Episode 189: Mouthwashing - Air Force Footprint

[00:00:14] Welcome to Gaming Together, a cooperative podcast. Each pod we play through a cooperative experience and relate to you, the listener, if this game is the creme de la creme of co-op or something better off playing solo. I'm your host, Nave, and the co-op partner I have joining me this week is Dave Jackson from Tales of the Backlog. How's it going, Dave? Nave, good to see you again, dude. Thank you for the invite on. Always a pleasure. It's always confusing for the listener when Dave, Nave, all of these names that would Nate from the older trolls. It's just awful.

[00:00:41] Uh-huh. Yeah, we need a couple more people just to fuck up all the rhyming. Yeah, it's terrible. Well, so it's been a while that we've had you on. Unfortunately, Phillip couldn't be here this week because he's got Alaskan things going on. He has to dig his house out every day from the snow. I was going to say, he's just digging holes. He's busy. Yeah, that's why he's got a husky dog. I think it's a husky, but he just lets her go outside and she digs around the house for a while. Smart.

[00:01:09] Yeah, he's taught her. Yeah, they're smart dogs. So you want to tell the listeners about your shows that you run? I know I'm very intimate with Tales from the Backlog, but also you run the top three. Yeah. Right? Yeah, so I'm a host of Tales from the Backlog, like you said, and every episode is kind of similar to this. Every episode's one game in depth, you know, one game per episode.

[00:01:31] And each episode is pretty long. We do a deep dive on the game for a while with no spoilers, and we warn you when spoilers are coming. And then after that kind of spoiler break, we have a full spoiler discussion. So anyone can listen to any episode of Tales from the Backlog.

[00:02:15] Tales from the Backlog. Tales from the Backlog.

[00:02:48] Is that a real word? A cavalcade of writers. Sure is. We sat there for like 20 minutes just nitpicking everybody's their top three albums. Yeah, but music always brings us together or tears us apart. But this isn't a music podcast. It's a gaming podcast. That's the only time I've ever been able to successfully transition that one. I don't know how Phil does it normally. Perfect. Perfect. But yeah, so we're going to talk about some of the games that we've been playing. Dave, what have you been playing?

[00:03:17] Oh man, I've been playing a lot of stuff. The thing I've been playing the most is something I can't talk about right now. It's under embargo. So I have also been playing Persona 4 Golden. That's been an ongoing thing. I've been playing on Steam Deck. It's been a great game to just pick up and play when I have a break at work or when I'm just laying on the couch or something like that. My first time playing that game and I started it right after I finished Metaphor ReFantasio.

[00:03:46] So Atlas to Atlas, long game to long game. I've been playing that and I've recently, over the last six months, I've gotten obsessed with the Ace Combat series. Have you ever played any Ace Combat games? So I've been playing Ace Combat 7 right now after I played Ace Combat 0 and 5 a couple months ago. So I'm all in, 100% in on Ace Combat now.

[00:04:13] I'm like a super fan in the course of like two months. So I'm playing Ace Combat 7. I love that game. I remember in the place, I played a couple on the PlayStation 2 and I specifically remember as a kid going, graphics can't get better than this. Like this is the peak. It's never getting better. Oh yeah. I think we all have a PS2 game we played where we said that exact sentence. Mine was Final Fantasy X where I saw that and I was like, this will forever be the best looking game that's ever made.

[00:04:41] And it kind of still is. But yeah, those are probably the main two I've been playing recently. Also Lorelei and the Laser Eyes, which is, you know, I was thinking about it like co-op games. Lorelei and the Laser Eyes is a single player game, but it's a great one to play with somebody else because it's a puzzle game. And it's got so many puzzles in it. And there's going to be a bunch of puzzles that you can figure out by yourself.

[00:05:06] And there's going to be a bunch of puzzles where you just need someone with a different kind of brain to help you out. So Lorelei and the Laser Eyes is going to be great. Could be a good co-op gaming together game for sure. Oh yeah. And two brain cells better than one. Yes. As always. I've got my own game that's similar to that. I streamed a game called The Exit 8. Have you ever heard of this? Is that the one where you're in like the subway? Yeah. Well, so this is the thing. Everyone knew this game. And I've never heard of it.

[00:05:36] It just dropped – like Shadow dropped on Xbox for $4. And I was like – you want to know the reason why I bought it? In one of the screenshots, there was like an ad on the wall in the subway and it was in Japanese. And I don't know if you knew this, but me and Phillip have been learning Japanese. Phillip's a year ahead of me. And so I'm like – I'm just basically crawling through here in Ghana right now. And I've got a little bit of Katsakana under my belt.

[00:06:02] And so I bought it specifically so I could look at those signs and like try and figure out what the hell I'm looking at. I knew that as like – I had just seen people who like horror games talk about it as like this liminal space horror game. And then you're like going through the subway hallways and you'll – something's different this time around or something like that.

[00:06:25] But that's all I – and I get that game mixed up with the game Pools, which is another one of those liminal space horror games. But I've seen it. I've seen it. Yeah. Well, I ended up beating it. I got all the achievements in it. It's pretty – it's got an easy achievement list. But really the theme of the game is you want to get out on the eighth exit. But like Dave said, listener, the hallway is repeating itself.

[00:06:52] It's the same hallway and there's one guy that walks down the hallway and he's the same guy every time. But occasionally there's an anomaly. And there's like 40 or 50 of these anomalies. So it only takes like an hour and a half before you've seen them all and you start to like recognize what's going on at a snap glance. But the whole problem is that if you see an anomaly, you have to immediately turn around and walk back where you came from. And if you continue forward, you'll reset back at zero.

[00:07:18] There's – I was going to say nothing scary ever happens, but there is like a couple jump scares. Most of the scariness is from like noticing an anomaly for the first time and not expecting it to be like that. So there's a couple of them where like there's a poster with like eyeballs that's like there's cameras watching you. And like one time I was walking by and I realized the eyeballs were looking at me as I walked by. And I turned around like what? And like I saw them move again and I was like, oh, god. You know what I mean? Yeah.

[00:07:47] No, I think subway stations like especially if it's a big – like I've seen screenshots of that and it looks like it's like a fairly big like subway station that you're walking through. If there's not a bunch of people, they are pretty creepy just like by nature. So walking through that hallway, like you said, it's mostly empty and then like sometimes there's something off and you might catch it like out of the corner of your eye. It's pretty – like they don't have to have things jump out and scare you. It's already scary.

[00:08:16] Yeah. So I highly recommend this game. It's only $4 on Xbox. People have been playing it on PC for like two or three years now. Yeah, so like Dave was saying, people on like Twitch and YouTube, they were really big on this. Completely missed the boat. I had no idea this was like something that was big. I just bought it because it was $4, which is – as you can see on my what did Dave buy section, I have – I fell off the wagon again. Yeah. Pretty extensive this time. Yeah.

[00:08:46] I've been really good for the past like four episodes. I've been buying like maybe one game, like maybe none. I was doing really good, but I fucked up. But before that, I've been playing Stalker 2. I am right at the end and I'm right at the end. And I was like, oh my god, I'm going to beat this game tonight. And I looked at the time and it was like 730. And I was like, hmm, I should work on the notes for tomorrow's episode. And then it was 1 a.m.

[00:09:15] Like I was sitting there working on the notes the whole time. I'm like on the last chapter at the very beginning of it. And so I'm kind of upset with myself because I like to come here and be like, oh, I beat the game. But the game will be beaten. I promise. This isn't a Metaphoria Fantasio situation where I said for three episodes in a row that I was about to beat the game. But – That game fakes you out with when you think it's going to be over. So – Yeah, multiple times. The whole thing – eventually I realized that the – I was like, I'm about to beat the game.

