00:00.14 Dave Hello everybody. My name is Dave Jackson and you're listening to tales from the backlog. This is a video games review podcast where each week I'm joined by a guest to bring a game out of the backlog play it and discuss. My guest today is a friend of the show host of first five on Youtube and a man who can macgyver anything you need out of some wood wires and rolling papers. Alex welcome to the show. 00:26.31 Alex Hey thanks for having me. Um, yeah I've been looking forward to this one for a few good months now. I've definitely enjoyed listening to your stuff. I know you covered one of the yeah I found you originally because you had covered ah Silicon dreams. 00:41.75 Dave Right? And that's part of the reason I was excited to have you on the show is because I've done at least 2 games that I found by watching your videos. The other one was unsighted so I figured it was about time I reached out and. 00:57.56 Alex Yeah, yeah, and I was really excited to be on here, especially after getting to hear that episode and a few of the kinds of other ones. Ah just because like you know. 00:57.97 Dave You know, get the inspiration on the show. So welcome. 01:09.47 Alex It's always telling you know like it that it's a good podcast when I'm sitting there listening to it especially that silicon dreams episode I was just like bursting gay at the seams wanting to be the third guy in the room being like this is how mind what this is what happened to be um so absolutely lovely to listen to. 01:19.71 Dave Yep, ah, yeah, absolutely yeah, ah, well thank you for that and thank you for coming and we've got another one of those games where I feel like if people are listening all the way through the spoiler section they may want to jump in with. How this game made them feel that the game today is this war of mine which is a survival sim game developed and published by 11 bit studios for just about every modern platform first released in 2014 if people are listening and have not played this war of mine. This works the same way as every other episode of the show. We're not going to spoil the story for you right now there will be a timestamp and a very obvious place where the spoilers begin. So if you want to jump out before getting spoiled go play this game for yourself, have your own experience and then. Maybe hop on the Discord server and share those experiences with us. You'll know when to jump out. So if you're listening and you don't know what this war of mine is, we have elevator pitches like always I say this war of mine is survival in an active war zone from the civilian survivor's perspective. 02:31.25 Alex I would say if you like Frostpunk which is the game eleven bit came out with after this one you are really going to like this one as well. They're very similar. They run on kind of you know they run on a lot of the same thematic lines. 02:31.50 Dave Alex what would you say? 02:47.31 Alex And if you enjoyed suffering in 1 You're going to enjoy suffering in the other they do. 02:52.24 Dave Yeah, they do have a thing, don't they have some quick stats before we start. I started this on switch and then I quickly realized that I would rather play this with a mouse than a controller so I switched to pc. Took me about 10 hours to finish my 1 complete playthrough and I played a couple hours of my switch playthrough just to see how it was different. You know stuff like that. How long did your complete run take you? 03:22.35 Alex It was very similar for me. I took a little over ten hours. I really um really let it kind of go when I was you know during the day portion of the cycle and really tried to eke out every second of that. So I think it took a little bit longer but it was very similar. 03:37.87 Dave Um, okay, yeah, so you can expect around that time if you want to complete one of the scenarios. There are different scenarios that you can do that might have differing lengths I'm not sure. So um. Alex when we talked about games to have you on the show you had mentioned this as a game that you were hoping to get out of the backlog. So we always start with our personal histories with maybe 11 bit studios and with this war of mine. What was it that made you want to play this in the first place? 04:08.50 Alex So this war of mine is kind of a bit of a cult classic right? Where um I feel like maybe not a ton of people have actually played it but it definitely when it came out. It did the rounds ah through like general games criticism which you know I I was. 04:25.24 Alex Paying a lot of attention at the time of course. Um so there were just so many people that had gushing praise for this game and labeled it as a very important game to play. Um, and so I have always been super curious about it. I know I ended up picking it up. 04:35.78 Dave Yeah. 04:43.87 Alex Years and years ago and some steam sail with like 10 other games as I used to do ah ah and and all you know. As that story usually ends I played about 2 out of those 11 games that I just never got around to this war of mine. So I'm very happy to finally have the opportunity. 04:57.55 Dave Um, yep, and you kind of mentioned in your elevator pitch about Frost Punk I Assume you played that game too. 05:09.96 Alex Yes, yes, which has made this a very interesting experience. Um, coming back from Frost Punk and having you know like playing through these games in reverse it's you know it's kind of like diving into a favorite band's discography. 05:24.55 Dave Yeah. 05:25.90 Alex You know, like the lyrics are different. The songs are different but the music is still exactly the same between these teams. Ah, which is definitely something. It was constantly in the back of my head. Ah when I was playing this game and it's going to be a bit of a struggle for me to talk about it without constantly relating it to frost spunk. 05:44.70 Dave That's that's fair um I see I played maybe a couple hours of frost punk and I bounced off of it and there's a couple reasons for that I was playing on playstation and I feel like that's another game that just works better with a mouse. Um, and also I don't have Rts brain. 06:02.50 Dave And Frostpunk is kind of like that you know, constantly getting people off to do jobs and stuff like that. This war of mine is much simpler from a gameplay perspective than frostpunk. Ah Frostpunk's now on that list of games that I want to revisit especially after having played this. But. 06:20.10 Dave What? Ah what put this on my radar was um I missed it when it came out I wasn't really paying attention to video games much at the time and this is just on those lists of like you know if you look up the 10 best games to play on switch that cost three bucks or something like that. You'll find this game. 1 of those in those videos or those articles I also got it in at least 1 itch charity bundle feels like every time there's you know the charity for Ukraine or something like that like this game's always in those bundles. So I have it in multiple places. Ah. I bought it on switch . I got itch. It's it's everywhere and I'd always heard kind of like you that this is one of those quote important games whenever there is a new fucking genocide or war or something going on like this game pops back up and the developers talk about how like. This game's not directly about any one of these events but it applies to just about all of them and you know different journalists and stuff will bring the game back up. So this is ah yeah, it just just keeps coming around and then yeah. 07:27.18 Alex Um, yeah, and yeah, and it's. It's really interesting how it does feel like it relates to all of those Wars but like in the opposite way of how you'd usually expect right. Ah, because whenever somebody talks about like oh it's like a generic story that's supposed to apply to everything like a real Everyman Tale. You know people you know, like to assume a certain kind of story that's going to be very generic in its details is going to leave a lot of things blank for the audience to insert themselves into this war of mine doesn't do that This war of mine is in. 08:00.62 Alex Incredibly specific and as you said it's much smaller. It's a very focused game. Um, but it still rings true for all of those conflicts because all of those conflicts are the same and they all cause the same problems in the same miseries. Ah, and so even though it is like this fictionalized war. 08:03.28 Dave Um, yeah. 08:13.30 Dave Right. 08:18.44 Alex Um, and it's you know? ah so focused on like the lives of like a half dozen people maybe a full dozen if you know include all the random npcs you come across? Um, even with that incredible specificity. It's still. 08:34.74 Alex Feels so true to all of these conflicts. 08:37.54 Dave Yeah, exactly it's it's kind of like ah you know locations might be different cultures might be different but like the suffering seems similar in a lot of those places. So um, a couple things I want to shout out. Ah that also kind of got me to play this. I did an episode that released in November Twenty Twenty three about games that are set in real places but not the United States and Japan and western europe you know like uncommon settings for video games and 1 of the guests Randall brought this game up. This game takes place in a fictional place but it might as well have said that this takes place in Sarajevo or something like that. So Randall brought that up, kind of talk sugar about it for a while, kind of pushed it up on the list. It actually pushed me to put it in 1 of the polls that I do on Patreon and then it won the poll. So. That's why this game's actually here is because it won that put that patreon poll. I feel like it would have been here eventually but shout out to everybody who voted for it and yeah. Before we get into the story and stuff we give some quick opening thoughts about the game and I just want to start out by saying like this game. The elevator pitch is that it puts you in the shoes of the civilians in a war zone. Basically every other video game about war puts you in the soldiers perspective. 10:03.58 Dave Ah, this one It puts you in the shoes of the civilians during times of extreme scarcity in a city under Siege and teaches you about the decision making and helps you try to empathize with the daily struggle. Um, I think it's a really commendable goal for a game. To try and take this on a really uncommon perspective and there's so many video games about war but this is a really uncommon perspective to focus on the civilians. Um, I think they did a great job of it. I think there there could have been a lot of ways where this felt. 10:41.39 Dave Ham fisted or felt insensitive or any number of bad ways. This could have come off but I think this is really good and that I do eventually like agree with that quote important label like I think this is a game that a lot of people should play. Um I Do want to say straight out like. You will hear out there that this game like makes you feel like you're in a war zone or something like that and I'm not going to go that far because I think that's a ridiculous thing to say I played this in the comfort of my game room on my Pc so it didn't make me feel like that. But it does help you empathize with decision making and stuff like that. 11:23.27 Alex Yeah, absolutely I think that's a great summary of both. You know the game's importance and you know how it functions on a narrative level. I don't think I can add anything to that. Ah, but mechanically ah this Ah, this is a very specific kind of game. 11:40.38 Alex Ah, that a lot of probably rogue-like players are kind of familiar with where it is a perpetual engine. Um, if you're ahead and you could keep shoving more fuel into the Engine. You're only going to get more ahead and more comfortable. Ah you know and have an easier time of it. But if you're behind and you don't know quite how the rules work yet and that engine ever starts slowing down even the slightest bit at any point you are in danger and that's when all. 12:10.76 Alex You know the horrible gripping War narrative stuff comes in when you have to make up for it and you have to find ways to fill that engine and get it going again. 12:18.99 Dave Yeah, and like I will get into it of course but along those lines I had several times where I thought I was doing great and then just 2 things broke the other way and I was like oh shit. Well what am I going to do now? 12:36.49 Alex Yeah, absolutely, especially if you just do like you can you can be cruising along and be doing great for hours and hours and then you can just do 1 stupid thing when you are you know out and about trying to scavenge for loot. 12:51.70 Dave Yep. 12:55.65 Alex And suddenly you are in crisis mode. 12:58.54 Dave Yep, so we will ah put a pin in that we'll listen to a bit of music and when we come back, We'll kind of continue this conversation. We'll set up the setting. We'll talk about the story and a lot of the ways that this game's narrative cannot show itself. 13:17.27 Dave Um, so this war of mine takes place in the fictional city of Pogoren I'm going to pronounce it that way. They never say it out loud in the game in the fictional country of Grosnavia and Pogoren a civil war has been going on for years when the game begins the quote that the game says is. When the civil war broke out many people thought that it would only last a couple of weeks it's been years since government military surrounded the rebels in the capital cutting off all supply lines the civilian population in the city are suffering from hunger disease and shelling. So. You are immediately put into this setting of a city under siege not just you know a regular war zone. This is a siege supplies are cut off people are scrounging for anything that they can find and not only that people are not like. My fleeing this isn't like a refugee situation. It's people they might be in their own homes but all the supplies have been cut off. 14:19.29 Alex Yeah, um, and I know we're gonna get into this in a little bit but like it's very telling that like half of these buildings are bombed out half of them still have people living in them. Ah you know it is 1 thing for. 14:29.20 Dave Yeah. 14:36.28 Alex Yeah, you know how they introduce it for you: The player where your band has come and found this derelict building and now you need to build it up, but it is another thing when you go out somewhere and there's just a family living in a house That's just missing its back half. Um. 14:52.92 Dave Um, yeah. 14:53.76 Alex And they're like still functioning and you show up there. You know every Sunday to go and trade with them. Um, so it is very ah the the visuals are very strong at setting that tone. 15:26.70 Dave I'm glad you brought up the visuals because the visuals are a big part of setting up the tone and the atmosphere for this game. It's mostly black and white um or very very grayed out. 15:41.00 Dave And then there are some you know lights and you know red colors Yellow colors from lights and maybe there's fire and stuff like that. So the almost complete absence of color in the game really sets this kind of desperate tone. It's like a. Like Fallout 3 on steroids. You know there's no fucking color in that game. Um, and the other thing that I think is really interesting about it is the way they fill in empty spaces. You know if you're looking at a room and you're looking at it like this. 16:06.27 Alex Yeah, with like the little painter least like the like drawn in scratches and stuff and all the shadows. Oh yeah, it's a wonderful touch. 16:12.21 Dave Yeah, the scratches and stuff kind of just swirling in the shadows. Yeah, it feels oppressive and it really does a lot to sell just how desperate everything is. 16:20.29 Alex Yeah I was to say it's not quite as novel in this day and age maybe but back when this game came out. It. You know like it was kind of an early example of like you know like indie games taking a kind of mixed media approach right. Like yeah, all of this is built in a video game and there are you know polygons underneath all of it. But it's drawn in a very harsh hand drawn style. You know there's all kinds of real world media mixed in there with actual photographs. You know of real people for all of the survivors and stuff. Ah so it. It is very um, maybe not quite as much today, but definitely for its time and I still think very um. 16:57.20 Dave Yeah. 17:09.36 Alex You know, striking and unique in its presentation. 17:12.49 Dave Yeah, effective for sure and I'm glad you mentioned the photographs too because that's something like it kind of got me sometimes when things were looking bad for my group. Um, you have. 17:25.21 Dave A group of characters that you're controlling. You might have one I had up to 3 at certain points in my playthrough and they all have these character portraits down on the bottom right of the screen and they're real photographs and not only are they real photographs. They're moving like. They'll sit there and they'll blink and look straightforward at the camera and stuff like it kind of humanizes these characters because the camera zoomed out in a way that you'll never see their face on like the character model. You know, but their face is always down in the bottom right of the screen staring right back at you. 17:58.70 Alex Yeah, 1 thing that always hit me about those photographs. The blinking is a really nice touch. But what always hits me is how you know how unkempt. 18:12.74 Dave Um, yeah. 18:13.64 Alex I Guess everyone is in each of those photos like you like it does really like you know capture the look of like the you know oh over here, you know it in actual safety. Ah you know people can worry about their skin care routines whenever they want but in the middle of an act you know. Ah, the middle of an active War Zone. That's not something you could make taed and you know like these people you know they are grimy. They are you know, covered in acne they you know they look like they have been or are going through it. You know it is. It is such a small detail. 18:33.27 Dave Um, right. 18:41.46 Dave Yeah. 18:45.88 Alex You know? And maybe you know like ah man I got acne all over my face, not as bad as like oh man I'm literally starving but like still a sign that you know like people people are not as they'd like to be. 18:59.72 Dave Yeah. 19:01.80 Alex Right? This is not the ideal situation. A presentation is important. This sort of thing is important for a lot of people including myself, and so it is kind of you. You know, like help kind of like. Capture in a small way. Then you know the desperation of the situation . It's not even something you could think about. You know something that in peace time would be at the top of a lot of people's minds. It's not even a consideration anymore. 