PlayStation Plus Game Club Kevin Garaventa

Darryl (@TheTallSamoanGuy) from the Trophy Talk Podcast picked the super cool perspective puzzle game Superliminal to talk about. We go through our favorite puzzles, how much we love this unique mechanic, and how this game does a great job of giving you confidence to overcome the seemingly insurmountable task of finishing it. Fun fact: hearing how Darryl went after the challenge mode in this game gave me the confidence to try and complete it the following day! As Dr. Glenn Pierce would say, do you find yourself blowing things out of proportion and coming face-to-face with impossible situations? Then maybe Superliminal is for you!

Tofer and Jordan are back to talk about Dead Cells and our love/hate relationship with the rogue-like genre. We go into all of our favorite parts and random configurations that this game can take. We discuss some of our favorite weapon styles and synergies and then tell a few stories about ridiculous deaths that we should have seen coming. We also talk about what makes the DLC so great and why you should get it if you love this game so much. And then we explain why, even though we kept getting knocked down, we planned to jump back in after recording to try again, and probably die again.

Fellow Castlevania enthusiasts Jordan and Topher both join me to talk about Koji Igarashi's Kickstarter-funded game that fans had been eagerly clamoring for ever since he left Konami. It's an understatement to say that we have complex feelings about how this game turned out, but we are still very glad to have it. We go into all our favorite weapons, spells, locations, and bosses. We also go into inevitably getting stuck and the frustrating effort it takes to make something as simple as spaghetti or beef curry in the castle.

Steve picked the Outer Wilds to play through this month and we break down what we love and sometimes hate about each planet in this micro solar system. We talk about the joy of discovering something new and being able to just share that joy with someone else. We also talk deeply about what it means to travel to new and unexpected places, even though it might be scary, and why we feel the urge to keep going despite that. We also laugh a lot over the many ways to die in Outer Wilds - being crushed by a giant sand waterfall, having the autopilot fly us straight into the sun, or just forgetting to put on our space suits when exiting the ship, it's all here and we loved doing it over and over again in the name of discovery.

Colin Kolhoven, the host of the Trophy Talk podcast just played Shadow of the Colossus for the first time and we dig into what makes it so much of a masterpiece, but still somewhat difficult to play. We gush about the beautiful landscape, the majestic beauty of many of the colossus, and then how you kill them. We talk all about which side of this story might actually be evil and question what our actions really mean. Then in a spoiler section we theorize about the many possible meanings of the ending and then break down each of our top five colossus fights. Mere hours after we recorded I already wanted to change my list - there are just too many incredible moments in this game.

To close out 2023 Robert has picked for us to play Marvel's Guardians of the Galaxy. We go over all there is to love about the story and what's not to love about some of the action. We gush about how much we both love Drax and all of the things he just doesn't seem to understand. And there's a space llama involved.