[00:09:42] And I realized there's a whole other month on the calendar and it doesn't go past that. So I was like, hmm. I was like using those – rubbing those brain cells together trying to figure out how long that's going to take me, which it was a long time. But I loved that game. I love Stalker as well. Have you played Stalker 2? No, I haven't played any Stalker games. It looks really cool and is on Game Pass, right? Yes, it is. Yeah.

[00:10:08] So I've been thinking about like maybe a couple times this year I'm just going to get a month of Game Pass and just like catch up on some stuff. So the first month that I get it, I'm going to play the Indiana Jones game. But then like the second time I do that – because I let Game Pass expire because I wasn't using it a whole lot. But like I'll take the chance to play one of these games for $10 basically over the course of a month. And Stalker seems like one that's going to be real fun. It is long. It is like 40 hours.

[00:10:38] It is a long campaign. And I think like 10 of those 40 hours are just walking across Russia or Ukraine. I can't remember where this game takes place. It's one of those two. But it's – this has got to be hands down one of the most immersive games I've ever played. Yeah, I've heard. And I can't – like I don't really get scared when I play games. I have been – I have shat myself like multiple times because I – like there's this one in particular. I don't remember if I got the Twitch clip or not.

[00:11:08] But I was walking around in this area. Like there are choices you can – I'm not going to spoil anything, listener or Dave. But this – there are choices you can make and it does dramatically kind of alter the world. Not in like a physical way but like how the factions are distributed around the world. And I went into this area that used to be like this town and it was empty. And I had no idea what I did to like make this place vanish. I don't know if this is just a story beat or whatever.

[00:11:34] But I was walking through it and it's completely dark and there is this alert that's being – that's being repeated on the radio inside of there like the PA system. I'm playing this game in Russian by the way. So it's like double immersive and also more scary because I don't understand anything.

[00:11:50] But he is talking about like basically evacuating the place and I'm like – I'm wired listening to it because it's also a liminal space again like in the Exit 8 where this is a place I've been like for multiple times to sell stuff and buy health items and stuff. And this creature, these mutants, they go invisible and they decloak to attack you. This dude just jump scared me. Like – and I don't think it was like a predetermined jump scare. I think that he was there.

[00:12:20] I could have noticed him if I was paying attention but I was just so locked in to like trying to figure out what happened in this place. Yeah, it seems like one of those games where you're just – you have to be locked in like all the time when you're playing it. So, you know, anything that you just didn't see right away could jump scare you real bad. Yeah, I highly recommend it. Save Often, it's one of those games. I have multiple times.

[00:12:44] Like multiple times the past two days I lost like maybe 20 minutes each time I died because I got sniped or something. Like some – because enemies will see you from a mile away. It's a PC game first and foremost. So, they expect you to be able to shoot them with just shitty little AK that's jamming. Yeah. It doesn't matter. The game is really good. Yeah. I hope everyone plays it eventually. It's funny that you said you were going to play Indiana Jones because that was what I was juggling.

[00:13:13] I was like I'm either playing Indy or Stalker 2 and the reason why I chose Stalker 2 was because everyone is playing Indiana Jones instead and I'm a contrarian. So, I went – I zagged instead. No, it looks really cool. Like props to the developers for getting that game out, making a really good game with all the – you know, everything that they've had to deal with over the last several years. They need – they should be proud of themselves especially with the sound design. The audio design is crazy. Yeah.

[00:13:43] Like it will be raining and you will walk near like a car and you hear the patter on the aluminum on the car and then you go underneath like an awning and then the sound of the rain kind of dissipates and now you hear it on the – it's like what the – That's crazy. Yeah. It's just so incredible. Well done, Stalker. Yeah. Anyway, so that's the games we've been playing. We've got a really long episode ahead of us so I need to just jump through these really fast. What did Nave buy?

[00:14:10] I – I've got a bunch of screenshots and Dave's kind of looking in amazement at some of these games. Well, also part of it is I have this extension that is dark mode Google Docs but what it actually does is it just like negatives the page. So the screenshots you put on there are all negatives of like the real screenshots. So for example, these anime girls are all like they're pitch black and their eyes are white and it's very weird.

[00:14:39] Yeah, so it's like something from Stalker. Yes, exactly. Yeah, they are horror game anime girls. Yeah. So I got these two – okay, so on Xbox there is a buy one get two free indie game sale and there are like – there's like 150 indie games in there. And unfortunately I am a connoisseur of buying games I'm never going to play. So I already had a lot of them. But these Neptunia games, I've always seen them in the distance. I've always been an Xbox boy.

[00:15:09] I had a Vita and I think I bought one but I never actually played it. And so – because it's a little too weebish for me. But as I've been dabbling in Japanese and as I've watched Bochi, the Rocket Spy Family and shit, I've gotten a lot more acclimated to the anime girl. And I'm like, okay, I think I can do this. It looks like Tales of Vesperia but anime girls only. And I – from what I understand, it's about game development. Like the anime girls represent different game consoles and like publishers and stuff. Huh.

[00:15:39] That's super weird. Not going to lie. I don't know how that fits. But, yeah, I mean I will be interested to hear when you definitely play these how that all fits together. Yeah. Well, I bought two of them just to double down. I don't know why. But I'm excited to try one because I've always seen them. It's like Decidia where I've always seen it over there on the Sony side and I've been curious.

[00:16:06] But I've never actually been able to easily access these games. But these are the only two on Xbox at all. And they just released. And so being able to get one and then get the other one for free was sick. Also, the game I got as my third game was called Daymare 1994, which is quite a name. It is. And speaking of the name Daymare, like I said, the screenshots are negatives of what they really look like.

[00:16:35] So it is blindingly bright, that screenshot in the Google Doc there. So Daymare, as opposed to Nightmare, really fits with what I'm looking at. The thing about this game is it looks like they saw the Resident Evil 2 remake and they were like, we can do that for an eighth of the price. Yeah. And so they're trying to do that. This screenshot isn't really indicative of what the game looks like normally, I guess. Because I don't know what the fuck this thing is.

[00:17:04] But you're fighting like zombies and stuff. Yeah. And it just seems like a cool double A game. This I'm actually very likely to end up exploring pretty soon because I just love this kind of stuff. Mm-hmm. Yeah, I mean, it looks like, like you said, it looks like the RE2 or RE4 type of combat. So, I mean, I'll give that a shot, you know, if I have a game like that because I love those games. Yeah. Well, it's $35.

[00:17:31] But I got it for free, you know, because these Neptune 8 games were $40. So, it was right there. And so I double dipped on this buy one, get two free. So, this was the $20 tier. So, I ended up getting the Braid. I think it's the anniversary edition. I don't know. It's the new Braid. I've never played Braid. I do own Braid. I think I could have played it before buying this because I think I have it backwards compatible on the Xbox. Mm-hmm. Yeah, I've never played Braid either.

[00:18:00] It's one of the OG indie games though. Yeah, one of those darling. It's something about – I have played it for like a little bit where I like – I know there's like a time mechanic. And I think I got like three puzzles in before I had to go, hmm, on a puzzle. And I was like, this isn't Portal. I'm going back to Portal or something or Limbo, you know, Castle Crashers. Yeah. No, I get it.

[00:18:23] But I think that – I remember this game coming out because I'm pretty sure the main guy who developed this – I don't know how many people were in on it. But one of the main guys who developed it like almost threw a fit because it sold really poorly. Oh, that's – well, it's Jonathan Blow. He developed Braid and The Witness. And it would be very like him to throw a fit. Awesome. Well, I'm glad I don't misremember that because that's all I remember about this game. That's what I think about.

[00:18:53] I can't remember if Braid – I don't remember if he was – if this or Jonathan Blow was a part of Indie Game, the movie. But I want to say it was. I'm talking out of my ass though. But yeah, that guy is like a really well-respected game developer, programmer and everything like that. But if he threw a fit, I wouldn't be surprised.