19:31.25 Dave Right? It's me thinking about how I don't want to take a shower after we finish recording this but um, you mentioned how people are basically they're not you know the version of the person they used to be or the. 19:33.64 Alex Yeah, yeah. 19:45.67 Dave They're not thinking about things as their old life would have allowed them to think about ah we take over a group of survivors and I think that your group of survivors can differ between Playthroughs even on the same platform. So I'll tell you who I got you tell me if it was the same people that you had um. 19:46.14 Alex Um, yeah. 20:05.11 Dave There are 12 playable characters total on my switch playthrough. It was a father and daughter combo and I think that was a dlc thing because of all the things they introduced a dlc that brought children into the mix in this game and. On my pc playthrough which is the one I finished I had a woman named Katya who was a journalist I believe a character named Pavle who was a pro soccer player before the war and Bruno who I don't remember what his profession was but his skill was cooking. So maybe he was a chef or something like that ok celebrity chef. Okay, so ah, yeah, we actually have three I would say higher profile. Ah. 20:39.46 Alex Yeah I had the same thing and yeah ah Bruno was a celebrity chef like he had his own kind of like yeah he had his own cooking show. Basically um. 20:58.60 Dave Professions here. We have a journalist, a professional athlete and us as celebrity Chef right? and then as you said they're all brought down to this just very common. Um Baseline level of trying to survive and that's that's basically what you do you get your survivors you. 20:58.82 Alex Um, and. 21:09.33 Alex Yeah, oh. 21:16.27 Dave Try to keep them alive and you are trying to just wait until the war ends. That's how you win this game is by surviving until the war is until a ceasefire is declared and the narrative in here is. 21:31.22 Alex Um, yeah. 21:34.37 Dave Like so all right 2 2 levels of narrative you have like the top level narrative about the war and how the war changes and you know stuff like that. That's really sparse and really basic if we're being honest, what's more like. 21:53.80 Dave Present all the time and then more effective obviously is this emergent narrative the way that you keep these people alive the things that happen to them along the way my characters get sick I had a character Die. There's Perma Death. I Did a bunch of stuff that I didn't feel great about to keep my characters alive. All of those things are like with you minute by minute I think more so than the overarching like Plot plot. 22:25.29 Alex Yeah, definitely. Um, there is. It's really interesting because it was always the smallest moments. Ah that were the ones that stuck with me with this game like the overall kind of general. 22:40.95 Alex Plot and vibe of what's going on is just kind of like this ever present Haze of misery and Strife like pretty much everybody is going through it in this game. Um, and after a while you kind of just get a little desensitized to it all but through that kind of like just like. 22:59.26 Alex Fog of misery. There are always these little like tiny moments that like punched through ah and just like reached out and hit me in the gut. You know some of them are positive moments, a lot of them. You know, like negatives, like very small details. Um. 23:04.34 Dave Yeah. 23:17.96 Alex Like ah like I remember um you know the first time I don't know if this would qualify as a spoiler or not but the note when you first walk into the hospital. Um you walk in and it mentions that you know it. It lists like the casualty list and. 23:36.44 Alex And you know from the numbers that it's putting down like the patients and which wards have died you realize that? oh you know when this hospital got shelled. You know it directly hit the children's ward right? You know so it's like little details like that just pierce right through all the general. Um. 23:47.50 Dave Um, yeah. 23:55.56 Alex You know, like misery in the game. Um and and and you you know like ah those are kind of like the the littlest details are the ones that touch you I Guess in that way. 24:09.20 Dave Yeah, yeah, there's ah so there's 2 things you brought up and I want to talk about both of them. So let's talk about the bad stuff first because I think that's what this game is most famous for. It's like the setting is famous. The conceit of the game is famous, but. 24:26.59 Dave The other thing that you will hear is that this is a game that forces you into either morally gray or just outright evil things to keep your people alive and a lot of games. Do this a lot of games. Try this a lot of games feel cheap when they you know make you do evil things and then like. 24:46.45 Dave Wave their finger at you when you're done. You know how you could do such a thing and it's like well I'm playing a video game I don't have any choice the only choice I have is to turn the game off right? Um I think this game earns more of those decisions because number 1 they all felt like my decision like you mentioned the hospital I made the plan. 24:53.87 Alex Um, yeah. 25:06.80 Dave To go to the hospital and steal medicine because I knew a hospital would have medicine in it. I made that choice. I could have stolen. I could have gone somewhere else that was supposed to have medicine to try and steal some medicine but I chose the hospital because I thought it'd be easiest stuff like that. 25:07.35 Alex Move him. 25:24.61 Dave I made that choice. Um I made the choice to go to Rob somebody's house and then sell their stuff back to them I did that so like this ah this game puts you in desperate positions and then asks you like what are you willing to do. 25:34.85 Alex Ah, oh now. 25:43.25 Dave To do it The other thing and you know I had little mental battles like okay this character is really sick I'm short on resources would it be better for the group if that character died so that the rest of the group could carry on like those are natural situations that come up throughout the game. And then you have options for how to deal with them So whenever I did something bad to keep the group alive I Really thought like that was my choice and it was not cheap that the game put me in there because you mentioned earlier like maybe I was in that bad position because I made a bad decision. 26:14.79 Alex Um, even. 26:19.93 Dave Like five days prior and just really fucked myself over so stuff can compound and put you in those situations. 26:29.83 Alex Yeah, ah and it's very how I would want to say this. 26:42.85 Alex Sorry, my brain went in 2 directions at once and now I need to pick a rabbit to chase. Ah, right? That's what I was going to talk about yeah and it's also kind of interesting how you know the characters themselves. Also you know, get an opinion. 26:46.24 Dave That's okay. 26:51.40 Dave Yeah, yeah. 26:59.61 Alex You know as the player you get ultimate say on you know what horrible things you're going to do but you can't necessarily drive a good natured person. Ah, you know, transform into a terrible Axe Murderer Um, you know. 27:18.70 Alex They will not go along with that. Um, and and so you know like no matter which choices you're making you're going to have somebody questioning you or at least I did between my characters. You know if I did something charitable. You know Bruno. Would always complain and be like no these are our resources we need to look after us, you know, etc, etc. And if I took the coldhearted you know option then Pavel and Katya would be what would get really bummed out and be like oh man I really wish we could have done something about this. 27:56.46 Alex And it does put additional weight on your choices or at least I felt additional weight on my choices because there were a lot of moments where I was like yeah I could go steal something like yeah I could go to this place and hold somebody at gunpoint. But do I really do I really want to deal with Katya you know getting the depression modifier and things just getting absolutely worse and way harder to manage when I get back. 28:24.93 Dave Um, yeah, the fact that your characters will because on their character portrait there's a little link to go read their character bio and you can basically read their journal where they write about how they feel about how things have gone and um. Yeah, there were times like when I you know robbed somebody all the characters had something to say like 1 of the characters said you know I really wish that there was another way I don't feel good about that but we survive another day because of stuff like that. Um, and I just. 28:51.47 Alex No. 29:01.82 Dave I Want to kind of reiterate how I think that this is again another tightrope for this game to walk to set up these situations but not feel like they're saying okay at this point in the story. We're going to make you do a bad thing and then we're going to yell at you and call you an asshole for doing a bad thing. 29:15.88 Alex Um, you know. 29:21.50 Dave And you know there are a lot of games that do that kind of thing when you don't actually have any say in the choices you're making . I feel like you do always have a say and then your characters also have a say about what happened so I did some bad stuff and. Some characters got that depressed modifier and wrote in their diary about how terrible they feel and it makes it hit home a little bit harder I think. 29:48.94 Alex Yeah, 100% 29:53.55 Dave Yeah, the other thing in this part 2 of what you brought up earlier and I'm glad you brought this up too is that there are good moments in the game too. This is not just 100% post-apocalypse hell world like cruelty 100% of the time in here this is um. 29:58.90 Alex Um. 30:11.48 Dave A very human game. I feel like there are lots of opportunities to do good things as Well. Neighbors will come to your house and ask for help. Um the tradeoff being like you will have to send a character out and they will be unavailable for anything else. The rest of the day. Um, you might have people coming up and asking for food or they might say my mother is sick. Do you have any medicine and you can make the choice of whether to give them your precious resources. Um, and then people will help you out too. People maybe show up at your door and say hey we grew these vegetables please please take them and so intersperse throughout this just overall gloomy atmosphere of the game and then like like you said those moments that really punched through and it's like ah fuck can't believe that happened. 30:54.26 Alex Um, yeah. 31:07.28 Dave You also have these really wonderful human moments as well that I think really really help me get through the game because it's not a fun game to play. 31:18.76 Alex Yeah, that is true. Um, it is kind of interesting because it does the thing that a lot of games do like it's got the bioshock effect where if you do the good thing you know it feels like a sacrifice but you quickly figure out mechanically that. You're going to come out ahead than if you had done the dick thing. Um, but it still rings true ah because it gives this wonderful feeling of kind of like community with a lot of the other characters in this game. 31:54.78 Alex There are a lot of people in this game that are absolutely terrifying. There are a lot of people in this game with guns and they will point them at you. There are very few people in this game that I would like to call like assholes or like villains or you know like objectively evil people. 32:12.88 Alex You know I said it before everybody is going through it in this game and like even so even a lot of the people that are perhaps less than likable are just other people in the community trying to survive the same stuff that you are and you know like. The number of people that are like actually like capital b bad you could count on 1 hand. 32:36.46 Dave Yeah, yeah, that's definitely true, just kind of running through. Let's say rough experiences that I had there were only maybe 2 people that I'd be like yeah, that's just a complete good for nothing. You know, yeah, that's absolutely true. 32:55.59 Dave And I think the fact that everyone you're interacting with is trying to survive and number two. The fact that you have these moments of people like sacrificing to help each other does also mirror the real-world experience. At least the small sliver of it that we experience via you know, seeing stuff on social media or stuff like you you will if you look for it and if you're tuned into it. You will find you know stories or videos of people helping each other in Palestine right now even though. 33:31.48 Alex Um, yeah. 33:32.42 Dave By doing so they are making a sacrifice of some kind and this game brings that to the forefront often enough that like I don't like I don't want to say that the people who made this have experience but they definitely did their research at the very least. About people's on-the-ground experiences. 33:57.70 Alex Yeah, absolutely I would agree with that. Um, let's see. 34:09.88 Alex Yeah, sorry I don't have too much to add. But yeah I think I think you said it well. 34:14.67 Dave That's all right. And I think I did see that like when I was doing a little bit of development research for the game which we don't. Don't do dev history on the show. But I do like to read a little bit. I think I did see that they talked to a lot of survivors, read a lot of books and watched a lot of documentaries about. Ah, the places that this is you know supposedly based on they had name dropped ah warsaw during world war ii this is a polish company that made this game so they name drop that Sarajevo and 1992 Magadishu in 1993. 34:39.20 Alex Um. 34:46.94 Alex Yeah, yeah. 34:55.93 Dave Ah, Kabul and Fallujah in ‘03 and ‘04 Syria and then they also said it's about Gaza right now. So I think that they look through different points in history differently. You know places in the world to really flesh out how they want. This all to play out the choices that you're going to make, the types of people you're going to meet, stuff like that. Um, yeah. 35:24.46 Alex Yeah, 100% especially because like you know, um with some of the you know we were we were talking a little bit before about like the hospital that got bombed out. It's like well you know I'm playing this game two weeks after you know reading. Ah, half a dozen articles about how the one giant hospital in Palestine just got bombed. Um, so it really does ah it it really does pull so many striking parallels with what is going on with so many you know like current conflicts. 35:43.77 Dave Yeah, exactly. 36:00.50 Alex Ah, and that's one of the ways that those little tiny details punch through right because you read a tiny detail and it instantly clicks with something that you've already. 36:10.62 Alex You know I wouldn't say experience but at the very least like you know, like read about and like had to marinate in you know as you're browsing through social media. 36:20.24 Dave Yeah, absolutely um, one of those things and this is a nice transition into like kind of the way. The story gets delivered to you outside of those emergent narratives that come up. Um you venture out at night to go look for supplies or maybe go barter and stuff like that. And all the places that you go have at least 1 lore note around or something that you'll find to give you a little bit of story. You mentioned the casualty list at the hospital. Um I wrote down about the flyers that were dropped around the city That basically said they they actually said I screenshotted this this is a zone of anti-terrorist operation persons remaining in the city will be treated as terrorist supporters for your own and your family's safety leave Pogoren immediately the army guarantees you a safe passage now where have we heard that recently. 37:11.97 Alex Oh yeah, oh yeah, yeah, and in both this game. You know the line immediately after that is literally nobody believed them. Um, just as literally literally nobody has believed it. You know. 37:14.64 Dave In recent history like those exact words so this is ah. 37:25.25 Dave Yeah. 37:31.58 Alex Today in our own world it was immediately proven false. 37:36.26 Dave Yeah, yeah, um, other stuff that you find like ah you'll find propaganda from the government one that says ah people should not touch aid packages because they might be poisoned which is just ah, very cruel. Um, you might find. 37:48.53 Alex Also just an absolutely wild assertion. 37:54.19 Dave Yeah, yeah, of course they're going to drop poisoned aid packages because they want to kill you. That's what they want the people dropping food in that is um, another notable one A family pet's grave that I found and then ah, an unsent letter. From um, an elderly couple to their granddaughter basically lying about the state of things and telling her that everything's okay and making up a reason why the granddaughter can't come visit. Basically so you'll go around you'll find stuff from the government. You'll find stuff from the people, everything in between. Really fleshes out the state of things outside of your own experiences. We'll say. 38:32.31 Alex Um, even. 38:38.55 Alex Yeah I was just saying a lot of the notes. Um that kind of hit me I would say for ah behind the spoiler wall but there was like it like there would be there would be like incidents where like. 38:45.25 Dave Sure. 38:51.48 Alex Something would come up on the little radio. You can build and it would like to name a very specific place that I was like oh hell you know like I've visited there like every 4 days that like one that's going to be a huge problem and 2 I know that place that sucks. 39:03.36 Dave Um, yeah. 39:10.48 Dave I'm glad you mentioned the radio. That's another way that you get some of the story. Um, the radio will kind of give you what's going on on the streets. They'll say you know a bunch of crime on the streets make sure to lock your houses up and you meanwhile you mentioned like houses are like. They're half there now like half of them are you're blown half apart if your house is standing like the windows are fucked. Everything's you know so good luck locking it up. They'll give weather updates and the weather becomes important throughout the story. Yeah, they. 39:28.66 Alex Um, yeah. 39:37.28 Alex Oh my God, weather updates. Yeah. 39:43.10 Dave We'll talk about the weather updates in the spoiler section. I want people to experience those for themselves. Um, and then ah some other stuff like they will say ah cigarettes are scarce in the city right now and the price of cigarettes has risen so that gives you an idea like hey if I've got cigarettes. Maybe I can. 39:59.41 Alex In. 40:01.20 Dave Can trade those right now. So the radio's super helpful. Highly recommended that everyone builds one for many reasons. 40:09.20 Alex Oh yeah, definitely one of the first things I built um, you know I guess the do we want to get into just kind of like the general base building and like the day part of this a day night cycle 40:22.17 Dave Yeah let's do that after a little bit of music. We'll come back and we'll get into that day night cycle of gameplay and how to survive. In this war of mine. It is a survival game and it goes like Alex said on a day night cycle. Um, and what you're basically doing is just making all kinds of calculated choices about how you're going to use your resources and how you're going to gather them in the first place. And then how are you going to use them? Um the survival stuff before we talk about what you do in the day and night characters have status effects that pop up to display their condition in their mood so rather than filling a meter It's just presented as Boris is hungry. Or Boris is very hungry or maybe even further than that if you don't sleep. Ah, your characters will get tired if they get wounded or get sick. That will all be displayed for you. Um, and everything can get worse and then it also shows you their mood and. I never really sussed out whether a character being depressed or not affected gameplay mechanically but I didn't want them to be depressed. So I always tried if I could like we'll turn on the radio help or something like that. 41:48.34 Alex Yeah I Never I Never really found out. Ah because I only ever you know, got the ah the sad modifier a couple of times and. 1 time I Just told him all right? Just go to bed for a day and fix itself and the other one I said okay just go drink your problems away and it will fix itself. Um, so I am sure that it is. 42:14.73 Dave Okay, fair enough. 