[00:19:17] So the second to last game is Tainted Grail Conquest, which is one of the most generic names I've ever heard of. And I almost passed it up if I didn't need to fill that $20 slot. And that caused me to actually click on the game and realize it is a card game roguelike. And I went, uh-oh. That's crack. The combat looks cool. It looks like you're fighting a cool monster in that screenshot there. Yeah.

[00:19:45] So the monster, I think, has these totems. So I don't know what these totems are doing. Probably buffing them. It's like a boss fight, I think. But it looks kind of like Darkest Dungeon meets Splay the Spire. And everyone don't all come at once because I don't know, honestly. I don't know if this game is going to be that good. But it looks like that kind of aesthetic with the gameplay systems. So I'm kind of excited to see what this game is all about.

[00:20:12] And the last game is Sword and Fairy End 2, which is the sequel to the generic names of the games I've been buying. This game looks just like a management sim with anime girls. So, you know, anime girl. I'm anime girling it up. It looks because it just... I think you just cook food and then give the food to the tables, like Overcooked style. I did just beat Overcooked, all the DLC, last week. So I'm in the mood, you know.

[00:20:41] I kind of want to continue cooking. I almost re-downloaded that one game. The... What is it? It's kind of like Overcooked. It's like Yum Cook Delicious or something. Cook Serve Delicious, maybe? Yeah, Cook Serve Delicious, which is... That game is nothing like Overcooked, but it is still dope. And it is still stressful. You better be careful with this one, because I think those anime girls are going to be pretty demanding customers. Yeah, there's a lot of red bubbles above their heads, which is going to stress me out. Uh-huh.

[00:21:11] I feel the need to please, just like some of the characters we're about to be talking about soon. Um... That's a segue, Nave. That's a segue. I'm getting better. I think it's the monster. This is my third one today. Uh... Uh... So, with NewPod updates, Phillip didn't say anything, which is surprising, because he really liked this game. But, uh... We did get a comment, which I missed last week. But, this is the silver lining. Spotify.

[00:21:39] I've been complaining about this, and someone at Spotify clearly listens to my show. So, you guys can thank me, all you podcast hosts that use Spotify, uh... Or track your stats over there. Um... They updated the comment thing so that it shows you when you get recent comments. You no longer have to search for the damn thing. That if... When it tells you you got a new one. So, now there's a little box that tells you what all the new comments are. Nice. And so, we got a new comment from... Oh, shit. I just maximized it, and then it moved.

[00:22:09] Uh... Andrew Milton, who said... That, uh... Or on our episode 186, the asshole. The first asshole episode of the year. He said, that first Am I the Asshole is 100% Bean Dad. That guy that got canceled for having his son open a can of beans. Um... Do you understand what's happening, or do we have to go down a rabbit hole really fast? I think I remember the story of Bean Dad. I think it was, like, uh... This person posted...

[00:22:37] Either it was either a video or just a post making fun of their kid for not being able to open a can of beans. Like, not being able to use a can opener or some shit. And the entire internet was just like, what the fuck is wrong with you? Just teach them how to use a can opener. Instead of, like, making fun of them for internet points or whatever. I think that's the story. That's incredible. Like, it should be intuitive. That kid should be able to... There's only, like, so many functions of a can opener, I guess. Sure, but it's like, if you've never used a can opener before, like, is that what you...

[00:23:07] Like, is it your dad supposed to... Isn't that what your dad's supposed to do? Is, like, teach you how to do stuff? Instead of just making fun of you on Twitter or whatever? Is it a... Was it an electric can opener or a ye olde one? Oh, I have no idea. It was probably an old one if it was an issue. I was imagining an electric one and then as those words left my mouth, I was like, wait. There's more than... There is a can opener that is actually quite confusing. Like, the one where you have to scissor it. But, like...

[00:23:37] Because I always want to put it on the top, like, flat with the top of the can. But you're supposed to, like, go vertical, which doesn't look right. I thought you were supposed to go horizontal. I was watching some... Some shit came up on Instagram reels or whatever that's like, you know, you're using these things wrong. And the can opener was one of them. It's like, you're supposed to do it horizontal, which I have then not changed the way I use the can opener. Because it opens the cans and that's all I need it for.

[00:24:04] Dude, I don't even own a can opener because I don't buy cans that don't have a pull tab because I'm a fucking child. I'm an infant. Maybe that was the issue with being dad's kid is they just... They had pull tabs for everything. Chef Boyardee has pull tabs. You don't need a can opener for that. Yeah, man. So does the... Not hungry, man. What are the cans? Chunky. That's it. Oh, chunky soup. Yeah. Yeah. Chunky soup is yummy. Except every now and then you bite into something really hard. But I just ignore that. I just spit it out and present it in heaven.

[00:24:33] It's like 95% real food. Yeah. I mean, hopefully the meat is at least. Hopefully it meets what they say it is. All right. So now we're on the Patreon section here. Gaming Together, we work hard to provide excellent co-op content for you, the listener. If you have the means, please consider supporting us on Patreon. The link is in the description below. Also go and support Dave Jackson's excapades over on Tales from the Backlog and the Top 3 podcast. Do you not do a third podcast? Am I tripping?

[00:25:03] No, it's just two. I do a lot of stuff for Tales from the Backlog, but it's just two shows. Okay. Well, we need all the $4, $5 that you can get. I don't even know if you can make a $4 Patreon tier. That's an awkward number. But here are the list of our current supporters. Jose Martinez, Berserker This, Mr. Kwong, Insane Cracker 04, Nikolai at Night. Thank you for your support. So we have Mr. Kwong here, who's been a longtime supporter. We always debate on how to pronounce his name.

[00:25:33] I assume it's Kwong. But Phillip always says Mr. Kwong, and he's never written in about it, even though we've mentioned it multiple times. So this is my fifth plea, Mr. Kwong. Who's right? I need to know. What do you think, Dave? Schrodinger's Kwong. They're both right. I think that's probably it. So thank you guys for your support. If you can't support us monetarily, you can always go to Spotify or Apple Podcasts and rate us there. Or go comment on our Spotify or YouTube. Do stuff, interact.

[00:26:03] And then we read your stuff on the internet. And you're immortalized. So don't say nothing dumb. I'm pointing at you, Eric. Don't say nothing bad. All right. So we're going to take a break. And the music's going to play. Then we're going to do the Am I the Assholes. So here's the music. Do you need to use the restroom? No, I'm good. What is blurb? It's time. How long has that been there?

[00:26:32] It's time for the Am I the Assholes section. We're going to go online and assist some gamers in need to help them know, are they in fact the asshole or not? What the fuck? Phillip always reads this. I guess he can translate this in his own way. Oh, no. I screwed something up. So we got the Am I the Assholes sheet here. And we're going to pick some stuff. Dave, you want to do the honors to pick our first one? Oh, just pick any of them? Any of them that don't have any colors on them.

[00:27:01] We have like a color coding thing that only we know. But if it's white, it's all right. Okay. Oh, it's inverted for you, isn't it? It is inverted. Okay, so if it's white, it's not all right, actually. The colors don't make any sense. Here, let me turn this extension off real quick. Phillip, we found an issue with our color coding system, and you're going to need to account for it. There we go. Okay.

[00:27:29] I just see you getting flash banged. I'm so sorry. That's why I have the dark mode thing on because if it's light, it's way too bright. My eyes will be destroyed by the end of the recording. All right. Let's see here. Ooh, OP gets revenge for his Legos. Let's go with that. Oh, I see it here. Okay. Color that in. The title is, Am I the Asshole for Letting My Kids Loot My Brother's House to Prove My Point?

[00:27:59] I'm already on board. Is this Fortnite? PUBG? Okay. My brother and his family came for a visit last month. My kids and I play with Lego, and we have fun leaving little dioramas around my house. Just silly stuff like a fight between Iron Man and Darth Vader on the Loot Llama. Need some context for the Loot Llama. That's definitely a Fortnite thing. It's just our way of leaving Easter eggs around the house. Okay. A Fortnite thing. My nephew really liked them and decided to take a few home.

[00:28:29] When we noticed they were missing, I asked my brother to bring them back. He said that it was just kids being kids, and he would bring them back next time we saw each other. I saw him for coffee and reminded him beforehand that I wanted our stuff back. He, quote, forgot to bring, quote, the toys, end quote. Okay. Game on. We went over to his place for a barbecue. I told my kids that unless all our stuff was returned to us when we got there, literally anything in the house was fair game.

[00:28:58] Like the godless barbarians they are, they went to town. When we left, I don't think there were any remotes, small electronics, or beer mugs left at his house. I actually had to sneak the dog back into the house before we left. I started getting calls on our way home. I ignored them. When I got home, I returned his calls. He said a bunch of stuff was missing from his house. I said I would check with the kids. He said that I fucking well knew what happened, and he wanted his shit back.

[00:29:28] I said I would box it up and return it next time we saw each other, as long as we got our Lego back. He was at my house with my Lego later that evening. He had even accidentally included stuff that wasn't ours. I returned it in his stuff. I told him that this is how it would be dealing with his kid in the future. Sure. He's pissed that he had to make a special trip to return my stuff. My parents think there's a huge difference between an eight-year-old taking Lego minifigures and a couple of teenagers pillaging their uncle's house. Am I the asshole?

[00:29:59] Dude, I wish this guy was my dad. That's very funny. Yeah. This is great. I don't think he's an asshole. I mean, he gave the stuff back, right? Yeah, he gave the stuff back. If this was like the 15th time, maybe he's an asshole. But I think one time, it's okay. Just play a prank on your extended family. I wonder how far he had to drive. Yeah. I wonder that, too. Do they live across the state or something like that?

[00:30:27] Because if they live around the corner, then like, hey, that's just good fun with the family right there. I think it's hilarious that they took the dog, too. Like, everything is fair game. They're like, oh, yeah, we got the dog. And right before they left, they had to sneak the dog back into the house so that there wasn't, like, a huge problem. But I think this is too funny to be mad at the dad.

[00:30:54] And it's like it came from a place of pettiness and, you know, being weird, I think. Yeah. It seems like they were, like, unnaturally upset about the Legos. But the response was so funny that I have a hard time being mad at this. This is very funny to me. I really like when he called and said he'd check with the kids. The guy says that he fucking knew damn well what happened. Yeah. He calls and he's like, oh, there's a bunch of stuff missing from my house.

[00:31:23] He's like, oh, I don't know. Let me check with the kids. Maybe they got into something. Yeah. This is great. Yeah. I don't know. This just seems like a good family dynamic. And I – unless they had to drive a really long way to get their stuff, I don't think this is a big deal. No. It's – I mean, yeah. I mean, like, yeah, you're mad that they stole all your remotes and stuff like that. But fucking, I don't know. Bring the Legos back. Like, next time you see them. Had a chance.

[00:31:53] Said he was going to. Didn't do it. This guy, he's definitely having fun with it. So he has some comments on it. The OP is some edition 9752, separated by underscores. One thing that he says is blood calls for blood. To quote Gandhi, I am the punishment of God. If you had not committed great sins, God would not have sent me as judgment upon you. Oh, so he's posting on Am I the Asshole? But he's having a lot of fun with this along the way. Yeah.

[00:32:22] Someone was saying that he basically – to retaliate with the Legos, he committed a robbery. And he says more like a hostage situation than a robbery. It would be funny if he like – yeah. If he actually took the dog, I think that would be very funny. Yeah. As long as it was okay. Speaking of dogs, though, go ahead and click on his name and then switch over – because it will be on the overview. Switch to posts. Oh, I lost the thing. Oh, here.

[00:32:51] I'll just send you the direct thing in the Zencaster chat. Okay. Because he has one other post on this account. I'm trying to see if this is the – I don't think that's the dog they took. That seems like it's probably his dog. Their dog? Yeah. Hmm. Well, hold on. One of the comments says I would have been – you can keep the – oh, I would have been you can keep the Lego. We'll keep the dog. The Lego's going to be replaced.

[00:33:20] So people are flooding over here from the Am I the Asshole page. This is a completely separate subreddit. Okay. Yeah, yeah. That was on dog tax. Yeah. Yeah. There's a team Lego legend also pays the dog tax. Okay. Yeah. So people like me and Phillip do digging on people's burner accounts. Let's see what else they're up to. But he's got a cute little dog named Trevor. Or maybe that's the dog that was hostage in a way. Not the asshole because he has a cute dog. Yes. Exactly. Exactly.

[00:33:50] How long have we been going? 34 minutes? I think we can do a quick one. Let me see. Let's do number 28. Do you still have the little list pulled up or do you want me to link it to you? Oh, this isn't long. This isn't quick. Hmm. Hmm. Maybe not this one. Just kidding. This is insanely long. Um, and there's edits. So that's going to take forever. Uh, let's look at number 13. Oh yeah. This is short and sweet. And it's got a picture. Yeah.

[00:34:19] So number 13 here, you see it? Yeah. All right. I'm about to gray it out and then you can go back into night mode. Though, you know, the funny thing that you said though, uh, I don't have good lighting in here. So if I don't have this white Google doc shining me in the face, then you can't see me. I look like an unlockable character in a game. And, um, that we used to do the, uh, he would literally paint the page black and then we used white text on it.

[00:34:46] And that was preferable to what it is now, but you couldn't see me ever. So, yeah. So what I'd do, I would just open up word pad and I would just have it. You can see it open. Can you see it like moving around my screen? Yes, I can. Yeah. No, this is a, this, I don't have like a great lighting solution either. So my, my solution for like good lighting in here is to make sure my screen's not as bright as it could be. Yeah. I need to invest in a ring light. I'm sure they're not that, not that expensive.

[00:35:16] All right. So this is from am I overreacting, which is one of my new favorite subreddits. I don't even, so we do this. Am I the asshole thing? That's Phillip's thing. I actually pay a lot of attention to am I overreacting? I really like this one because it's almost always kids or, or like early adults. So. Oh yeah. This is a dorm room. Oh yeah. Roommate. It looks like it. Oh, oh, oh. This is great. Have you, have you seen the YouTube channel? Um, you suck at cooking.

[00:35:47] Uh, I think so. It rings a bell. He, he's, he does these funny like bits about having roommates and stuff. My favorite video of his, cause it's just a cooking channel, but like, he's a silly, he's a silly man. Uh, and so he does this one up video for ramen, uh, and like different ways to cook ramen. And he's always like, you gotta, you gotta take the green onions from your roommates like stash and then put a plant, roll a plant up and put it in there and he'll never know.

[00:36:15] And then he's like, you eat all his eggs are taped to the top of his fridge so that no one can steal them. But that's always what it reminds me of. Uh, but this is shiny mag mortar, shiny mag mortar. Uh, am I overreacting raw meat in closet shoe prints on bed and look at his room? How does, what does this have to do with video games? Okay. And there's a lot of pictures. Uh, I go to UC Berkeley. Is that how you spell Berkeley?

[00:36:45] Uh huh. Why does that look? That looks so silly to me. Uh, anyway, I go to UC Berkeley and my housemate's room smells so bad, like trash. It was stinking up the whole house. I went there. This guy's going to college. I went in there to see what it was and I found raw meat in the closet. There's his shoe prints on my bed from when he needed his charger for my room. I accidentally took, I cleaned up his moldy bananas in the cup, in the cup.