42:24.11 Alex Affects the character in some way. Um, you know it seems to be moving on a very similar scale to you know all of the other kinds of not meters but like the different descriptors of like being hungry or being tired So I'm sure if you pushed it far enough. You know like I'm sure something bad would happen. 42:42.80 Alex Ah, but yeah, honestly, it was surprisingly easy to Manage. Everybody's emotional state. Um, yeah, you know my version of my survivors did not complain a whole lot even though I. Really ask them to tighten their belts. A whole bunch. Um I I don't know if we want to leap straight over to this but you know with I figured out a trick early on that people did not need to eat every day. In fact, ah to yeah to survive and so. 43:19.83 Alex Um, I had my survivors enacting very strict rationing. Um, where where you know everybody was basically eating on shifts and I was astonished nobody ever complained about this a single time. 43:33.49 Dave Interestingly I fed my survivors better than you did and my people were just generally sad and or depressed for most of the game and it might have been because of some of the things I was doing, maybe because I was not rationing very well. 43:44.10 Alex Wow. You know. 43:52.49 Dave Um, but the thing I noticed is if they're sad or if they're depressed. They will just sit around the house and talk to themselves and the things they say are quite depressing. Um, yeah, so they will do that? Um I assume that if you don't. 44:00.32 Alex Yeah, oh very. 44:09.91 Dave Ah, let people eat, they will die. I didn't get to that point. Um, and there's no, there's no thirst. Thank God I Don't think I wanted another kind of survival thing to manage here. Oh yeah, yep, you will be doing a lot of stuff with water. 44:21.76 Alex And though there is quite a lot of water to manage still. 44:29.12 Dave For sure. Um, the other thing about your characters is all the characters have traits that help with specific things. So ah Katya because she was a journalist. She's good at bartering so I had her do all the trading and Pavle could run really fast. So if I was going someplace dangerous. Maybe I would send him because he could run away faster than other characters soccer player Pavle was ah and I had a character named Boris who joined later in the game who had a permanent injury which means he's very slow but he's also a big strong guy and he could carry a bunch of stuff. So if I needed to go gather a ton of stuff I could send him out there if shit hit the fan. He wouldn't be able to run away so I had to be a little careful about that. But good to have someone who could carry a bunch of stuff because there are very strict inventory limits when you're out scavenging. 45:27.24 Alex Yeah, extremely I ended up with most of the same characters. I managed to keep Bruno alive. Ah woo who was like ah we talked about how he was a celebrity chef he does this thing. Um. It's just called good cook so a lot of the traits in this game along with a lot of other things. They don't really tell you what it does. They just tell you this person is x and you kind of just have to figure it out ah through trial and error. What does any of that mean? Ah the most. 46:02.86 Alex Ah, the most perplexing one of which I got was my fourth person Amelia who was a very good lawyer. That was her ability. I was like great. This is super useful in the apocalypse. 46:15.50 Dave Really exactly? Yeah yeah, really useful survival skill being a lawyer. Um, just ah, just to be clear. Ah Bruno did not die in my game I just forgot to write him down. Um, so yeah, it's okay yeah I think Bruno's cooking thing is that. 46:19.80 Alex Yeah. 46:24.71 Alex Oh okay, that gotcha. 46:32.97 Dave Ah, in order to cook. You need 3 types of resources and his cooking was a little bit more efficient than other people. So useful I mean I just had him cook all the stuff. So um, let's get into the ah day night cycle. So during the day. 46:51.53 Dave You can't go outside because there's snipers the armies you know people are killing each other outside so you have to stay inside during the day So during the day is when you do all the building and crafting stuff that these games have um, you have a lot of options for stuff that you can build. Ah, you can, you know, make workshops, you can make beds and furniture. Ah, you can build that Radio. You can make a garden.. There's all kinds of stuff that you can make the problem with is resources to do all that Stuff. Um. Do you play a lot of these like survival type games? You know like a subnautica or spiritfarer stuff like that. 47:35.70 Alex When I get a chance. Yeah, not quite as often as I used to just because the Venn diagram between them and 100 hour long games is almost a circle. Um, but I do very much appreciate this style of gameplay. 47:46.25 Dave That's true. Yeah. 47:52.14 Dave Ok, um I don't play a lot of these there has to be another hook like the story in spirit fair is why I finished that game. Um, Stardew Valley is just liquid cocaine. So I've played a lot of Stardew Valley but the thing I noticed about that is like um. 48:05.30 Alex Um. 48:09.13 Dave You know, a lot of those games will present you with the different things that you can build and throughout your time Playing. You will actually build the nicest version of your base in Subnautica or you'll max out your ship in Spirit Fairer and ah in this game. You can make a bunch of plans for the future about what you're going to do. I'm going to build a vegetable garden so that I can grow my own vegetables and will have self-sustaining food supplies and in this game life comes at you fast. 48:35.39 Alex Oh boy, oh it does I think we had very similar experiences because I remember being like I'm gonna I'm gonna be self-sustaining I'm going to grow them vegetables and I got like so. 48:43.45 Dave Yeah. 48:53.22 Alex So a lot of the things you can construct in this game have multiple tiers. Ah right and the higher the tier the better you know the stuff you can make with it and specifically with vegetables. You have to first make a herb planter where you make herbs which are not that useful. 49:12.43 Alex Um, and then you have to invest all of those resources a second time to get the vegetable planner to make vegetables, which was the thing I actually wanted. I made the fetch. I made the herb planter like ten days into the game. Maybe. 49:31.30 Alex I Never got the resources to upgrade that to a vegetable ah to a vegetable feeder if eventually I had to scrap it for resources having never used it a single time. Um. 49:36.12 Dave Yep. 49:46.43 Alex But yeah, life does definitely come at you fast in this game. There are definitely.. There are definitely points. Ah you know where the survival mechanics cut in and your resources are just so Strained. Ah that you are focused on survival and not on expanding any you know like. Any of this stuff that you want to build and even you know having completed a fully successful run I barely explored any of this stuff right? like you, You don't need to Build. You need to build all of it if you want to thrive but you don't need to build all of it if you want to survive. Um, yeah. 50:21.15 Dave Yeah, that's a good way of saying it like I built the metal workshop so that I could make a lock pick every now and then um I built you know the workshop where you can then go ahead and build. A bed for your characters and stuff like that. Um, and I built some heaters, but all of this is like the tier one version of those things. You can look on the screen and see the tier 2 version and be like holy shit if you upgrade this. I can repair this broken gun that I found and I can have a weapon and I can use it or I can sell it and get a bunch of food but I like it.. It's not that it takes like a prohibitive amount of resources if you just look at the amount but the problem is you have like real. 50:55.23 Alex Yeah, yeah. 51:11.21 Alex Yeah, if you just take three days digging around bringing back nothing but scrap instead of actually useful things you need like food. 51:12.29 Dave Pressing survival needs that need those same resources so you'll just I couldn't get there. 51:27.11 Alex You can build this cool new thing. 51:27.51 Dave Yeah, you can repair this guitar, did you? I never did. I never got to a point where I could. 51:33.60 Alex I did actually manage to repair the guitar. Yes I think that this was one of the moments actually that punched through for me. Um, because this thing had been sitting in my inventory for weeks at least twenty days um 51:43.73 Dave Mm. 51:50.74 Alex I randomly found it. I don't even remember where and I was like you know I'd really like to you know fix this up sometime I bet this would give all my people a morale boost that seems like a nice thing. Um and it was just sitting there for the longest time. I could never get the I could never get enough resources. They always had to go somewhere else. Um and then like finally at the very end of the game when it was, you know, like an hour from victory I finally got this thing um built. 52:24.93 Dave Yeah, you just have it. 52:25.19 Alex And didn't do anything. Yeah, you know So yeah, somebody could hop out the guitar and they can strub it and it's like it's actually very cool right? Ah because ah they had you know they have their own like list of like songs that they added and composed for it. You know, specifically for the acoustic guitar. 52:42.52 Dave Um. 52:44.34 Alex Ah, and different characters had different skill levels with it so you got like different versions of each song where like 1 person would be noodling and like kind of get in it like another person would just like completely jamming out and sound amazing. 52:59.92 Alex But it was such a powerful moment for me even though the guitar mechanically didn't really seem to do anything. It was such a strong moment for me. Ah, just because I had been holding onto this thing for so long I had so many opportunities where I had to say no I can't do this yet. 53:19.77 Alex And I had so many opportunities where I could have sold it because it was even damaged and broken in half. It's still worth something. You know there were so many opportunities where I could have just scrapped it and and given up um you know and and just turned it into food and I said no I'm going to hold onto it. Um. 53:20.35 Dave Yep. 53:38.49 Alex And then I finally finally managed to do it and actually get it built and like it's such. It's such a simple and kind of generic moment right? like that you would you would experience it like you know, like any horror movie like oh man, the survivors managed to you know, get enough pluck to. Fix the guitar and I'll hang around the campfire for a little 2 minute scene but be you know because I had just spent 10 hours sitting on this thing struggling to find you know the breathing room to make it. 53:58.91 Dave Yeah, so. 54:13.40 Alex Ah, it was an extremely you know like a very savored moment. 54:18.96 Dave Yeah I can see that as like ah you know you can imagine it easily being a victory for your characters and then a victory for you as well. My version of that is I built an armchair like ah like a fucking lazy boy. 54:33.19 Alex Ah, yeah. 54:34.69 Dave And ah, that was my thing and it was like okay well Bruno's feeling sad I'll just have him go sit in the armchair for a while. That's the best I can do but I never got that guitar fixed because ah like there are points in the story in the in the you know the progression of how things change in the city where. 54:54.33 Dave I was like ok playtime is over all hands on deck to find these 3 resources that are going to keep everybody alive literally no no energy for anything else. It is ah it's an emergency situation so that'll happen in the house during the day. 55:09.65 Alex Yeah. 55:13.63 Dave Ah, building stuff takes time. So if you want to send somebody to build a fucking armchair. It's going to take a couple hours and you have from 6 am to eight pm in the house and that goes by pretty quickly as you're playing I didn't like time it out in real time but maybe like I don't know 10 minutes 55:29.61 Alex Five ten minutes yeah 55:33.50 Dave Five ten minutes yeah something like that so sending somebody to build something or you like you can build a distillery to make moonshine and moonshine takes a long time to make so like you might put it in there and. 55:50.35 Alex Um, yep. 55:51.14 Dave Hope it's done by the time you need to go out and trade at night or something like that. Um, but it all takes time until I get to a certain point. There were lots of times when I couldn't build anything because I didn't have shit to build anything with and so there were certain times when it was like. 56:09.38 Dave It is 11 a m I don't have anything to do ah the person who comes to the door every couple days to trade. They're not coming. It's clear that everyone go to bed, that happened to me several times. 56:20.33 Alex Yeah, did you do a lot of sleeping during the day? 56:27.70 Dave Oh yeah, because ah, you know if you send people out at night they come home tired um or at night you can pick people to stand guard and they don't get to sleep either. So that was my routine Basically it was. Everyone's pretty busy at night unless they're sick or unless they're like they have that very tired status then I'll let them sleep? Um, but everyone's got shit to do at night. So. It's always like you know from 6 to to two p m or whatever people are usually sleeping. 57:00.55 Alex Yeah I lived my way through this game like a goddamn vampire. Ah you know you mentioned all hands on deck every night it was all hands on deck if you were not scavenging you were guarding and everybody slept in the day. 57:02.87 Dave Yeah, absolutely. 57:11.75 Dave Ah, yeah. 57:17.41 Alex Ah, that led to some very complex routines because I went down the moonshine distillery direction as well I managed to get that and the like next tier above it The yeah so there if you upgrade I forget which one of the workshops you need to upgrade. But once you do that you can build and. 57:37.23 Alex Upgrade you know like a second distillery where you take the moonshine and you like distill it a second time into even better booze. Um, and then the thing I didn't get to do was I didn't manage to make the medicine bed because it said that oh and then you could turn the even better booze into. 57:56.53 Alex The actual medicine which is like 1 of the most valuable things in the entire game I was like oh baby we are here industry ho ah, but I never quite got the resources to pull that off. Um, but yeah. 58:08.14 Dave Yeah I was rocking I was rocking tier one of everything never really upgraded anything except the kitchen I updated the stove that was it. 58:25.30 Alex Yeah I was going to say I upgraded the stove I upgraded the heater um and then I had to build a second one anyway, I yeah um I actually did fully upgrade because there were 3 tiers of upgrade or. 58:33.87 Dave Yep me too. 58:41.22 Alex 3 tiers so 2 upgrades for each of the 2 benches I did manage to get them both fully upgraded. It was really funny. We you know we could talk about it behind the spoiler wall but there was um the last bench. 58:58.25 Alex Upgrade that I had to get in like the last two days I spent like I needed like literally 1 thing but I spent a week trawling the city desperately trying to find 1 item that I just could not find ah and it was brutal. Ah, but we. 59:18.50 Alex Yeah, we did manage to get a lot of things upgraded. You know, like that you know I mentioned at the start you know the perpetual engine and I managed to feed enough coal in there that it kept getting bigger and bigger and around the point of like day 12 I was in this. Ah, position rows like oh this Ah you know this? This is actually cozy. I'm actually like I'm building a merchant society here you know I'm I'm churning out 2 or three moonshine a day you know things are going great. Everything's looking up the trader shows up and I clean them for. 59:56.53 Alex Almost everything he's got ah that life comes at you fast and that did not last. 01:00:01.64 Dave Yeah, and I never got to that point yeah and I never got to that point I never really felt comfortable. It was like the point of comfort that I reached was like if everyone stayed home tomorrow night we would be fine. That's about it. Um, and. 01:00:19.30 Dave Yeah, let's talk about what you do at night. So we already said you can send characters out to scavenge. Ah you can have characters stand guard at home or you can have them sleep and if you have a bed you can let them sleep in the bed. Otherwise they just sleep on the floor. Um. Going out to scavenge is important because that's the only way you get resources other than bartering with the guy that comes to your house every couple days. So like there was only maybe 1 or 2 nights when I just had everyone guard and not scavenge. Otherwise it's like so order of business number one is go out and find stuff because you need stuff constantly for everything. Yeah, exactly? Yeah um, and then standing guard was something that I neglected for too long before I finally figured out how important it is. 01:00:59.63 Alex Yeah, you gotta feed the engine. That's the only way you're going to feed it. 01:01:13.85 Dave Ah, but the tradeoff is that if they're standing guard. They can't sleep and then I don't actually know what happens if they don't sleep for like a long long time but I can't imagine that it's good. You probably get sick or something. 01:01:25.85 Alex the worst yeah the worst I ever did ah was somebody being awake 2 nights in a row and that got them very tired and I assumed that if I did it a third time they just dropped dead or something so I never risked it. Um it was also very helpful because like. 01:01:34.91 Dave Um, yeah, yeah. 01:01:43.80 Alex Even if somebody was up that long. Um, they just sleep a double shift during the day and they just don't do anything that you know that day and they're fresh again. Come nighttime. Um. 01:01:52.95 Dave Right? There's that tradeoff though is if people are sleeping during the day that's your get shit done at home time. So I was kind of lucky like the two of you . I guess we started with the same group, like we have 3 characters so we can manage the playthrough I started on switch. 01:02:09.28 Alex Um, yeah. 01:02:12.38 Dave It was a dad and a kid. The kid can't go out at night. So the dad has to go out at night and the kid also doesn't know how to build anything because they're a kid so the dad has to do literally everything and it's just. 01:02:22.34 Alex Um, yeah. 01:02:27.22 Alex Poor poor little kids sitting home alone on Robber duty with a little knife in the lap. Not a great image. 01:02:27.38 Dave It's a lot. It would be a lot harder if I didn't play that much in that playthrough. But 01:02:35.31 Dave Yeah, yeah, yeah, um, so when you are sending people out to go scavenge in here. You get a map screen where you can select what location you want them to scavenge at and different locations have different resources. And they'll tell you what resources are at this place. They'll tell you what percent you've looted from the place. So like I said before there's one time I needed medicine So I was looking for places that had medicine and they'll also give you a little description of the place and so let's say we have a hospital that's run by Volunteers. And then the other place that has medicine is this this decrepit apartment building where a fucking militia had moved in and they don't take too kindly to people rolling up to their apartment Building. So where am I going to go to get the medicine I'm going to the hospital so you get to pick where you go you get to pick who you send. 01:03:31.36 Dave Different characters have different inventory limits, different characters can run at different speeds and different characters may have. I know there's a soldier character that has better combat skills. For example, Um, so.. It's always a choice of who to send and where to send them and then they start you out with a safe place where there's no danger you can go there as many times in a row as you want, You can just clean the place out but then eventually places get depleted. So It starts out pretty simple. And then the real decision making starts like there were plenty of times where I sat and looked at this map screen and was like there's like no really great options left on here. 01:04:17.82 Alex Yeah, that really stood out to me too almost immediately like they give you the one freebie they give you your little tutorial level right? at the start and all the other options. Absolutely suck for 1 reason or another. 01:04:28.35 Dave Um, yeah, ah. 01:04:33.67 Alex I'm already. Ah I was already on day 3 and I was looking at that I'm just like oh I don't like any of these. Um you know there's always some tradeoff you know sometimes it's a moral tradeoff you know like there 's this little cottage with a you know, nice little old couple. Do you really want to, you know, go steal everything they own. Ah you know. 01:04:53.70 Alex Other times it's hey there's a gang here and they have guns ah take your chances with that. Um, you know there is a wide variety of places you can go, most of them are inhabited by other people that you know exactly in the same situation that you are in. Ah this is their little. 01:05:05.60 Dave Yeah. 01:05:12.53 Alex Base building adventure that they're in the middle of and you're crashing into. 01:05:14.85 Dave Yeah, and when you go to those places. It's a 2 D almost like a stealth game where you can run but running makes a lot of noise and if you're trying to make sure those people with guns don't hear you, noise is bad. And so you kind of tiptoe around you can like break open locked containers with a crowbar if you have 1 or like pry wood off of a doorway all of that stuff makes noise so you got to be careful about what you're doing and um, yeah, you just kind of loot until. Something bad happens or loot until you're full like inventories full and um, one thing I thought was nice is if shit goes wrong. There's a button on the screen that says run to exit and if you click that your character will just book it to the exit. You don't have to control them anymore. 01:06:08.18 Alex It is a godsend. Absolutely. 01:06:11.83 Dave Yeah, happened a couple times where I was like okay we're leaving immediately. 01:06:14.81 Alex Yeah, there were definitely a couple times where I got caught, guns getting pulled and I just needed to not be there in that moment. 01:06:25.94 Dave Um, yeah, Absolutely um, there are a lot of these places where you can go scavenge that maybe the people there are not aggressive. But they don't want you trespassing. We'll say like there's a mechanic shop that it's one of your early places you can go to and I think these might be somewhat No, there's no way they're they're probably similar right through playthroughs. 01:06:40.45 Alex Yeah, yeah. 01:06:54.98 Alex It was early ish for me. I think it was like the second set of places I could go to. 01:06:55.78 Dave Um. 01:07:04.10 Dave Yeah, um, there's a mechanic shop. The people who live there are not hostile. You can go trade with them. But if you go into their place. They'll get angry and then they'll eventually get hostile if you don't leave when they tell you to leave. 01:07:16.81 Alex With him. 01:07:19.97 Dave So there's a bunch of places like that that are not inherently dangerous to be but they got stuff and sometimes you want that stuff So this is where a lot of those morally gray decisions and stuff like that comes into being like that mechanic shop. 01:07:37.42 Alex Um, Murder and. 01:07:39.21 Dave Was the place I mentioned where I found a way to sneak around to the back of their shop, stole a bunch of stuff and then sold it back to them. These are the types of places where you'll get into some of that gray and maybe even outright bad activity. 01:07:54.63 Alex It is. It is also kind of interesting how the game decides what is and isn't theft right? because it puts a very heavy weight on theft like if you if you go to? um you know like. 01:08:04.53 Dave Yeah. 01:08:13.51 Alex If you go to steal something like it has a little different Ui icon when you open you know when you open up the drawer and look at the loot inside. It has this gigantic bright red do not touch stamp on it. Um, you know if you do it. It is an event. 01:08:30.10 Alex And literally everybody comments on it. You know, as we talked about, it puts such a huge weight on whether you're going to make the decision to steal or not but it's very interesting who you are allowed to steal from without having to wrestle with that. Because some of the armed groups you can just walk in and take their stuff and the game won't say anything to you? Um, you know it the who you are taking from is as important to the game as um as the fact that you've decided to do it. Um, and there could be a. 01:09:04.80 Alex A few funny edge cases like you know there there there were a few cases I stumbled into of like you know a random loot locker in the in the back of a building with ah you know that you you need a saw Blade to get into because it's got some iron bars and you know everything else in the building is is robbery material, but this one little loot box you know in the back perfectly. Fine. Um, but ah yeah. 01:09:27.37 Dave They also delineate um like you are allowed to dig around in the trash outside of somebody's house. But if you go in the house and start taking stuff then there's going to be a problem for sure. 01:09:31.51 Alex Yes, yeah, you are allowed to do that. 01:09:40.80 Alex Yeah, even rubble inside of a lot of houses. Ah, it doesn't count as stealing. It doesn't really seem to bother people because I did that you know in the hospital I went shuffling through all the rubble. Um, and that didn't bother anybody. 01:09:51.21 Dave In. Yeah, maybe they just feel like you're helping them out but I when I was in the position where I would even consider stealing from inside of people's houses I was in the position where that was you know the thing about going out at night too is you can't go to 1 place. 01:10:15.22 Dave And then change your mind and go to another place. You only get to go to 1 place and your scavenging sessions are precious because you need that stuff so there were a couple times when I went out because I was desperate for supplies. Maybe it's a place I hadn't been before. I didn't know what's going on there and I got there and realized. 01:10:15.72 Alex Yeah, me. 01:10:35.70 Dave Oh this is not what I thought it would be but I'm here like I can't go back home empty handed. So I got to do something you know. 01:10:43.94 Alex That is I only stole one time and that was why I did it ah and like this is the worst part is it wasn't even because I was like desperately like super hard up I like like I didn't I wasn't in like I need a win mode right. 01:11:00.46 Alex It was I had gone there for a completely different reason I you know with completely different expectations. But I packed a saw Blade in my back pocket just in case I needed to ah just in case I needed it and my plan just didn't work. 01:11:18.14 Alex Ah, the recent you know the resources I was expecting to get just weren't there. Ah, there was literally nothing I was going to be going home empty handed I was like well I can't do that You got to feed the engine something has to happen tonight. Um, and yeah I ended up breaking into a place and I. 01:11:27.72 Dave Um, yep. 01:11:36.57 Alex Got a fair bit of loot. 01:11:38.52 Dave Yeah, like you said when you go out on scavenging you can choose what you're going to take with you and that counts toward your inventory too. So there's a big risk reward with that like um. 01:11:49.30 Alex Yeah. 01:11:52.60 Dave Maybe I don't want to bring a crowbar with me because it takes up an inventory slot. But if I find a place that only a crow bar can open then I'm going to be glad that I brought that same with weapons too like I always had my characters take a knife with them just in case there is a combat system. In the game if you are on the Ui you'll see a thing that says unarmed and then that's like your looting mode and then if you click the knife. You'll go into the combat mode and if you have the knife out and you click on a character you go attack them same with if you have a gun pulled I Never shot anybody um I did. Pull a knife on somebody one time but that is something I'll save for the spoiler section little T's for later. Um I did bring weapons. I will say that you should not take combat lightly in this game. 01:12:45.16 Alex No. 01:12:48.23 Dave This is not a game that's about combat when you're out. It should be a last resort and even then you should probably just hit that run to exit button. 01:12:57.75 Alex Yeah, ah my own little tease, I axe murdered exactly 1 person in this entire run. Um, and it was an extremely flaily affair. 01:13:03.20 Dave Okay. 01:13:11.50 Alex It was very confusing. I don't understand why it worked the way it worked. I technically won, Pavle very nearly died. Ah and it took him a week, maybe two weeks to fully recover. 01:13:30.31 Alex With multiple bandages it was like it was very much like the decision to enter combat was a run defining moment with ramifications that lasted half my game. 01:13:44.27 Dave Yeah I would say that's the same for my game too. Um, and the way you're describing it sounds a bit like if someone who has no combat experience decides that they're going to kill somebody. Um, you don't know how to do it. 01:13:53.41 Alex Yeah, yeah. 01:13:57.63 Dave And it's going to fuck you up for a while you're probably going to get hurt in the scuffle like you know, put it? Yeah yeah for sure. 01:14:03.70 Alex And this and this was with me getting the jump on them too. Ah, you know I got the first hit and I don't even want to imagine what would have happened if it was a straight up flight. 01:14:12.93 Dave Yeah, yeah, let's ah, let's revisit that in the spoiler section. Um, it sounds like we had a lot of like it sounds like you had an easier go of the playthrough than I did. I was struggling for a lot of it. Then the engine stopped. 01:14:27.60 Alex Everything. 01:14:30.94 Dave At certain points along the way that forced me into some decision making but I'm excited to talk about how that went in the spoiler section that's going to be good. 01:14:34.90 Alex Yeah. 01:14:40.43 Alex Yeah I think it is. I think it's gonna be very illuminating. 01:14:45.77 Dave Is there anything else about gameplay that you think we should touch on before we do get into spoilers there. 01:14:53.79 Alex Not a ton I think we've pretty much I think we've covered a pretty good overview of all of this I guess you know the the 1 other thing about scavenging you know is that there are a lot of different I guess like merchants so it's very it's very interesting. There is. 01:15:07.37 Dave Yeah, yeah. 01:15:13.52 Alex A lot of game world that I never saw and I think most players never will like for example, like there's the one location. It's like a literal military compound. You're not let into that military compound. You're a Civilian you could walk up to the front door and you could know you can trade with the soldiers there. Ah you know you could trade alcohol for a few bullets. 01:15:33.12 Alex Ah, but like you can also scroll. Ah you could just see the entire map grayed out going for days and days and this huge military compounds like the biggest building in the game and you know when you go back to Scage Map it says oh you've seen like 1% of this map. 01:15:52.10 Alex And that's just all, you're ever going to see you know and I'm sure I'm sure there are players out there. You know who has mastered the combat system figured it out. You know all the ways to mess with it. You know and make it work in their favor and they've prompt. You know there's probably you know like the vaunted you know. 01:15:52.70 Dave Um, yeah. 01:16:08.56 Alex Military outpost clear run where their entire mission is just to clear this entire base and just slaughter everybody inside because that's how video gamers work. Um, but but like I've never you know like I'm never going to see that. 01:16:27.94 Alex And I think it is very interesting that they put all the effort into doing this right? like they like you have all of these very large portions of the world that unless you are going to be like a flagrant lawbreaker and just like ignore all warnings and like. Walk into people's houses and fight them when they decide they have a problem with that. There are large sections of this game that mostly are just gestured at like you can go there. You can explore them. They're fully fleshed out but you unless you have like unless you are very determined. 01:17:06.31 Alex Ah, you're never going to be in those spaces. 01:17:08.21 Dave Yeah I think so like I'm looking at the map screen right now and I would say there are 15 locations ish and I would say probably about 5 of them are like that like you just described where they are dangerous. You cannot go inside. Under any circumstances. Maybe you can stealth your way through it. But if people see you they will shoot you on site. So for all intents and purposes. They don't exist. You can't go in there and that map screen's always taunting you when you're picking your location. They're like. Well, the military base has tons of food tons of medicine and tons of guns and I'm like fuck I would like some of that. But yeah, you're right, a lot of it is kind of revisiting the same locations that you know are safe or safe ish that you at least know how to handle. 01:18:00.56 Dave And just picking those clean like there were several places that it might take you 4 or 5 trips to to take everything and I did that because it's the only safe place I could go. 01:18:01.74 Alex Oh yeah. 01:18:10.58 Alex Yeah, and and you'd even get into place if you know into situations where it'd be like well what I really need is X resource like I really need food. There isn't any food here but there's something here and there isn't food anywhere else. 01:18:19.10 Dave Yeah. 01:18:26.55 Alex So I'll go grab something and hope that I can trade it for food. 01:18:30.00 Dave Yeah, yeah, exactly there's a bunch of other places that are like maybe they're not hostile places kind of like the hospital we mentioned um I would say I could divide these places up into three groups. There are hostile places. There are the. 01:18:45.90 Dave Occupied places like there's a church. For example, that's still operating. Um the priest is still there. Ah the hospital places like that and then there are the empty abandoned. Maybe there's like a squatter or 2 in them. Those types of places. Um, you can go try and loot out the church. 01:18:47.10 Alex Yeah, yeah. 01:19:05.32 Dave But if you do that like the church. The church is helping people in the game. The hospital's helping people if you choose to go loot there then that like that hits you a little bit. You're doing a bad thing by doing that as opposed to looting out the. 01:19:19.14 Alex Um, yeah. 01:19:21.85 Dave The shelled building where no one lives anymore. 01:19:23.90 Alex Yeah, yeah. 01:19:27.40 Dave So we will dive into all of those decisions that we made in the spoiler section before we get into spoilers. We always do a little bit of wrap up in housekeeping here. So Alex in this section. We always answer the question who would you recommend at play. This war of mine. 01:19:47.65 Alex So you know obviously we've kind of mentioned a few few times basically any journalist that has ever covered this game has labeled it quote unquote important with a capital I in that very specific way that many games or or pieces of art get labeled. 01:20:07.65 Alex It is absolutely true and you know if you're the sort of person that you know cares about ah you know about culturally ah important games. This is absolutely one of them and you should absolutely play it. Ah you know I also way back at the very start already mentioned you know. Fans of 11 Bit’s other work. You know you like frostpunk you're eagerly looking forward to frostpunk 2. There is more here and you are definitely going to find something to enjoy in it. 01:20:41.94 Dave Yeah I Basically agree with everything you said there see usually I take the easy part but you took the easy part that time good job. Um, yeah, no I agree with everything you said there that if the if the if the pitch for this game that the quote. 01:20:49.70 Alex Ah, thank God because I didn't have anything else. 01:20:59.40 Dave The fact that this game is quote important and the pitch of it's important because it is helping you empathize with the Civilian Under Siege Basically if that sounds interesting to you then I think that this is an unqualified like go play this, you probably already own this. Like it's been given away many times at this point it goes on sale for $2 often The developers want people to play this game. 01:21:22.49 Alex Um, if you're maybe this would be a good way of wording it if you mentioned there was in the humble bundle or itch I o bundle for Ukraine my apologies. 