[00:37:16] And have also cleaned his moldy bathroom sink for him. I have taken the trash out alone the last two times. What do I do? I can't live like this. I texted him this. That's how it ends. I texted him this. There's a, so there's the texts in here. He screen capped the, the text messages. Uh, so there's a, a picture of a footprint on the bed.

[00:37:43] And it says, the text says, bro, why the fuck is there an air force, uh, misspelled air forks footprint on my fucking bed? Me and my cousin don't wear air forces. What the fuck is your problem? And, uh, the roommate responds, my bad bro. I don't want to cause conflict, but I think you used my iPhone charger. Dude, yes. Then the next part of the text says, brother, there is flies and shit coming out of your room. Can you come back? B, clean it up. It smells bad in here.

[00:38:12] Respectfully, bro, you can't use, you can't leave to your parents hours for days on end when they're perishable food rotting in your room. Skull emoji. Skull emoji. Brother. Skull emoji. Skull emoji. Skull emoji. He's leaving to his parents hours for days. Yeah. But, but there is a picture for it. There is a picture of raw meat in the, in the closet in like a grocery store package. Um.

[00:38:39] Oh, it's like the hamburgers like that are pre-separated and pre-pattied. It looks like. Yeah, maybe. Yeah. Uh, it looks like Asmongold's house. Which is, uh, oh no. I'm, I'm, uh, I'm the podcast equivalent of Asmongold. With that. I don't know if you, actually my house is quite clean. I can see your house. Your house doesn't look like this guy's house. Yeah. This, this is a lot worse. Um, dude, the footprint on the bed is a perfect footprint. It looks like fucking LA noir.

[00:39:09] Like, you're talking to me. I was going to say, the police could do a lot with that footprint. Yeah. It's like, it sounds like he's making up Air Force Ones. I bet he could figure out what type of shoe this was by this footprint. It is a perfect footprint. Yeah. Uh, very funny that he's like, uh, my bad. I, I stepped on your bed with my shoe. Cause I needed the iPhone charger, which is. Oh, is that. I, I, I interpreted that as he took the iPhone charger. Therefore I step on your bed. Yeah. Therefore I grind my shoes in your bed.

[00:39:38] Like, uh, like that Rick James thing on Chappelle's show. That's so fucking funny. I feel like my dogs do this because like, sometimes I'll jump into bed like at night. I'm like so excited to lay, lay down and I'll hop into bed back first and my back will go straight onto the ball. Like one of their balls. Like in my, like, why is it under my blanket? I don't know. Yeah. Uh, no, I don't, I, I don't think it, I don't think it, the, anything short of like physical

[00:40:07] violence is not overreacting. If a roommate leaves raw meat in their closet and like, like it causes like insects and shit in your house. Yeah. I think that's fair game. I don't think this is overreacting. I love the pizza box next to the bed. What's the, what's going on there? Is he storing? Is that for storage? Oh, you don't want to know what's in, what's going on in that pizza box. Yeah. This is great. I love this kind of stuff because I, I feel very self-conscious about the state of my apartment.

[00:40:35] And when I see this, I'm like, Oh, I'm actually not that bad. Actually doing fine. Yeah. Yeah. I should clean. I should clean my dishes right now though. Like right in the middle of the podcast. That's something I should do. Just, just give me like, I can monologue for five minutes while you do your dishes. Yeah. Uh, well, no, we're going to do the, we're going to go on a break. I'm going to wash my dishes. And then we're going to come back with the review for mouthwashing, whatever we want. Everyone's favorite co-op game, mouthwashing and the music plays.

[00:41:04] You know, the funny thing, I don't remember if I mentioned this whenever I was talking about the exit eight, but, um, I streamed it for someone and they were watching like, like I was, I was springboarding off what you said about your game where like you could, I can't remember what game it was, but like you could have somebody there to help with the puzzles. Yeah. And I was using her because she was noticing things I would never notice. She was like, yeah, there's only two doors. There's not three doors or like the vents are in the wrong place. I'm like, how the fuck do you know that?

[00:41:33] But then I would see like, there's a face in the ceiling and she's just like, I mean, yeah, that's stream quality. There's no way I ever noticed. But, um, yeah, I don't remember if I even mentioned that, but, uh, so what are we talking about? We're talking about mouthwashing is the game. I have the street, the steam. What is this? The grab the steam description. That's it.

[00:41:59] Uh, the five crew members of the tall bar tall bar are stranded in the empty reaches of space shrouded in perpetual sunset. God is not watching. Overwhelmingly positive. Good blurb. Overwhelmingly positive with 21,000 reviews. That's, uh, that's pretty impressive. That is crazy. Uh, I always look for funny steam reviews and a lot of them that were down votes were just people being contrarians. Yeah. Uh, I like the, I like the one that was not recommended. Anya looks like my ex.

[00:42:30] Yeah. I like when people get personal and steam reviews. Yeah. 16 hours on record. What was he doing? This game is two hours long. Yeah, exactly. But, uh, so speaking of reviews, the Metacritic is 88 generally favorable with a 7.8 from the users. So pretty close. That's not usually how it happens. Right. Um, speaking of the game though, uh, what were your history? What was your preconception of this game? How did you discover this game?

[00:43:00] Um, I picked it. So they had another game before this, uh, wrong Oregon made this free game. Molly wants to talk about mouthwashing. Um, so wrong Oregon made this, this free game called, uh, what was it called? How fish is made. That's what it's called. And it's, uh, it's real weird. It's like a, it's, it's kind of just like a weird horror, like art project almost.

[00:43:30] Um, which I didn't play, but I did watch Jacob Geller's video about it and, um, it just made it look really weird. It like had a, a crazy art style and stuff like that. So I was aware. I didn't know this was the same people until I looked at the steam page and saw like, Oh, they made that other weird thing I saw. But the reason I played this was because, um, when game of the year time was coming,

[00:43:56] uh, I had started to hear like what games were going to be on people's game of the year lists for 2024. Uh, some of the early lists came out. Um, the indie game awards had released like their best list and like mouthwashing was in the top 10, uh, nominees for their game of the year. So this was just like a FOMO, like it's really short. I want to play something short. I want to get a couple more games in before game of the year time. So, and it's cheap. It's like 13 bucks full price.

[00:44:26] So, um, yeah, it was just a, it was really like a FOMO thing. Like what can I easily play before the end of the year? And I played this like early December or something like that. So it was really just like, everyone's talking about it. It's short and it's cheap. So I picked it up. Yeah. That kind of, uh, resonates with me because I don't remember who specifically it was. I think it was just multiple people. Like you were saying, like, I saw multiple people talking about it suddenly.

[00:44:53] And it, it, I am kind of this, I'm kind of known in my friend group, like in my podcast group for being the indie horror game guy, like the introspective horror game. So I'm always pushing these games on people. Obviously all the, all the long time listeners are going to know, I'm going to say, I'm going to talk about signalis. I'm going to talk about inscription. I'm always pushing these games on people, crow country. And so I felt the FOMO really, really early on. But the problem is I don't have a PC that works very well.

[00:45:22] And so I ended up buying it just to support the dev. And I was like, I'm just going to see one day. I was randomly was like, I'm just going to see if this game will run, like how good it's going to run. And then I beat it. Like, I just didn't realize how, and so there were parts in this game where my game went to like two frames a second. And I was like, oh no, I'm not going to make it like this. This is the part where it's going to crash. Uh-huh. Made it through though. Yeah. I want to say, um, I want to say Jerry had talked about it.