01:21:34.93 Dave Yeah. 01:21:38.42 Alex If you're the certain sort of person who bought the itch io bundle for Ukraine you're the sort of person who will enjoy this game. 01:21:46.33 Dave Yeah, that's a great way of playing of putting it. Yeah Absolutely. Um and I guess like I don't think we mentioned this in the gameplay section. But this is a survival game. It's one of those crafting loop gather craft upgrade type loop games and it's really good from that perspective too. Like I thought that the balance of resources, the stuff that's available, the stuff that you need to make but the way that they want you to feel while this is going on. They want you to feel the pressure and I think that that's executed really really well too. 01:22:17.67 Alex Um, it's also. 01:22:19.91 Dave From that purely mechanical gameplay perspective I think it's quite good as well. 01:22:24.71 Alex It's also very unique in the way it handles those aspects because you know like we mentioned how we struggled to really get any Headway and like really explore that you know like the quote unquote Tech tree. You know in this game. Um. 01:22:37.25 Dave Yeah. 01:22:41.47 Alex For most survival games like this that is not the case you know for a lot of these other games. They want you to start from nothing and they want that kind of more power fantasy feeling of you going from 0 to hero and slowly you know, amassing power until you're the richest baddest student in the entire planet galaxy whatever you know sandbox you're in. This one handles it a little bit differently in the sense that you're not ah, you're not expected. You're not mandated to you know make it to the very top tippy top of the tech tree. You're not expected to build and see everything. Um, you are expected. 01:23:20.71 Alex To pick your battles you know decide you know like all of these different branches and all of these kind of like different things you can upgrade. They're effectively like different play styles. You know like if you wanted to go back and do another run you might do 1 run making cigarettes. You do another run you know making moonshine. 01:23:39.92 Alex Um, you can't unless you know? maybe if you're very experienced at the game and you really know what you're doing you can effectively build a facility that has all of these things but on a first time run. There's no way. 01:23:53.20 Dave M. 01:23:55.17 Alex I would be shocked if somebody did it on their first time run without having to walk through in their hand the entire time. Um, so I think that it is. Yeah so yeah, so I think that it is a you know a very unique way. Um. 01:24:01.71 Dave Yeah, yeah, frankly, yeah, go ahead. Sorry sorry start over. 01:24:12.96 Alex Of handling this kind of like it's a very unique spin on this very common like set of mechanics. 01:24:20.81 Dave Yeah, and frankly dude I am surprised at how far you got into these ah these upgrades and stuff like that too because like I said um I was ah just scraping by for most of the game like ah the. The highest I ever got again was that feeling of like if everyone just slept tonight and didn't go out scavenging we would still be okay for one night that's about as comfortable as I got yeah a okay, awesome. 01:24:44.63 Alex Yeah, well after the spoiler wall. You'll get to hear all my secrets of how I did it. 01:24:54.49 Dave So ah, let's do our housekeeping before the spoiler wall. I think it's obvious that both of us think very highly of this game and recommend it to a whole lot of people. Um before I talk about myself, tell people about First Five and kind of give an intro to your channel and tell people where they can find you. So and what you're doing. 01:25:16.22 Alex Yeah, hey, ah so I run the Youtube channel First Five. It's sort of like a video game review channel that is largely focused on smaller indies. But every once in a while when I find the right game you know I will look at something bigger. Ah, kind of the connecting thread between everything is I specifically look ah for shorter games. This was kind of like a personal experience thing you know when we were all you know in high school and college. We had those hundreds and hundreds of hours to play you know, whatever assassin's creed had come out that year or you know bang out the new world of Warcraft expansion or whatever. 01:25:52.20 Alex We don't have that time anymore you know like we're we're we're busy adults. We have other things to do in our lives. You know that you know other hobbies and family friends. There are just other things taking up that space and. At the very least I personally know that I do not have time for those games. You know Baldur’s Gate 3 is an absolutely amazing game. Absolutely love it. Have not bought it yet. I love that it exists but god knows where I'm going to find the one hundred and fifty hours for it. Um, so I focus on smaller games instead. You know people that are busy in the same way that I am can actually enjoy and can you know like actually get something out of and you know like hopefully you know maybe see the credits too. But you know, not even necessarily that but just like getting a worthwhile experience out of it even if you're really busy. 01:26:43.80 Alex You know if you have kids if you're doing a graduate. Um, you know yeah doing like a postgrad thing. Um, so that's kind of like what I try to talk about and at this point you know I've been doing it for so many years I've come at it from a lot of different angles. But that's kind of like the common through line. 01:27:06.33 Dave Yeah, I think the first video of yours that I found was what you did a video about and I forget which itch bundle it was but you did a video about like okay so you now own 1500 games from this itch bundle here's some cool stuff to try. Ah. And then from there like I said I ended up playing unsighted and silicon dreams because you covered those on your channel and I was like that looks really cool I will wish list and hopefully buy that one day and those 2 I actually got a chance to ah to play. Um, so you know I appreciate what you're doing and. 01:27:27.88 Alex No. 01:27:42.52 Dave I Think recently you actually did a game about these crafting type games or. 01:27:46.11 Alex Yeah, actually it was a really big project. It took like eight months to crank out somehow I'm still not entirely sure how I did it? Ah so what I did is I made a video called the time strapped gamer's guide to life sims. 01:27:52.68 Dave Jesus. 01:28:00.37 Dave Right? That's what it was. 01:28:03.99 Alex And which you mentioned before that you play a lot of Stardew Valley because it is liquid cocaine to you. Ah I had a very different experience with start valley which is kind of what set me down this path where for a lot of reasons I felt like it was a game that was constantly using my time inefficiently. Um. And you know and there were constant things that were needling me about that game where every late literally it was a yearly pilgrimage I would go back to this game I'd be like this game sounds amazing. There is so much that I love about this game. I absolutely want to love this game and then I would play it for 30 hours and I'd never want to look at it again. 01:28:42.40 Alex And then a year later I would be back. Um, and so I eventually decided you know what I'm gonna break the cycle I'm just going to play as many games in the same genre as stardew valley as I can physically get my hands on. Um and I ended up playing like 15 or something like that and I'm going to take down all my notes. 01:29:02.32 Alex And figure out how do you know how these games change or improve. You know, like kind of like the formula that Starty Valley and story of seasons kind of pioneered you know where are all these other games taking in most importantly. Any of them made a version of it that a schmuck like me with only a couple hours a week can actually enjoy and I've found a ton of great ones. Um it was. It was actually an incredibly fruitful project. Ah 1 thing that actually surprised me was I did end up enjoying Stardew Valley finally 01:29:33.68 Dave Hey there we go. 01:29:36.41 Alex I made it through. I filled out what you call it the community center. I had an absolutely wonderful time. Um, it helped that I'd already played the game 6 times and I knew what I was doing um, but yeah. 01:29:49.20 Dave That's true. Yeah. 01:29:53.11 Alex Ah, so it was an absolutely delightful project to work on I I felt like I got a ton of great insight into how like the genre itself works and I'm I'm hoping in the future I could do it for like you know other genres that I can tackle like you know I've I've been wanting to do it for like Mobas for a really long time. 01:30:10.84 Dave M. 01:30:12.70 Alex Like League league of legends like the ultimate like this is the game you're in for life. Um, but there are like there are so many other yeah you know like league of legends and Dota are obviously like the super big ones but like there are so many other Mobas out there that. 01:30:15.67 Dave Yeah. 01:30:31.59 Alex Are not as time intensive ah that will not ask for your entire life that are not nearly as popular. Nobody's ever heard of you know it's ah it's kind of a great tragedy. One of them literally came and went in the time it took me to make the first time strapped gamer's guide video. 01:30:48.76 Alex Ah, there was one called out God now I got to actually look up the name. 01:30:57.50 Alex Ah, omega strikers, this absolutely phenomenal game. Um, yeah, it is. It takes all of the mechanics like your normal moba. Ah and just makes you play a 3 v 3 soccer game with a. 01:30:57.89 Dave Oh nice. 01:31:11.95 Dave You put that on your top 3 games for the ah for my end of the year episode that and I I just recorded that like yesterday and I remember seeing the name and be like huh never heard of that moving on. 01:31:16.87 Alex Yes. 01:31:24.93 Alex Yeah, it is an incredibly incredible game. Did not get the player base it needed to announce that it was. You know it's done doing development. The service will stay up but nothing new is coming out so the game shut down Basically a month ago is an absolute tragedy. I love that game to Death. It is some of the best multiplayer fun I have had in years. I will miss it extremely dearly. 01:31:45.27 Dave Ah, that sucks. 01:31:55.15 Dave Ah, and I'm part of the problem reading it on the podcast and being like never heard of that. Well ah yeah, so anyway, um, I really like your channel. I've liked it for a long time now. I'm really happy to have you on the podcast because again i. I took a couple of games straight from your channel onto the podcast. So this has been awesome so far and I'll put a link down in the show notes to your channel and then to a couple of my favorite videos so people can easily check those out and yeah. Go check those out. It's good stuff now. I'm going to talk about myself for the next minute or so while I'm talking about myself. Feel free to go clicking around on those youtube links. So the best way to support this podcast I think is the easiest way is if you're listening on Apple Podcast Spotify or podcast addict. You can leave a 5 star rating and or a written review if it allows it that way when people search this war of mine. They will find this episode more often that'd be a big help. You can also join the discord server and chat if you played this war of mine. And you listen to the spoiler section and want to talk about how your experience went. Come in and talk. We have a great community there. Um, it's a really good time. I'm very proud of the group of people we have there . If you want to support monetarily you can do so at patreon.com/real Dave Jackson like I said this game was the winner of a poll. 01:33:19.61 Dave And every month I do a poll for what games I cover on the show. So if you want to join in, throw a couple bucks a month my way it's a big help. It's much appreciated, not expected of course but always appreciated. I also have another podcast because I'm a maniac. It's called a top three podcast. That is with my high school buddies and it's ah it's a good time. I promise you it's not just for dudes drinking beer and shooting the shit. It's a structured show. I think it's a good time. It's called a top three podcast. 01:33:52.47 Dave With all that being said Alex and I are going to take a break and when we come back. It is full spoiler time for this war of mine. 01:38:12.54 Dave Okay, Alex and I are back in its full spoiler time for this war of mine and even though I think that different people's playthroughs can play out in different ways. You'll certainly have different things happen to different characters if you don't want to be spoiled, please leave, go play the game and come back. We will be here. When you return. So Alex you mentioned earlier you did one and a half runs tell me about that half run tell me where things went wrong. 01:38:41.27 Alex So ah, where things went wrong is immediately. Ah, the reason why things went so well the second time around and I was able to actually accomplish something is because I had a dry run where everybody died horribly? Um, so. 01:38:42.90 Dave Immediately. Okay. 01:38:52.83 Dave Holy shit. Okay. 01:38:57.98 Alex I I had gotten in and things immediately went downhill. It was like day five. The weather already started turning and it started getting colder. Ah and I did not know how heaters worked yet. So I just threw one piece of wood in. 01:39:08.54 Dave Oh shit mm. 01:39:17.29 Alex You know, one day I was like oh yeah I'll take care of it or whatever people were getting sick constantly all the time. Um, so they were all also constantly in bed not doing things you know, um I hadn't figured out that you could just. 01:39:29.37 Dave Right. 01:39:35.10 Alex Sleep off your tiredness during the day yet. So I own you know I didn't have all hands on deck I only had 1 person guarding I um, only ah you know I i. 01:39:41.24 Dave This is. 01:39:48.95 Alex Focus very hard on sustainability and economy. You know, I got to feed that engine and I was trying to get the engine kicks started and then people just came and stole all my shit. Um I had ah you know like I am. Focused really hard on boarding up the walls. But I only had 1 guard. They didn't have enough equipment. So every time robbers showed up literally every other day starting like day 4 um and so like every other day. Ah they were breaking in. 01:40:13.10 Dave Jesus. 01:40:21.24 Alex And everybody that was in the building got injured so 2 people were getting injured every time and when you get injured it goes to the next tier. So I had people that were still working off being slightly injured, get it and then they break in and Robbie again and now they're very injured. 01:40:39.60 Alex So I was already sitting there day Nine Ah poor Poor Bruno was on Death's door. He was moderately injured and severely sick. Everybody else was fully injured. There was no food in the larder. I basically had nothing. 01:40:49.70 Dave Jesus. 01:40:59.49 Alex Ah, you know Pavel had gotten injured going out scavenging on a location called sniper or something or another. Um it wasn't like sniper alley but it was something like that right? um. 01:41:15.42 Alex And it had this little sniping mini game where you had to like time running between like objects to stay out of sniper fire and I messed it up because I got impatient so Pavel got sniped so he was injured too. Ah and right around that point I was like all right where we are. 01:41:24.30 Dave Oh man. 01:41:32.72 Alex We are steep into a death spiral. We're just going to start this over and call that a try Rod Yeah, it was brutal. 01:41:38.22 Dave Wow. Okay, so for a little bit of comparison in my playthrough. The weather got cold on a day like 24 or something like that, like well into the run. 01:41:51.50 Alex Yeah I think it was like I think it was like day 2021 on my second run I had so much more time to prepare. 01:41:57.32 Dave Okay, yeah, and then there's a certain point in the game when they really turn the screws on burglars and that was after the winter in my game but and also that that. 01:42:11.16 Alex Um, yeah. 01:42:15.38 Dave Sniper alley or whatever. It's actually called was not in my game. Not a look so that makes me think that like they'll have you know, ah bespoke locations like not. 01:42:18.48 Alex Yeah, it was. 01:42:30.00 Dave Randomly generated locations but not everything will be in. Everyone's game. 01:42:31.71 Alex Yeah, so sniper alley was repurposed as a different thing in my second run. Um, so in my second run it was the marketplace you know where you showed up and there were like for yeah, exact same map just a different scenario and it seemed like. 01:42:44.94 Dave Um, oh yeah, okay. 01:42:50.81 Alex Every location in the game had at least 2 scenarios attached to it because yeah because there were other locations like the supermarket where I had entirely different um encounters both of the supermarket encounters were some of the more memorable ones I had. 01:42:57.30 Dave That's smart. 01:43:09.84 Alex You know. 01:43:10.94 Dave Yeah I had one of my more memorable encounters in one of the supermarkets as well. This was where my only character died and it was Pavle. He got fucking murdered in the supermarket. 01:43:22.51 Alex I'll no oh no. 01:43:26.12 Dave Did you have a character die in your successful run? Ok. 01:43:29.78 Alex No I did not, I managed to keep them all alive. It was close a few times though. Ah Pavel got shot within an inch of his life on multiple occasions. 01:43:37.33 Dave Okay, ah yeah, so what happened in this scenario for me was in the grocery store. There was an unarmed woman in there who was being terrorized by a very armed man and I thought he didn't see me. 01:43:48.25 Alex Yes, yes. 01:43:56.89 Dave And so it has this thing where if you're pressed up against a door. You can look through the peephole. But if you have the knife in your hand. It will also give you a ah thing to click on to go what I thought meant go do a stealth kill because I'm a fucking gamer. 01:44:12.85 Alex Yeah. 01:44:14.73 Dave I Know how to know how this shit works. Um, but as soon as I opened the door. He heard the door open and just shot him right in the head instantly killed him so it was okay in the supermarket it was that guy. 01:44:26.17 Alex This was when I committed the Axe murder this scenario was that guy. Um I instead of a knife I had a hatchet and what ended up happening is I. 01:44:33.11 Dave Okay, aha. 01:44:44.11 Alex Ah, so like the way it's plotted out like it is set up perfectly to tell the player like there are so many flags like hey step in and murder this guy. Um, you know like they've got you know like you've got the moral high ground because this guy is trying to assault you know a defenseless woman. Um, they've got. 01:44:52.81 Dave Um, yeah. 01:45:00.63 Dave Um. 01:45:02.18 Alex Ah, you know his back is to you. You are like five feet away from this man. Um, you know Ed you're staring at him. You have the perfect opportunity to jump him and that and I was like I was really on the fence and I was really nervous and then there was. 01:45:05.40 Dave Yeah. 01:45:17.61 Alex There is a point where you know the stage direction. He starts stepping away from the door ah towards the woman and I was like my moment is slipping away. I need to make the choice right now and I dove in and I got the jump on him I got the first hit in the back of his head with the hatchet. 01:45:35.77 Alex And dropped into like a sliver of life left but he was still up. Um and the worst part is he got knocked super far away too. So I had to go chase him to hit him again and the way the combat works the game just gives you a button that says hey click here and your guy will like you know, go run and attack the guy. 01:45:55.34 Alex Um, and so I did that and he just fucking decked me with his rifle. You know like he just smacked me with a butt of it. Um, and so but I was like well I can't run because he's just going to shoot me. He has a literal assault rifle. So I just kept charging him. 01:46:12.50 Alex Over and over again and every time I charged him. He just smacked me with the butt of his gun until the fourth time when Pavle was, you know, beaten within an inch of his life. He finally closed in and he got the hit and he took the guy down. Um and it was. 01:46:30.80 Alex So ah, it was. It was so huge for my run because well one I got an assault rifle with like 30 bullets. Um, and that was really good for keeping robbers out. yeah um I yeah I I never actually use the thing out scavenging. 