[00:45:52] You know, Jerry's another indie horror game sicko. So I think he talked about it too. So, uh, he might've helped put it on my radar. But, uh, I have now I've purchased the game for like three people. Now I'm, I'm just like, I am evangelizing this game at this point. I'm like, please everyone. Uh, but so hours played, I'm assuming you have like either two or four hours. Yeah. I played it twice. Yeah. I played it twice. So I have five hours. Uh, two and a half hours, both times.

[00:46:20] Uh, I played the game once and I think I left it on, on accident. So I have seven hours. I don't know. Maybe that's what happened to that one person who had 16 hours. They just went to sleep after they beat the game. When they saw Anya, they had an existential crisis and then laid down. So, yeah. Uh, so we've got a bunch of reviews here. Um, we're going to just go one at a time. Uh, who saw us 1212 recommends this game.

[00:46:47] It says, this feels like a trolley problem, but there is no lever and there is no alternate track. You're simply watching a group of people suffer. Accurate. Yeah. Uh, next up is King Livid. King Livid. And I love reviews like this for games with really fucked up situations. King Livid's review is just, if I was there, none of that would have happened. The hero that we needed at the time. Yeah.

[00:47:13] Uh, ally, uh, recommends this game that says you can carry curly around like a princess. That is, that is true. And ally has 3.8 hours. So I think they spent 1.3 hours carrying curly around like a princess. Uh, the next one, we already talked about the next one. Uh, that was the one who didn't recommend it cause Anya looks like their ex. So the one after that is, uh, from Mephis, uh, recommended. I have no mouth and I must wash. That's my favorite. That's my favorite one. Yeah.

[00:47:43] Uh, then we are red McLeod Molly. I don't know what's going on outside. Red McLeod recommends it. Uh, he says, I want to peel Jimmy apart like an ape on fentanyl. I'm eating my mic now. Uh, that's a good one too. Uh, cause after you play this game, especially after you play it twice, you will, uh, you'll want to fuck Jimmy up for sure. Perhaps peel him apart like an ape on fentanyl.

[00:48:08] Almost every review of this game is, uh, different variations of killing Jimmy. Yeah. Oh, you're still muted. My mouse double clicks all the time. My mouse is breaking. So I muted and then, you know, okay. But, uh, anyways, I don't remember what, oh, so all of the reviews on steam, uh, basically like 85, 90% of them are just different variations of, uh, killing Jimmy in horrible ways. Yeah.

[00:48:35] So that's the, uh, that's the, uh, I forgot what I was even going to say. It doesn't matter. We're going to spoil this game to hell and back, obviously. Uh, so we have no spoiler wall. We're going to talk right. We're going to dive directly into the narrative because like we said before, the game is like two hours long. So we're going to get into the nitty gritty. A lot of the times when we do these reviews, we want to talk about our feels and vibes about like different parts of the game. Like what we took away from the experience.

[00:49:03] Um, that's going to be strictly about the narrative for this game because that's all you really have to chew on besides there's a lot of cool imagery and the soundscape is really beautiful, but I think that the, uh, narrative is something that is really special. Yeah. Um, it's a lot. I made the executive decision to, I don't know why I said it like that, but like I made the decision to, uh, talk about the narrative in chronological order as opposed to, uh, the

[00:49:31] order in which it is presented in the game. I'm sure that's, that is a name, but I can't, I don't know that word either. No, it makes sense. Um, it makes sense to like talk about it this way because it will help, um, set up things that will be important later, I suppose. Uh, and it's interesting to see it this way cause it's not the way it's presented in the game. It's very different. So this is a game where either setting things up in chronological order or playing the game

[00:49:58] twice is pretty important for your understanding of what actually happens. Yeah. Uh, generally what I, I mean, generally, uh, what I ended up doing cause my computer is so bad as I just watched people on Twitch play it over and over and over again. Like I just kept absorbing information and it was just, and the fun thing is, is that like people are in the chat talking to, and unfortunately spoiling the game for people.

[00:50:24] That's very annoying, but like that you'll see people talking in chat and you'll just be like, Oh, I didn't think of that before. And so that's what really got my noggin jogging about this game. I was basically begging Dave because I remember seeing him talk about this. I was begging him. I was like, when can we get you on to talk about this? Yeah. Uh, so this was literally the earliest possible opportunity I could get Dave on. Yeah. I, uh, I was sick for like an entire month and then I had an entire month of podcasts to

[00:50:52] do along with my regular podcast load. So it's been a lot lately. Your podcast got backlogged. Yes, it did. Yeah. Which is always super fun. I'm backlogged in Anki right now, which is something that Phillip warned me about. Uh, and it is terrible. It makes me feel bad. Uh, it's, you want to set up like who these people are before we dive into the story real quick, like the five people on the crew. So we have, I have the little list on here.

[00:51:22] Um, I had this kind of fleshed out before and then I deleted it for some reason because I thought that that was a wise decision and it was not. So we do have, we have Curly who is the captain. We have Jimmy who is the co-pilot and these are the two characters that you switch your perspectives between. Yeah. These are the two playable characters. You play as Curly in all the segments before the crash and you play as Jimmy in all the

[00:51:48] segments after the crash because Curly, if you've seen all the art for mouthwashing or if you've seen screenshots, you'll see there's a character that's like very, very badly injured, bandaged up. Um, that's Curly. So Curly is incapacitated for everything after the crash. Yeah. This game was set up for success because Curly is the perfect thumbnail. You know what I mean? Like striking for sure. You're like, Whoa. Yeah.

[00:52:15] Um, so the rest of the crew, we have Swansea, Swansea. Uh, he is basically the mechanic. Uh, then you have his underling Daisuke who is, what is it called? He's an intern. Intern. That's it. Unpaid probably. Yep. Most likely. Yeah. He's an intern. Um, he doesn't really know what he's doing. He's just there to learn from Swansea. Um, yeah. Yep. Yeah.

[00:52:41] He's an impressionable young boy and he is the sunshine and on the tall par, especially after the crash, he just continues to be the sunshine. In some ways. Yeah. Um, then the last character we have, uh, is Anya. And it's funny that I laid, I left her last because that's not the order in which I have the characters. So I kind of just skipped over her, which is poignant. Yes. In this game. Yeah. Indeed. That was known on purpose. Yeah. Yeah.

[00:53:09] You can also say that one of the characters is the, uh, the mascot Polly on top of that being the pony express and the tall bar itself. So like got a couple, it's like one of those horror games where the environment is a character in itself, like silent hill or dead space. Yeah. Very similar to this. The tall par and the, let's say the capitalist future hell world that the game takes place in is kind of, um, kind of a character in its own way. Yeah.

[00:53:37] And I tried, so I was talking to Dave about this. I don't remember this is recorded, but I had three weeks of notice before to work on these notes and make them really pretty. And I, I did these notes in the last 48 hours and I have a pic, a picture where I've edited the, the, the notes since this, since I went and checked, but I put it into a word counter and there are 4,891 words as of yesterday.

[00:54:04] And I've added to the notes today also for an hour and a half. A lot going on in the story. Yeah. Yeah. This is the most notes that we've ever had in a gaming together episode is probably more notes than we had in the entire year of, uh, 2022. Like we probably have less, less words than this one episode. So I'm really excited to talk about this game. Um, we're just going to, I guess we're just going to bounce back and forth, hitting bullet

[00:54:33] points and then just discussing on, uh, things that we, there's going to be a lot of like thought, like, uh, like contemplating different things, like trying to figure out what the game is trying to tell us and stuff. I bullet pointed almost everything and it starts seven days before the crash. Mm-hmm. Um, the first thing that you see in this chapter, which I have the chapters laid out to you. This is according to the wiki and it's weird cause it skips, it goes from like 12 to 18

[00:55:00] and I'm like, I don't, I don't know why that is, but, uh, this is the third chapter that's presented to the player. Yeah. Yeah. But this is the first thing that happens chronologically. Yeah. It's, um, it's, it's kind of like, if I remember right, the first thing that you do is pilot the ship during the crash. Then the, the thing after that, I think is after the crash. And then this might be the first thing where you play before the crash.