01:46:35.80 Dave Oh. Oh yeah, of course oh to. 01:46:50.30 Alex It came very handy ah towards the end game when they put the screws on and they bring in like the real heavy duty robbers. Um. 01:46:57.67 Dave Okay, yeah I was going to ask you if you ever used a gun. I never shot somebody but I did basically use all my bullets for home defense. Um, also just to add insult to injury the night that pavel got killed in the supermarket. 01:47:01.55 Alex I Never know. 01:47:14.63 Dave Ah, people broke into my house and stole all of my food so it was a bad night. Ah so it sounds so when you finish this run. You had 4 people, right? Yeah, did you because I had a. 01:47:17.74 Alex Um, oh oh God Yeah, no kidding. 01:47:27.83 Alex Yes I had 4 people. 01:47:34.35 Dave Four days after Pavel got murdered I had Boris come to the door and ah and want to join us. Um, so I thought that that was like oh well, you just had someone get killed. Um, we're going to give you a replacement person now but turns out someone might show up. Regardless. 01:47:38.49 Alex Other than that, 01:47:51.30 Alex Yeah, yeah. 01:47:53.21 Dave Um, did you consider at all sending them away because having 4 mouths to feed is a lot in this game. 01:48:02.39 Alex You know it is a lot but I didn't really consider it. You know I was in a comfortable-ish place and I was like well with the way I'm rationing this actually still works right? because I mentioned before that I you know had a very strict rationing program. Ah and before. 01:48:20.17 Alex It was just the 3 of them. It was round Robin um, you know and just one person didn't eat each day and it would just rotate who didn't eat and the other 2 people would eat and when the fourth person came I went well just 2 people won't eat and it was the exact same you know. 01:48:39.76 Alex Um, pull on resources I was still only cooking 2 meals a day as just 2 people didn't eat. Ah so yeah. 01:48:43.29 Dave Yeah, yeah I figured that out pretty late in the run where um, basically people can survive if they're hungry and they can. They can just persistently be on that hungry status and everything's fine except they're hungry. It just took me a long time to internalize that that was the right way to proceed, you know. 01:49:09.10 Alex Yeah, ah that that was one of those ways where you know the game was a lot easier on my second run because ah you know that was a lesson I figured out in the first one everybody you know I ran out of food so I got to see what happened when people got a little hungry and the answer was oh well they can actually go a day without it. 01:49:22.94 Dave M. 01:49:25.16 Alex And be perfectly fine. Um, and I I know if I did not institute that rationing it would have been way harder. Ah because whenever I was trading I wasn't I wasn't usually trading for food I was trading for components I was always always desperate for more components. 01:49:34.20 Dave Um, yeah. 01:49:44.66 Alex And would it did not matter what phase of the game it was I desperately needed basic building materials and they ran out like day 5 for me on my second run because like you you know the little like random events you can hear about on the radio on my second run like literally day 2 01:50:03.21 Alex I Got an event where they're like oh you know people are you know, looting all the you know all the scrap and anything they can find you know that's vaguely useful and isn't bolted down and the effect of it was there are fewer. There's like fewer basic building materials on the map. 01:50:22.90 Alex Um, you know from you know and it was at the very start so it just like it just ate them like locusts and I was constantly looking for more and the only place I could find them was traders and then after that on like day five or six I think I got another random event where they were like. Well, there are no small animals left in the City. We ate them All. So So your little animal traps that are supposed to be like the basic building block to self-sustenance or you know self-sustaining. Um, yeah, that those don't work anymore. 01:50:42.53 Dave Yeah. 01:50:53.85 Dave Yeah, yeah. 01:50:56.54 Alex Ah, so that was why I ended up going in the direction I did where I just built a trade empire churning out as much alcohol as I would like, like 3 or 4 alcohol a day going as hard as I could and just trading for as many materials. And a little bit of food just enough to keep me going for the next 3 or 4 days. Um, yeah, that was how I managed to survive and get through it. 01:51:26.90 Dave Gotcha Yeah I prioritized food a lot more and that's probably because my people were eating relatively well for most of the game until the winter when we started the rationing policy and then once I realized that that actually like. 01:51:43.58 Dave Wasn't a big deal if people went from very hungry to hungry to very hungry to hungry. They were fine then it became a little bit easier. Of course there's a bunch of other shit to manage during those particular portions of the playthrough but at least I didn't have to worry about it. 01:51:55.82 Alex Yeah. 01:52:02.40 Dave Trading everything for food. Um, but. 01:52:03.55 Alex Yeah, for sure that was one of the biggest things that helped me because if I didn't do that. All of those resources I was trading for all of these materials to try and keep the engine running and try and you know keep my base progressing in the right direction. You know, keep improving. It. All of those resources would have had to go into food if I hadn't done all that rationing from the start and I would have been way more impoverished. 01:52:31.96 Dave Yeah, um, let's see, there's also those events where people come and ask you for stuff or ask you to join them on stuff. I get the sense that you basically just said yes to anyone who needed help. 01:52:41.29 Alex Yeah, um, most of them. Yeah, the only one I didn't was there. It was the very first one I got both runs actually. 01:52:49.67 Dave Yeah. 01:52:58.61 Alex And I imagine maybe you would have ah you would have as well because I think I remember you mentioning them the two little kids that come asking you for medicine and then later later they you know a couple days later they're like hey we need more help can you bring us food and I just physically did not have the food to give them ah which which was a little bit crushing. 01:53:04.31 Dave Right. 01:53:15.16 Dave Gotcha. 01:53:17.25 Alex Ah, but I think that was like the only one I didn't say yes to. 01:53:24.81 Dave Gotcha Yeah I basically said yes to everybody? Um, including the kids both times I had the stuff they needed but it's always like I gave them the last of my medicine which hurts because. 01:53:38.81 Dave I didn't give my people medicine often. I chose to have them rest for like five days in a row to get well. But that medicine is like the ultimate bargaining chip like I can buy so much shit with a bottle of medicine. So. 01:53:43.63 Alex Yeah. 01:53:50.61 Alex It really is it really is you know Medicine was kind of like kind of like my final fantasy ether right? like you get 1 you're like oh what if I need it in the end game and you stash it in your back pocket and never literally never use it because it's too valuable. Um. 01:53:56.87 Dave Yeah. 01:54:08.17 Alex You know I I had a lot of people get sick because I still you know part part way into after the weather turned it took me ah I still hadn't figured out how heaters worked I eventually you know after people got sick enough times I was like I had to Google it and be like I keep putting one in my heater. Why isn't it working? 01:54:23.59 Dave Yeah. 01:54:27.12 Alex Um, but yeah, so like when that was happening and people kept getting sick I just used herbal medicine instead and prayed you know or you know if it was Amelia who didn't really do a whole ton. Once she got there other than you know, be an extra body to guard. Um, you know. I just let her sleep it off. 01:54:48.90 Dave And yeah I was going to say you? Well she's being a lawyer too. Let's ah, let's give her some credit. She's lawyering during the ah the war here with the armed robbers they come to the house. She's. 01:55:02.82 Dave So let them know exactly what part of the revised code says they can't be here right now. Yeah exactly? Um, so um, you also have people that come and ask you to join some unsavory activities. Did you do any of those? 01:55:03.82 Alex Yeah, she will explain to them to hold your ground law. 01:55:20.83 Alex I was not asked to do any unsavory activities. Um, okay. 01:55:22.64 Dave Okay, so I had to do the first one was some people asked me to join a raiding party on a rich neighborhood which I did because I really needed stuff and the second one was to raid a hospital warehouse. 01:55:40.46 Alex Oh okay. 01:55:42.64 Dave Ah, for bandages in medicine which I did because I really needed that stuff and also I kind of misread that I thought they were stealing from like the army but it was not. It was the civilian hospital that they still because when when Bruno got home from that everyone was like man what the fuck like. 01:55:56.20 Alex Oops. 01:56:01.16 Dave Come on and then I was like oh okay, it was that kind of hospital I see um. 01:56:01.43 Alex I Yeah know yeah you know I didn't get those I got all requests for help. Um I got the two kids and I got a single mother. 01:56:10.84 Dave Okay. 01:56:19.98 Alex Who wanted help boarding up her house? I got a guy whose brother had been shot by a sniper and needed help getting them home and then I had the guys that brought by carrots and then they came back later. 01:56:35.64 Dave Yeah. 01:56:39.37 Alex Asking? Yeah and then they came back later also asking for help boarding up their home. There were a lot of people that wanted me to board up their homes despite the fact that I have my characters had 0 experience at doing that before the war but you know. 01:56:45.21 Dave Um, yeah, right? Um I think the only other one that I had was a house they got bombed and there was like someone stuck in the rubble they needed help getting people out. Yeah. 01:57:00.15 Alex Oh yeah, okay yeah I didn't get that one. 01:57:04.84 Dave Um, but those are especially when you have 3 people. Those are low cost like nothing when you send people out to go do that kind of thing to help board up. Someone's house like nothing bad ever happened to those. The worst thing that would happen is they come home tired. 01:57:19.27 Alex Um I did. I did actually have one night where I got somebody trying to Rob me the same night but like by that point I had four peep 4 people. So I still had a double garden everything so it was like literally not even a problem. 01:57:27.80 Dave Okay, right, that's true, right? that you could You could not have enough guards That's true I was thinking like you know I'm going to send someone out to clear rubble and they're going to fucking break their leg or something. 01:57:35.29 Alex Um, yeah. 01:57:42.52 Alex Yeah, no I was saying especially with okay my gamer brain turned on when the guys showed up with the vegetables because let me tell you vegetables are one of the most expensive things in this game like it's medicine and then it's vegetables pretty much. 01:57:45.54 Dave None of that ever happened. 01:58:02.70 Alex Um, actually no, it might be. It might be medicine and then canned food and then vegetables. But it's you know like it's up there and these guys just show up with 5 vegetables. No strings attached just like hey we're a nice neighbor. 01:58:07.11 Dave Yeah, yeah. 01:58:19.20 Alex Just want to be nice, have some vegetables. It's like, are you crazy? Um I like my gamer brain turned on I was like this game is going to giveth and it is going to take it away an equal measure. 01:58:19.31 Dave Yeah, yeah. 01:58:31.58 Alex And in five days they are going to come knocking on my door asking for like 3 medicine or something absolutely ludicrous and then like four days later sure enough they came back. They're like can you help us board up our house. We just need you for the evening. What really that little. 01:58:37.26 Dave Yeah. 01:58:44.19 Dave Yeah I definitely had those same I definitely had those same feelings too especially with the people that came you know. Basically most of those requests where they come or they you know they just give you free shit. Why would anyone be giving me free stuff or you know one of those was like come join our rating party and then I was expecting them to you know. 01:59:00.64 Alex The. 01:59:14.23 Dave Like they're actually evil and they're going to kidnap the person or something like that. Um, but that stuff didn't happen and that's part of what I talked about in the non-spoiler part, like there are just random acts of kindness throughout the game that really hit home even more because you're surrounded by. 01:59:14.81 Alex Yeah. 01:59:23.65 Alex There are yeah. 01:59:33.18 Dave A lot of others like desperate stuff like killing someone with a hatchet or my character getting murdered in the supermarket or the bad things that I haven't mentioned yet that I did all those random acts of kindness I think are really crucial for the experience in here because like 01:59:52.14 Dave Like I think I said in the non-spoiler part in all of these, any story you hear about survivors in a war zone or something like their stories are always full of you know good Samaritans helping out as well. 02:00:08.90 Alex Yeah, and there are also a surprising number like almost equal number of events where somebody terrifying you know like somebody heavily armed somebody that you know is described as like you know, like not a good dude. Um. 02:00:24.39 Alex Proves themselves to actually be pretty chill like ah the other event I had at the supermarket. So the other version of the supermarket. This was the one in um, in my first run instead of the military guy being there. There they say that oh there are other scavengers here. So you're going to have to share, right? Ah, that's like the event I looked at that I looked at that description I was like okay sure yeah fine I'm fine with that and I walk on and in the exact same place where there was that one soldier. 02:00:59.95 Alex There are 3 men with assault rifles and if you walk it to set the stage for everybody else. The front door is five feet away from where you come onto the map. There is 0 cover. There is nowhere to hide. 02:01:14.78 Alex You either turn around and leave immediately or you gamble and you see how this is gonna go. Um, there is no way to evade these guys and so like I'm just forced to sit there and stand and stare as I as 2 of them go inside the other guy turns around and immediately spots me ah. 02:01:21.33 Dave Um, yeah. 02:01:34.60 Alex Ah, just slowly walks towards me. Ah, ao and I have my you know like my heart is in my mouth for this entire sequence as I'm just standing there waiting to see what's going to happen and if I need to bolt and he walks up within five feet of me looks at me for like 3 seconds he goes. Yeah, you're all right 02:01:51.41 Alex There's enough for everybody to go on it. 02:01:53.57 Dave Nice Hell yeah, unexpected, Um, okay so I already talked about my kind of rationalizing to myself about stealing medicine from the hospital. 02:01:55.20 Alex Absolutely. 02:02:09.57 Dave I'm just going to So I'm not going to steal all of it I'm just going to steal a little bit. Um I did that things started to get desperate for me in the wintertime day Twenty ish The radio said it's about to get colder and ah I guess but no I'll save that because it hits harder later. Um. 02:02:29.10 Dave The weather gets really cold and this is what I was talking about. It was all hands on deck food and fuel and literally nothing else. I had no time or energy or resources for anything. It's literally like whatever you can carry to bring it home. We're burning it and then. 02:02:34.67 Alex Oh yeah. 02:02:45.50 Alex Yeah, yeah. 02:02:46.33 Dave Food. Also my people ate so much canned food in this? Um, but it was ah yeah, it. 02:02:50.74 Alex Yeah, that happened to me a lot too because I was you know because I mentioned I was building a moonshine empire. Moonshine takes water to make and it takes filters to purify the second version and you need those filters for more water. 02:03:00.93 Dave Right. 02:03:08.94 Alex And you need fuel for all 3 of these steps so on top of chucking all of this fuel into. Ah you know like the different furnaces and stuff to keep the place warm I had 3 different stations that I was feeding fuel into daily it was you know there was a certain point where it just it. It was untenable and could not. You know, be done. 02:03:21.34 Dave Yeah. 02:03:28.71 Alex And that was you know when the engine stalled for me. Luckily you know it had stalled late enough that I could just, you know, walk through the rest of the game with what I had already gathered for the most part and still mostly kind of survive. Um, but. 02:03:39.82 Dave Okay. 02:03:44.64 Alex That 1 did leave 1 of my most desperate moments where I also stole from the hospital but I stole furniture. Yes, ah so the hatchet in addition to being a good weapon for killing people can be used to convert furniture into. 02:03:48.13 Dave Ah, ah furniture. Okay. 02:04:03.39 Alex Fuel and wood. You can break it down back to its base components and I had already scrounged ah through all the barren areas. This was also why I had um I had robbed the 1 place that I said the one time I robbed. 02:04:04.91 Dave Ooh ok. 02:04:21.92 Alex Because I showed up to the 1 location , one house was occupied by a bunch of like armed people trying to protect their house and the other half was like ruins and I went to the ruins with the hatchet and was like all right? Well I'm just gonna you know, chop up. Whatever furniture is in the ruined half because I haven't done a sweep for that. There was no furniture. 02:04:31.66 Dave Great. 02:04:41.83 Alex The entire building I was like oh well hell I'm freezing in two days I need to get something out of this. So that's why I did that. You know that's why I did my one robbery and then after that I was still desperate for more fuel. So I went to the hospital. 02:04:42.34 Dave M. Yeah. 02:04:58.57 Alex I Found a quiet corner with a poor little oak armchair to victimize and dismantled it as quietly as I could um, which which. 02:05:13.27 Alex It would have been hilarious. How petty it was if I wasn't so desperate. 02:05:18.00 Dave Oh yeah, yeah, it Yeah, you're going to the hospital. It's like I'm not going to steal from the people I'm not going to you know, stick somebody up and try and steal that you're not going to steal their medicine like I did um yeah, just ah. 02:05:31.78 Alex I'm just going to steal the visitor chair. 