[00:55:28] So you're like back to the more normal times, seeing the characters in their more natural state, we'll say. And, um, it's an intro to a lot of the characters and it's interesting because when you see this in the game and if you're just listening to us, you didn't play the game, you don't really care. Um, a lot of the stuff that happens in this chapter is, well, it's the same for like all of them, but a lot of the stuff that happens here is actually very important for characterization, but you don't know why it's important yet.

[00:55:58] It seems, it seems like just a, you know, fun little quirk that Jimmy is, uh, making weird sexual comments during his psych evaluation and Anya doesn't want to deal with him. Um, doesn't want to like do the psych evaluation. She acts, she asked Curly to do it for her. Um, and she says it's because Jimmy makes these uncomfortable comments. Later on, once we figure out what's actually happened between them, you can understand why she doesn't want to be in a room alone with him.

[00:56:28] But we don't know that yet. We don't have any context yet. So like, yeah, that is really good in this chapter. Um, as you had noted here, you can see that Swansea is trying to be a mentor to Daisuke and that's not always like forwardly apparent because Swansea is just always like insulting him and saying he's worthless and stuff like that. He's just like a really bad teacher, but he's trying, but you don't know it right here.

[00:56:55] So there's a lot of stuff that like you see in this first chapter that you just don't know why it's as important as it actually is yet. I think that the people that made this game are, they, they have human emotion down to a T like this is one of the most, this is, this is really a perfect psychological horror experience. Not that it's the best ever, but it is a perfect encapsulation of survival horror, especially with the humanization.

[00:57:22] And, uh, you talking about Swansea being a kind of a bad teacher, he's, he is definitely outwardly mean to Daisuke, but I think Daisuke can tell that he, uh, enjoys mentoring him. And I think really this game rewards people who are, who is curious, people who are curious when they're playing and people who are perceptive, because if you're walking around and looking at things, you will notice that all over the place in this area, uh, Swansea has sticky

[00:57:51] notes everywhere and notes for Daisuke. Like he is going above and beyond trying to get all of these, like all this information into Daisuke's head. There's like a book, like a, like an instruction manual that he's writing in. Uh, you can see, you can even see where Daisuke is writing on the notes and like kind of being a little shit, you know, it's, there's a really cool mechanic going, I didn't mean to say mechanic, but, uh, what is it? Like, uh, they, they have a cool, what is the word?

[00:58:21] I'm, I'm losing the English language, honestly. A dynamic? Dynamic. That's it. Yeah. Yeah, they do. Definitely. Um, it's interesting to see because then you're going to spend a lot of chapters where Swansea is talking about how Daisuke can't do anything right and stuff like that. And it's, it's not really until much later on that you actually hear from Swansea when he's being honest and open, how he actually feels about Daisuke.

[00:58:48] And so it'd be kind of like frustrating if you're trying to mentor somebody and they're just like not good at their job at all. And you're just like, fuck man, like there's only five of us on this ship. You're one of the five and Daisuke can't really do anything to contribute on the ship. So it can be a little bit frustrating. Uh, speaking about dynamics between different characters, this is the, uh, this is a scene.

[00:59:14] This is the first time you see Anya interacting with somebody who isn't, isn't Jimmy, or at least not through Jimmy's eyes. You're getting to talk to Anya through Curly's eyes. And one thing that I picked on, picked up on immediately was the fact that Anya never really broke eye contact with Curly. And when she talked to him, she just looked at him. And because whenever, this is the third chapter, in the second chapter, you interact with Anya

[00:59:43] quite a bit as Jimmy and she kind of stammers. She doesn't really look at him and she, uh, she compliments him all the time. And the thing that I was picking up on, I didn't really, I didn't think of the, the thing with, with Jimmy really. I was convinced that Anya and Curly had a thing with each other. Like my mind went in the total opposite direction because I wasn't expecting how horrifying things

[01:00:12] were going to get in this game. I thought it was going to be mostly like body horror. You know what I mean? Yeah. No, I mean, there's, there's definitely body horror, but there's, there's a real creep to like the realization of what happened. Um, it's really good how they set this up too. Cause like you said, in, in the first, in the second chapter you play in right after the crash, Anya says that she can't give Curly his medicine and she asked Jimmy to do it for her. And Jimmy's like, you can't like, you're a, you're a nurse and you can't give him his

[01:00:42] medicine. Like what's going on. So it kind of paints Anya as this incompetent nurse. Right. And then in this chapter, the third one, you're back before the crash, but Anya still can't do her job. She's supposed to give a psych evaluation to Jimmy and she can't do it. So now Curly has to do it. And it's again, painting Anya as incompetent. And I think they want you to think that even though you, you know, um, cause you, you,

[01:01:10] they tell you how far after the crash, uh, those after crash things are, she's kept this man alive, uh, Curly for so long without the right tools and equipment antiseptic medicines that she needs. She's kept him alive. Like she's good at her job, but you don't see, you don't like have characters mention that it's all characters. Like talking about how she's bad at her job or like how they have to do her job for her.

[01:01:37] And then they leave it up to you to figure out why can she not give Curly his medicine? Why can she not do Jimmy's psych evaluation? Cause there's a really good reason for it. They just don't tell it to you right away. It's one of the reasons why the storytelling in this game, while it's very disjointed, it all makes sense. If you, I mean, you, you have to play the game and then you either have to play it again or you have to spend some time putting the pieces together, watching, you know, YouTube

[01:02:06] videos, listen to podcasts, read reviews, uh, analysis of it. It all makes like really, really perfect sense. It's like this perfect interlocking story, but like a lot of the things that are connections between the pieces are like kind of invisible when you first play it. So like this is this, these early parts where they're, they really want you to think that Anya just sucks at her job when she doesn't, she's very good at her job and she has good

[01:02:34] reasons for not being able to do these seemingly simple things at the beginning. Uh, the game definitely respects your intelligence. And I think that that's why so many people adore it so much, but it's, it's really interesting that you were talking about that because, uh, about, uh, Anya's perceived incompetence because it, the game had me totally convinced in that way. And I think that that's the important thing is that you see most of the incompetence through Jimmy's eyes and Jimmy perceives her as incompetent as like an obstacle.

[01:03:03] And so I never, it, it never occurred to me that she has been the one keeping Curly alive. I thought Jimmy was the one keeping Curly alive because that's what Jimmy thinks. That's like, that's the only thing that you ever see of like Curly being taken care of is Anya not doing it and Curly having to take over or not. I mean, I mean, it's Jimmy having to take over. Yeah. I mean, there's, there's more to keeping Curly alive than just giving him his painkillers.

[01:03:30] And that's the thing that Anya asks Jimmy to do. So that's the thing that Jimmy sees, but Jimmy's not in the room with Curly like 24 seven, like Anya is. She's always in there for the most part. So she's doing stuff to keep him alive. It's just that like, like you said, we see this through Jimmy's eyes. And I think that they do another awesome thing here, which is playing with our expectations that we are playing as Jimmy.