02:05:34.42 Dave Yeah, exactly? yeah, um, the desperation part for me was during the winter. Um, one of my characters is very sick and will die soon if I don't find medicine. I don't have any medicine I already stole from the hospital. Um, I don't have any food. And I don't have any wood for fuel. I literally think people are going to die in a week if I don't fix this right now. So all the while this is on a day like 25 ish. Um, because I did not prepare for winter. Because I didn't know that that was going to happen. Um, this is a few days into maybe five days into the winter and I wrote in my notes here like if I ever play this game again. Prepare for winter ahead of time. Um, so total desperation moves the whole time. Ah. 02:06:30.98 Dave When you go on the map screen to go out at night up in the corner. There's this place called the quiet villa which is where this old couple lives and for the whole game I had resisted going there because I don't want to go steal from the old couple but like we said in the non spoiler part you get to that point where. 02:06:45.12 Alex Depth. 02:06:50.72 Dave There's very little useful stuff without doing something bad like I've cleaned out all the empty places I've cleaned out all the places where there are people but they don't care that I'm there you know I've done all that I don't have anything to trade. So I went up to the old people's house and stole 1 thing of medicine from them. 02:06:52.31 Alex Oh yeah. 02:07:01.50 Alex Um. 02:07:10.10 Dave Ah, the old woman who lives there is sick so they are begging me not to steal their medicine. I didn't steal all of it, I stole less than half. Um and I also just stole you know like I said all the wood in their house took all that shit. Um, so that felt really bad and my characters were not. 02:07:14.97 Alex Um, yeah. 02:07:29.82 Dave Happy about that that that Boris did that but my people got to survive because of the things I took from their house and I was able to sell and then burn for fuel and all of that Bruno recovered he survived and then he went on the hospital raid like a week later so yeah we're just we're paying all the bad behavior forward now. Um, that was the only really bad thing I did, yeah so that was the one really just like an evil thing that I did because my people would have died if I didn't do that. 02:07:52.29 Alex Oh yeah. 02:08:09.22 Dave And the other options were like what am I going to go try and steal from the militia that's in these apartments I can't I can't go I've already seen how yeah exactly and I've I've already seen how combat plays out. 02:08:17.54 Alex Yeah, like what are you just gonna get in the shootout with literally all of them like what? Ah, what's your plan here? 02:08:26.56 Dave In this game my character just got demolished one time. Um this is the point for me things are super desperate and then on the radio. They say the peacemakers are coming in two weeks they said and it actually. 02:08:28.34 Alex Um, yeah. 02:08:44.56 Dave Ended up being a little over 2 weeks for me but they got the message so that's like a little spark of hope that the end is on it if I can just keep it rolling for another couple weeks. Yeah, um. 02:08:50.85 Alex Yeah, if you could just keep holding out for a little longer. 02:09:02.40 Dave And this the other part I wanted to mention I'm in this super desperation mode and I check the weather on the radio and the weather channel says keep in mind it is like °C in my house like I'm I'm burnin I'm rationing the fuel to just making sure it doesn't freeze in there. 02:09:17.63 Alex Broke up. 02:09:22.34 Dave Um, and the weather says we may expect the upcoming days to be quite cool. 1 of our listeners suggests. There's nothing better than a cup of hot mulled wine on a cool day. Enjoy and I've read that and I was like you motherfuckers. 02:09:33.94 Alex Um, oh my God for me. It was the one when they were when they said winter is coming and they were like let's all give the people of Pogoren of a nice warm hug. It's like diet. Thanks for your thoughts and Prayers God Damn it. 02:09:45.32 Dave Yeah, there's another one that says ah you know oh it's snowing outside make sure to cool up or curl up in an armchair with your favorite book and I was like God I just robbed an old couple of their medicine and this is what the radio's telling me. Ah. 02:09:54.23 Alex Yeah. 02:10:00.62 Alex Yeah. 02:10:03.40 Dave I Thought that this was um, a really interesting just way of flipping the script on like people like you and me who see these wartime things from the comfort and safety of our own home and just kind of like are just not obviously how could we be in touch with how things really are but. 02:10:13.80 Alex Yeah. 02:10:22.49 Dave Like a 2 two ways to look at this like how people who are not in it just they're living in their world and that's what matters to them and if somebody in fucking gaza saw that the 2 of us were. Doing a podcast right now and talking about the quote um struggles that we had throughout the game. They'd be like you motherfuckers. You know that's how I felt re seeing this radio message. 02:10:47.40 Alex Yeah, yeah. 02:10:54.26 Alex Yeah, 100% that is a really good point and obviously I definitely felt a lot of you know, very similar frustration with that with the weather channel. Um I mean like on the 1 hand. Um. 02:11:04.87 Dave I Also thought sorry, go ahead. 02:11:11.91 Alex You know whether it does kind of match the tone and attitude of like weather channels and maybe there is a little bit of commentary there just because you know like um with a lot of Journal. No. Maybe not necessarily with the larger Journalistic organization. But like there are sections like you know the weather where you know your job is to be pleasant and to ah you know, not rock the boat and. 02:11:43.83 Alex They don't want you to know the weathermen going off script and talking about oh well terrible terrible weathered Pogoren of ah you know? Um, yeah, exactly. 02:11:52.34 Dave Life fucking sucks in pokerov all right on to sports. 02:12:00.24 Alex I'm sorry it's it's Pogoren isn’t it Yes. 02:12:03.10 Dave Pogoren Yeah yeah, um, yeah, the the other way that I kind of saw this and credit to Randall again as I mentioned before who I sent the screenshot of this to him and he said like yeah, it's interesting how that could be a media just. Covering it up. You know I don't know whose radio station. This is basically what they want people to know. 02:12:20.76 Alex Yeah, that is true. Yeah yeah, and the difference in tone is very different because there are 3 different radio stations in this game that you can tune into as well as a few like you know, like little music stations. Um, but like they all have very different tones like you've got the one like very like neutral tone like Ap news sounding ah station. Um, you've got the weather station which is infuriatingly chipper and then you've got. 02:12:54.63 Dave Yeah. 02:12:58.98 Alex Local news station. Um, where I think the one quote from them that stood out for me most was like at the very end where they're like it's not enough that there's war now and now we have active gangs of looters on the streets. You know, like not in those exact words but they'll be like good God enough is enough. Um. 02:13:09.00 Dave Mean. Um, yeah, yeah I think the ah the radio seemed like a simple thing when I was building it because I think I think when you first see the option to build it. They say like. You can see what's coming up on the weather and stuff like it. It was like sure that it might be useful but I think it has like a really subtle but effective story purpose as well and it gave me something to do during the day to get up and check the radio and. 02:13:32.63 Alex Yeah. 02:13:46.85 Alex Yeah, it's on point every day. Yeah. 02:13:49.15 Dave Yeah, they say like us. Yeah cigarettes are in demand right now and I don't have any cigarettes So I can't really do anything about that but good to know I suppose Um, but a lot of this stuff I think reinforces like some of those. Themes that I think the game wants you to take away from it in a really nice way. 02:14:14.69 Alex Yeah, definitely and I also remember you know, especially once we were once you know the announcement goes out that you've got the peacekeepers on the way. Yeah, effectively like the UN stand in um, then you know I was. 02:14:25.27 Dave Yeah. 02:14:30.88 Alex Glued to that radio every single day for news and there was just nothing for hours of game time. 02:14:33.88 Dave Yeah, yeah in it. Um it so it keeps a log of what had been said on that radio station in past days so on day twenty eight they. Um, they said that the peacekeepers are on their way and it's going to take a couple weeks they said ah yeah day twenty eight so on day 42 or 43 I'm checking the radio and I'm like where are the fucking where is the u n like what are they doing when are they getting here. 02:15:10.33 Alex I got 10. I got 10 dogs with guns outside my door to get them over here. 02:15:10.97 Dave And again I had not at all to yeah, exactly they're raiding my house every single night or running out of food like come on and it's this is another thing I think they want to reinforce like. If. There is any sliver of hope to cling onto that you will cling on to any sliver of hope that you can find you know, Um, the other thing is when the cold weather passes like when I turned on the radio and there are like temperatures are looking up in the city. 02:15:32.42 Alex Yeah, absolutely yeah. 02:15:48.23 Dave Some other chipper is messy. Why don't you go out and play a game of soccer or something like that you know, um when the cold broke that was one of the 2 big like happy moments in the game because winter was such a struggle to get through. 02:16:02.48 Alex It's a huge relief for sure. Yeah, oh yeah, oh yeah, you know it's actually really interesting. I happen to be glancing through you know, like the achievements in the game and. 02:16:18.65 Alex Of course they tell you you know like with any other game on Steam What percentage of people got each achievement and you know like there is the usual attrition for um, you know people who you know just stop the game halfway right? but it's. 02:16:34.65 Dave Yeah, yeah. 02:16:38.34 Alex Very telling looking at these 22% of players survived winter somehow twenty two point two percent survived the event after that and 20.7 have the achievement for beating the game. 02:16:52.39 Dave Um, interesting. 02:16:54.59 Alex So it's like if you make it through winter you make it through the game. You're generally you know like look at you know I get it. This is not perfectly empirical but like a ballpark you can kind of look at it and say if you can make it through winter. You've pretty much beaten the game and you're you know the last hour or 2 is ah you know, mostly a victory lap. 02:17:06.93 Dave Yeah. 02:17:13.91 Dave Yeah, it's a bit of extra pressure because right after the winter was when the raids started like that every single night people try to break in. So um, it was a little extra pressure. 02:17:21.24 Alex Yeah, it was the same for me too. 02:17:29.83 Dave Well people are not sleeping at night anymore because someone has to go scavenge and then 2 people have to guard the house every single time people still get hurt during those home defenses from time to time. Um, but the good part about that section is during the winter another part that makes winter so hard. 02:17:49.12 Alex Oh my God getting snowed in. 02:17:49.66 Dave Is that a lot of the scavenging places are unavailable. Ah, and also sometimes just randomly they'll be like oh you can't go to the Market. There's people fighting there tonight. Um, which is a nice touch game design touch. Um sucked. For anyone who wanted to do anything there. 02:18:08.50 Alex Yeah, um, it was a yeah getting snowed in was truly brutal for me because I wanted to go out and do my hatchet plan and I had literally one derelict I could go to. 02:18:20.95 Dave Even. 02:18:22.71 Alex Everything else was housed. You know there are there's like 4 or 5 you know locations that you could go to where nobody's there nobody cares what you're doing there or messing around I could go to literally one of them because everything else was snowed in. It's like the end of winter got really desperate for me because. 02:18:41.35 Alex My options were to go to the nice old. You know the nice old granny and grandpa. Um, go go Rob them or go um or go deal with a gang like those were basically the only options I had left. Ah so I just. I went into the same gang apartment every single night and tried to sneak through it and usually it didn't work out but once or twice it did and I swear to god these were the most patient gangsters I have ever met ah because. 02:19:08.21 Dave Okay. 02:19:18.43 Alex Ah, they didn't shoot me on site. They know you would walk in and they'd be like hey what are you doing here. Get the hell out and so I'd slowly back out I go outside the door be like okay I left and they're all right cool I'm glad I'm glad we have an understanding. Ah. 02:19:18.95 Dave Okay. 02:19:33.30 Dave Right? yeah. 02:19:36.63 Alex And then they turned around and I'd walk right back in and they would catch me again. They're like hey I thought we told you get the fuck out of here but like okay okay I'm going I'm going I'm going you know it wasn't until the third time that they'd actually draw their guns on me. Oh I could come back the next night and do it all over again. Um. 02:19:40.66 Dave Um, yeah, yeah, okay gotcha. 02:19:54.43 Alex But I do have one really memorable moment from 1 of the times I went in there. It was just like this random casual. You know, like dialogue that was thrown out there. Ah where I was staring at 1 of the guards through the front door waiting for him to leave and he just casually went. You know that house across the street looks really rich. 02:19:56.99 Dave Sure. 02:20:13.40 Alex We should go raid that house like Motherfucker. I'm the house across the street I'm raiding you like through the pure happenstance of where it sat you know like on the map because it was um, it was the apartment complex that was like. 02:20:30.48 Alex Practically across the street from where I was, you know, like on the map. It's like your hovel and then there's like the garage right next to you and then across like the road is this apartment complex. 02:20:30.83 Dave Oh yeah, okay. 02:20:38.99 Dave You know, thinking about it like if anyone saw what was in my house they would probably feel that way like they're like this motherfucker's got 2 heaters. He's got two beds. He's got. 02:20:52.92 Alex Um, yeah, yeah. 02:20:54.79 Dave And ah, he's got a gardening project that he abandoned like three weeks ago but it's there. He's got everything boarded up. There's an armchair in there. Well the fuckcker's got an armchair. Yeah exactly I think I will take it. Um. 02:21:02.79 Alex That should just be our house. 02:21:13.38 Dave Then I think the final like memorable kind of emergent thing that happened for me was that I had robbed the old couple of some, some not all, of their medicine to keep Bruno alive and. 02:21:24.99 Alex Move on. 02:21:32.51 Dave I did debate before I did that I did have that conversation with myself where I was like well if bruno died that's one less mouth to feed. He can't carry a bunch at least it's not ah what's her face Katya because she's good at bartering at least it's not her. 02:21:49.77 Alex Moves. 02:21:50.70 Dave So I did go through that in my head. But I yeah I did steal from them to keep him alive so late in the game this is night 44 um I went back to their house just to see I wasn't planning on stealing from them I just wanted to see how it played out and they were dead. 02:22:02.58 Alex Yeah. Oh oh. 02:22:09.42 Dave They died in bed together. Yeah so I don't know if it was the winter but I know that I didn't help the situation so that was 1 fine and then like the day after they get on the radio and say um, the peacekeeping forces are on their way literally the day after. So I had yeah that moment up at the house but you know I I didn't like it is exactly two weeks after they were told the peacekeepers would be there in two weeks they were not there. 02:22:30.10 Alex Ah, that is a really compelling ending though. Yeah. 02:22:44.62 Dave So I was like fucked are they going to be late like that would be really you know cruel. But this is a cruel game. So I thought to myself. Okay, well um, I'll go up there and check to see if they survived like I said they died in bed together. You can see their dead bodies in the bed together. 02:22:49.13 Alex Um, yeah. 02:23:03.97 Dave Um, so that sucked and then I thought well they're dead I'm taking everything in their house and then I did that I went back to my house exactly? Um, but. 02:23:14.49 Alex Yeah I mean it's not doing them any good anymore. Um. 02:23:21.15 Dave The whole time I'm cleaning out their refrigerator I'm thinking like well you remember how you stole their medicine right? Yeah I remember that um and then literally the next day The radio says the peacekeepers are on their way. So I'm like ah of course of course. 02:23:21.66 Alex Yeah, very Morgan yeah. 02:23:37.92 Alex Yeah, was and say the other 1 or 1 other one that was really memorable for me was when I was on my chair hatcheting adventure in the hospital. Ah um I had come back. It was like the second or third time I'd been there. 02:23:55.53 Alex And they said that they had gotten shelled again. Ah ah and that would you know that was ah you know the moment where you know it. You know it really punched her. I was like oh God um that that was a moment when I was really starting to think about you know like. 02:24:14.34 Alex Kind of some of the stuff that I've been doing, you know, reading in the news about Palestine and stuff like that. Um, as like you could actually I remember there like way up in the corner of the hospital. You could still see like a bomb sitting there inactive. 02:24:16.64 Dave Yeah. 02:24:33.60 Alex That just like ever detonated. Ah you know they're they're doing all this operating in a hospital with an active mortar shell in it's yeah, ah, which is all kinds of grim to think about. Ah. 02:24:40.19 Dave Yeah. 02:24:45.53 Dave Oh yeah, a lot of really grim situations that you find yourself in even if you're not stealing from the sick old couple like I did even if you're doing a little petty like you said chair destruction and theft. 02:25:04.70 Dave It's about as harmless as you can do in this game. Um, do you happen to know what day your ceasefire happened ? Yeah okay, same for me. Um I didn't want to say anything in the Nons Spoiler part. 02:25:12.83 Alex I happen on day 46 02:25:22.36 Dave I Don't know if this varies from playthrough to playthrough. Um, but it is odd that it was the same day for both of us. 02:25:26.82 Alex I think it does because it sounds like my second run had a very similar rhythm to yours. Ah, and my first run very much did not ah you know like. 02:25:33.75 Dave Ah, ah, right. 02:25:40.43 Alex Like I got that first weather notification that like oh it's starting to get a little bit colder. You know, better get in your armchair day 5 Ah, which means you know winter was coming on day twenty maybe at best? Um, so I think I think that it can. 02:25:58.19 Alex Vary a little bit. 02:25:58.40 Dave Ok, starting to see the strings kind of a little bit like are there a dozen playthroughs Basically where they say ok winter happens on this day. The ceasefire happens on this day. 02:26:16.88 Dave Yadda Yadda yadda but it will happen the same day for everybody. 02:26:17.15 Alex Yeah I do know that you can make a custom game where you can adjust all of those parameters because that is, you know, like something I saw. Um. 02:26:24.37 Dave Yeah. 02:26:30.61 Alex And I think like the maximum parameter is you can have it go up to eighty days or something like that which you know knowing how barren my map was after 15 How ah you know that take that yeah that takes a much more knowledgeable player. 02:26:40.61 Dave Yeah, yeah, that's sicko shit right? there. 02:26:48.87 Alex Ah, then I am to pull off that amount of time I would be starving desperately long before that you know even without winter or all those other things I just run out of things. There's just not enough stuff. 02:26:52.27 Dave E. 02:27:04.14 Dave Um, yeah, yeah, unless like you can you can I think if you plan maybe you can build like a nice self-sustaining thing but there's always something to like. 02:27:20.25 Alex Yeah. 02:27:21.80 Dave Throw a wrench in your plants like I had. I had a small scale moonshine operation like I was making stuff every day. Every two days I would get a bottle and I could sell it for some food or something like that. But then in the winter I can't collect rainwater because it's all frozen. 02:27:38.58 Dave I have to go outside and get snow and then I need to use fuel to melt the snow to get water. Yeah, and I couldn't, I just couldn't afford that. Yeah, that's what. 02:27:42.18 Alex Then you got to use fuel to make the moon shine too. It's and then you need more fuel. Yeah, this was the exact problem I ran into. 02:27:54.46 Dave Drove me to the old people's house because I had no food. No fuel and no basically nothing. I had some screws that's about all I had in the house. So yeah, it's interesting. How um it sounds like. 02:28:11.90 Dave Our successful playthroughs were on the same kind of track but we had very different experiences within that same track. Okay. 02:28:16.13 Alex Um, yeah, oh yeah, there was 1 more desperate moment for me ah during the wet when the looters got really intense. Ah, so I mentioned. 02:28:32.86 Alex Ah, way back earlier in the non-s spoiler section that there was an upgrade that I spent a week hunting for right? I needed 4 electrical parts so I had literally everything I needed to get like the tier three um machining. 02:28:36.98 Dave Yeah, yeah. 02:28:52.60 Alex Table because I wanted the ability to manufacture bullets because I had like 20 bullet casings and like all the things I needed to make bullets lying around and I couldn't do anything with them and I was completely out of resources to make moonshine like there was just no sugar left on the map period. 02:29:12.10 Alex The only the only sugar I was getting was gonna be from trading as so I was like well this business venture is drying up I better switch over to bullets is what if is what what first set me down this path because I was like well you know I've got like 30 of them stored I don't really need more than that. Ah. 02:29:20.30 Dave Yeah. 02:29:32.40 Alex And then the raiders started coming every night and I started using 5 or 6 bullets every night and I suddenly realized oh shit I am going to need more than 30 bullets. Um. 02:29:48.33 Alex Luckily I had already started my quest for this. I Went to so many places I went to like 3 different traders. I know I waited for the main Trader guy to show Up. He didn't have any I went to, you know I went. To every derelict I could because the snows eventually went away and so I could go to all of them I couldn't find any eventually I went to the garage and I managed to get two I was like well this helps but it's not everything I'd need and then I went fishing around because apparently I'd left some rubble. 02:30:24.10 Alex At the ad in the rubble on top of the garage I found the last two I had not been there since like day eight day 6 very early in the game because I had gone through all the rubble and been like electrical parts I don't need those I need components. 02:30:43.00 Alex Because I was still making you know I was still making all the basic stuff. So it's like electrical parts. These are freaking useless. I don't have inventory space for this. I just left it in the rubble and those 2 electrical parts ended up saving my life. Ah because I would have run out of bullets on day 44 if I hadn't found those parts ah and because I did I was able to make like another 20 bullets and I was perfectly fine. Um, and yeah, and yeah it was just like incredibly desperate. 02:31:04.33 Dave Whoo. 02:31:09.98 Dave Nice to go ahead. 02:31:20.38 Alex And frustrating struggle because I knew I'm like okay the peacekeepers are going to be here soon. Winter's already over so I'm safe. This is the final hurdle. This is all I need to deal with. I just need like 10 more bullets to beat the game or or. 4 electrical components somewhat. You know, kind of a common thing and then I'm in the clear and I just for the longest time could not find them anywhere. 02:31:49.61 Dave And all of the trips that you're taking to look for electrical components could have been spent doing other stuff which makes it hurt worse when you come up empty. Ah I sold. 02:31:56.74 Alex Absolutely yeah, yeah, 100% 02:32:07.15 Dave Every single electrical component I picked up Beyond the if you needed them to build any of the level one things that I used those but other than that I sold all of them I sold every bullet casing and gunpowder that I picked up I I think it was the experience with ah. 02:32:22.77 Alex I Did that to you for a long time. 02:32:26.44 Dave With my character getting killed where I was just like violence is ah it is not going to be kind to me if I go seeking it out. So Bullets are more valuable to other people than they are to me so I'll trade them for food later I did get a pistol. From somewhere and I did have like a bunch of bullets banked up and that helped when those nightly raids happened for sure. But I also had a knife and stuff. So people were semi-armed and then. 02:33:00.54 Dave Yeah,, that's like the last test I Wonder I Just I wonder I don't know if you were holding anything back during the non-spoiler part like I wonder like what does it take in each of these conditions for someone to actually die like. Do they go from injured to severely injured to dead. 02:33:19.60 Alex I'm pretty sure what the way it is is. It goes from hungry slash injured slash Sick slash sad and then it goes more injured more sick or no, it's like slightly sick, slightly injured sad. 02:33:34.95 Dave Right. 02:33:36.69 Alex And then it goes slightly hungry or no, then it goes ah like moderately hungry depressed you know, moderately injured and then it goes severe and I'm pretty sure after that it is just dead. 02:33:48.13 Dave Yeah, from any of the conditions I like I wonder well being very like not sleeping for several days in a row will kill you so that probably does hunger probably. 02:33:59.30 Alex Yeah I'm. 02:34:08.56 Alex Yeah, because whenever you get somebody to like severe Blank. They're like oh buddy you better fix this like right now or they're gonna die you know like you get all the little warning Flags. Um. You know and in all the different survivors' bios as they start worrying about each other. 02:34:27.37 Dave Okay, so I just looked it up. Um, it goes from well-fed to normal and then there are 2 levels of Hunger. There are 2 levels of very hungry. There are 2 levels of starvation and then if they don't eat for seven days or two days at starving. They go extremely starving and if they don't eat. They'll die on the next day so according to the wiki that's more levels than I expected. Um. 02:34:51.16 Alex Wow That is honestly a surprise. Yeah, surprisingly long tail when ah whenever I saw that somebody was very hungry I just assumed I had like a day to fix the problem. 02:35:02.58 Dave Yeah I wondered about so wounded is a lot less forgiving Sick is a lot less forgiving but the wiki says that they move slower than Hunger. So Maybe someone can be sick. Ah, longer Time. Basically. 02:35:24.27 Alex They can definitely be injured and I bet temperature has a lot to do with it as well because like you know you can get sick if it is too cold I bet you It's also harder to recover without like meds or anything if you know it isn't warm. Um I know I know. 02:35:36.23 Dave Yeah, and then the last one. 02:35:41.98 Alex Both times that pavel got shot. He was severely wounded and both times it took him like two weeks and multiple bandages to sleep it off. 02:35:50.88 Dave Yeah, sleep off your gunshot wound, come on man. Um, and I just looked up because we wondered about the depressed state. Um, so it does go from normal to sad to depressed and then there's a final one called Broken where the character will not do anything. Ah, they will not build anything. They'll not cook anything. They can't go scavenge and they can't guard at night. 02:36:11.74 Alex Oh. 02:36:23.50 Dave Um, and the only way to cheer them up is a bunch of sleep drinking or having another character console them and it's that the wiki says they won't eat unless another character. 02:36:40.92 Alex Oh wow that is dark. You know? yeah I never did either. 02:36:41.57 Dave Basically feeds them so I never got into that so it looks like so I guess just to kind of wrap this up I think um. Like now that we're in the spoiler section people have either played the game or they don't care what they hear here. Um, I think it's safe to say that this game is actually easier than you think it is when you're playing as long as you're not totally blindsided by it. Ah. 02:37:08.80 Alex Yeah. 02:37:15.66 Dave Winter coming on day 5 or something like that you know, um, it seems like it is really oppressive and stuff toward you as the player but it's actually friendlier than you expect it to be like I thought that if like for example, someone is. Very sick like Bruno was. He was very sick for one day. I thought he was just going to die if I didn't get medicine that night but it doesn't seem like that's the case and it doesn't seem like that's the case kind of across the board. They do a good job of hiding it. 02:37:41.14 Alex Yeah. 02:37:50.43 Alex For sure. Yeah I absolutely agree. Ah you know also with other stuff like you know, like with that little trick where you know you can feed yourself every other day instead of every day. 02:38:04.81 Alex You know it's not very logical that you can, you know, get through two days with just a single can of tuna and be fine. Ah, but you know it if it is ah you know what 1 of the very gamy ways where you know this war of mine makes is a little kinder to you than it really needs you you know? well. 02:38:10.14 Dave Right. 02:38:24.43 Alex Yeah, then it really needs to be ah because I think there's an alternate version of this where the food requirements are much more severe and everybody just shrugs and nods and goes. Yeah that makes sense I mean that's how much you need to eat you know normally um. 02:38:24.84 Dave Yeah. 02:38:38.21 Dave Oh yeah, can you imagine if instead of can you imagine if instead of 1 you know like you said can of tuna per day if they were like your characters need to eat fifteen hundred calories you know 02:38:41.16 Alex You know people wouldn't even blink at it. 02:38:53.71 Alex Oh my god we I'll be, they'd all be dead in a week 02:38:57.80 Dave Like that, that would be brutal. Um, yeah I think you're right? The game is friendlier than it needs to be but the illusion is kept up well enough for everybody playing it unless you really get in a bad spot and you realize that. 02:39:16.26 Dave Your characters are not dying as soon as you thought they would um at least for me the illusion was kept up. It did not adversely affect my experience at all. I think I felt what they wanted me to feel. 02:39:26.83 Alex Yeah I think the illusion was kept up very well for me as well and I think that if I hadn't had that first run go so disastrously right? I would have probably been in many of the same dire straits that you were. 02:39:38.33 Dave No. 02:39:45.89 Alex Ah, just because that gave me you know the game is very specific about 1 you know like tell you go figure it out yourself. Ah with like this this is not a game that has like a tutorial message that pops up anytime you build a new thing. 02:39:53.48 Dave Yeah, yeah. 02:40:03.82 Alex You get a few vague descriptions for just about everything in the game but none of it is perfect information and a lot of the time. It's not always helpful even and you know and then there's other stuff that just straight up is not explained at all. And you just kind of have to intuit it. Um, and so you know like knowledge in the game is a real advantage and like a lot of games in this style like it's very common for games like this to have a drive run where you know you just die, you just. 02:40:37.10 Dave Yeah, yeah, yeah. 02:40:39.46 Alex You just eat shit the first time and then you take the lessons from that and you have a better start the second run and you know you actually get somewhere and that was more or less how this war of mine was for me. But I think that it may not be the way that developers want it. To necessarily be, I think they want you to go in and make those unforced errors so that you get into having to make those difficult decisions about whether you know whether you rob an elderly couple and mostly directly cause their death. 02:41:06.18 Dave Um, yeah. 02:41:14.43 Dave Yeah I think that of the 2 of us I think they would prefer that people have my playthrough. Yeah I think you're right? Um, frost punk is the game where I just ate shit the first time I played it and. 02:41:19.10 Alex I Think so yeah. 02:41:27.16 Alex I Absolutely did too. 02:41:31.80 Dave Yeah, and if I ever replay that game. You bet your ass I'm going to watch some like how to survive the first few weeks in frost punk videos just to make sure I can, you know, at least start strong and then. 02:41:42.89 Alex Yeah. 02:41:45.89 Dave See where it goes but that this is this game I think is a lot friendlier than frost punk. 02:41:52.62 Alex No honestly I had an identical experience with these 2 games. Ah, because I had the exact same experience with frost punk where I made it about halfway through the game before I just ate shit and just could not keep up with the winter getting worse and worse and worse. Ah and it was largely because. 02:41:54.55 Dave Um, okay. 02:42:09.46 Alex I had made you know like poor decisions based on not really understanding exactly how the system works and not prioritizing the right thing at the beginning and both games you know, have this, you know the the perpetual engine you got to keep feeding and having that strong foundation is such a world of difference in both of these games. 02:42:27.63 Dave Yeah. 02:42:29.20 Alex And so when I went back and I played my second run in frostpunk I did so well that I didn't have to become a horrible dictator I just didn't pass those laws right? because I I had already you know seen enough of the mechanical systems that I had enough of an understanding of the game that I could. 02:42:49.50 Alex Beat it without having to resort to any of the you know any of the moral quandaries. 02:42:56.70 Dave Interesting. Ah I failed within the first five hours of frost punk just because I was just so clueless about what to do so I think if I played it again. You know without. 02:43:11.81 Dave Becoming a professional first without getting a college degree in how to succeed in frostpunk. Um I think I again would have I think that's the more intended experience from the developer I think they want you to get into those gray areas ah rather than just breeze through this war of mine and just be like. 02:43:29.21 Alex Yeah, yeah. 02:43:31.70 Dave I Never stole from anybody. Things were chill. We were playing guitar. You know we had a moonshine empire. I was growing vegetables and eating rats. Things were cool. 02:43:35.90 Alex Yeah, yeah, yeah, I Definitely think that that ah that is much preferred I think even as a player. It's a better experience. It's a more meaningful experience for sure. You know, like I absolutely enjoyed this game. 02:43:48.41 Dave Yeah, yeah. 02:43:54.76 Alex You know I got a ton out of it. Ah, you know I found it very compelling. I think you probably had the stronger experience. Um, just because you were forced to grapple with all those things you know in a way that I. Did not quite have to just because I got to do the redo. 02:44:14.33 Dave Right? That's true. But I think that the game's not a one trick pony. It's not just the game that forced me to go steal from that elderly couple or steal from the hospital or. 02:44:26.74 Alex That is true. Yeah. 02:44:30.27 Dave Steal the stuff from the mechanic and then sell it immediately right back to him. Um, it's not that's not the game's trick. The game's trick is that all of the little things throughout the playthrough are good and are sorry bad and good again like. Was something I really wanted to make sure we highlighted in the episode is that there are moments of humanity and generosity and stuff throughout the game too which people don't really talk about because it's I guess it's just catchier to say that this is the game that made me do those terrible things. But I'm glad that we got to camp out a little bit on those nice moments too because there are plenty. So um I think we're going on about getting up for about 3 hours now so I think it's a good time to wrap this up. Um, I think that. We have ah maybe not exhausted all the things that we could say but I feel like we've done. Ah, we've done it. We've done our job here on this talking about our experience with this war of mine. So first of all, thank you for joining me. 02:45:31.57 Alex Yeah, I'd say so. 02:45:41.61 Dave Thank you for giving me 3 hours of your time to talk about this. It's a big ask to play the game and then spend even more time talking about it. So I appreciate it man. Thank you 02:45:53.19 Alex Oh it was a wonderful 3 hours you know? Ah, I always enjoy listening to the podcast. You know when I get an opportunity to listen to it. It is even more fun getting to be on it. So I'm glad that I was finally able to get an opportunity. Yeah. 02:46:02.85 Dave Thank you? Yeah and ah the door there's a door. There's ah, there's ah, a metaphorical door. That's always open for you to come back. Love to have you back on sometime. Cool. 02:46:17.46 Alex Oh yeah I would love to be back. 02:46:22.56 Dave Ah, so at the end I will remind everybody. You can check down in the show notes for links to first five and a couple of my favorite episodes episodes videos videos videos on Youtube episodes of a podcast a couple of my favorite videos. And yeah, go check it out. It's quality stuff. Highly recommended and as always thank you to everyone who sticks it out to the end of the episode. Another plug if you did play this war of mine or if you just want to talk about the episode hop in the Discord server come chat with us and that will be all. Thank you all for listening again at tune in next week for the next game to come out of the backlog and we're all done. 02:47:03.26 Alex All right.