[01:03:58] Therefore, Jimmy is a hero because we are video game players. We play as the hero in most games that we play. And so they play with that and you start the game out. Oh, fuck. This nurse can't do her job. Oh, fuck. This is broken. Swansea's a dick. Dice cake can't do anything. I'm playing as Jimmy. I have to do everything in this goddamn ship because I'm the hero. I'm going to keep everything together. And they like, they really set that in your head. And then they like, they just chip away at that for the rest of the game until you realize

[01:04:26] like how fucking out of touch and terrible Jimmy actually is. Speaking of chipping away at something, one of the things that happens pretty early on in this area is that Curly has to unlock the axe so that you can free Dice cake from this foam. The ship has this emergency foam like feature where if something happens, like a hole is punctured, the foam foams up and then becomes solid to seal the breach so that you're not sucked

[01:04:56] into the vacuum of space. And after the post crash timeline, the ship is like completely covered in foam, like all over the place. Yeah. So this is the first time in this chapter where you ever even see the ship without all the foam, which is a good change of pace because you spend the entire entirety of this game in the ship or in a nightmare sequence. But we'll talk about that later. This the cutting of the foam, though, is foreshadowing for something that's going to happen a little

[01:05:25] bit later, which I think I'll probably just leave it at that because it's more fun that way, even though most of the listeners probably know what the hell happens here. So we also have Curly hallucinating on his way to Jimmy. And I think that this is really important to talk about because at first I kind of like didn't write it off. But the more I thought about it and the more I listened to like videos talking about this game, the more things kind of like connected in my mind where Curly is going to do going

[01:05:54] to do Jimmy's psyche vowel and they're going to the cockpit. And on the way to the cockpit, you have a hallucination where the the stairs become hilariously long, like the endless staircase in Mario 64. And then you fall down into a lake of blood, I assume. Yeah. And then a lot of things kind of happened in succession there. First, it's a very it's like you're just in a lake of blood and it's black above you.

[01:06:21] And then you get this really serene starscape above you. You can see like galaxies and constellations and stuff. And it's beautiful. And then as you sit there and soak and soak this environment in, eventually these warning signs appear and then a alarm starts blaring. And then you see ladders appear and then a sun explodes. And the whole time you're experiencing this, you maybe 15 minutes ago just witnessed the crash. Right.

[01:06:51] And so you're imagining, oh, this is like the crash. Right. Like this is this weird, interesting, like play on the crash. But I have a couple of bullet points listed out. But what were you thinking whenever you went through this and like your second playthrough? Honestly, this this scene never made a huge impression on me.

[01:07:09] But I do think that the ladders are a good symbol for what's going through Curly's head in the days before the crash, because he's even before they get the news about what's happening to the company. He's worried about his own career success. You can tell it's on his mind even before they find out that the Pony Express is going out of business. So that's I think that's as much as I took from that.

[01:07:36] Although the flashing warning signs is interesting because like we'll get to it, I'm sure. But there's a lot that Curly should have been addressing, we'll say, as far as things happening with the crew. But he's not really. So maybe those things are boiling over. And this is, you know, a literal red warning sign flashing in his face. Yeah. Yeah.

[01:08:01] So you're you are astute because I didn't I didn't get this for a while, but especially as I was explaining it, I had this picture painted in my head already just from all the exposure. The one thing that caught my attention early is that the warning sign that you see in this is not the same warning sign that you see later in the game. When you see Curly trying to save the ship. When I was thinking, oh, that's the sign that they saw. Well, it's not. It's a different one because the other one said warning crash imminent.

[01:08:30] This one says warning emergency. And it's literally a sign. And we were kind of like in Curly's headspace here. Like this points to Curly. Definitely. He's not oblivious to what is happening with his crew. He sees the signs and in order to progress in this in this area, there's only two ways you can progress.

[01:08:54] You can either do nothing and just stand there looking at them or walk past them, push past them, which is symbolic of what Curly actually does in this situation. This game is an Ouroboros of meaning. Like I it's so cool just hearing people talk about it and then just like ping ponging the ideas in your own brain. Because like you were saying, you picked up on the ladders. I didn't even notice really the ladders. I was like looking at this.

[01:09:23] I was looking at the the signs and trying to read them. I had no idea what the hell was going on, but I didn't notice the ladders. And this is before the ladder metaphors, the speech that you have a little bit later during Jimmy's cycle. Right. I think of Val. There's a lot of foreshadowing happening here. And the last thing I wanted to hit on, unless you had something else, which is the sun exploding. I thought I thought it was a nuclear bomb. But like when you look at it afterwards, it definitely looks like a star kind of expanding.

[01:09:52] This kind of foreshadows Curly's fate because obviously he's about to take the brunt of the explosion into into the into the asteroid. And everyone's aware of that, like because of what Curly looks like. Everyone knows what Curly looks like at this point. But also I kind of feel like it's a metaphor because of what I said before with the warning signs, either ignoring them or pushing past them.

[01:10:16] The result of that is that the result of that inaction is the destruction of him. Right. Yeah. Lots of different types of inaction conversations that he could have had but didn't. Yeah. So we do talk. We do end up talking to Curly. One thing that I wanted to mention here, we already basically kind of went over what they talked about.

[01:10:41] But one primary thing that immediately set off and I noticed this right away. And I'm not trying to say I'm like super smart, but there's like this game is clearly like a mystery. So in my in that headspace, I'm like I'm looking for these things. Normally, I wouldn't notice these kinds of things, but I was very curious about this game. And the first thing I noticed was when you come back to reality, you are in the cockpit that you started the game in.

[01:11:07] And at the beginning of the game, you don't know who you're controlling. Right. But at the very beginning of the game, you're sitting in the left seat. And I don't know why I realized that. Like I immediately – it was like in the forefront of my mind. And so as soon as I realized that Curly was in the right seat and Jimmy was in the left seat, I was like, wait. Everyone's saying Curly crashed the ship though. But it makes sense because Curly is the one that's hurt. But Jimmy sits in the left seat.

[01:11:36] Like not Curly. Like it would be weird for them to sit in the wrong seats during the side give out. So that was always – I didn't immediately – I wasn't like, oh, obviously Jimmy crashed the ship. But I had this weird like cognitive dissonance with that the whole time I played the game that something was kind of wrong with Jimmy. And I think it's those tiny little subtle like things that they did because you played that initial part before this part. The devs wanted you to see that. They wanted you to see where Jimmy was sitting. Yeah.

[01:12:05] I didn't pick up on this either time I played it. But it is correct. Correct. And it's just another way that they do a great job of playing with your assumptions about who you're playing as, why they're doing what they're doing. Because as we said, for all except for one scene, anything that happened before the crash you're playing as Curly. And anything that happened after the crash you're playing as Jimmy.

[01:12:32] Except for the moments right before the crash where you're not playing as Curly, you're playing as Jimmy. But you assume it's Curly because who else would be in the cockpit piloting the ship? It's got to be the captain. And then after the crash, Jimmy says Curly crashed the ship. It lines up with your assumptions from just the first part of the game. So it all makes perfect sense until I mean, like I didn't get it until much later when they actually show them talking about it.

[01:13:02] And then Jimmy walks and goes into the cockpit to do it. But the seeds were there much earlier. It's just there's so much more here than you'll even pick up playing the game twice. It is incredible. I really like... I mean, I'm not going to keep sucking the game's dick. We obviously both really like the game. But so Jimmy kind of talks about...

[01:13:28] During his psyche valve, he kind of talks about how he likes the control he has as a co-pilot. This is obviously clear foreshadowing for his... Not only what he has done and like his kind of like impulses, but also his character. Like what his proclivities are. Because he expresses this quite a bit throughout the game. And just like Dave said, you being the protagonist, like this is the character you play as.

[01:13:53] Of course you have to be a take charge guy and you have to have control because that is literally the character you control. But it's like... I don't know. It really flies under the radar for a lot of people, including me. Like I don't know. I didn't see the reveal of what he had done until... Yeah, it is basically spelled out for you. Yeah. So there's two parts here that kind of like...

[01:14:20] Give you a window inside Jimmy's head before the crash of what he cares about. And so he's been struggling through his career, his whole career. Like you get the feeling that like being the co-pilot on this ship is the best job that he's ever had. And he also feels like it's the best job that he will ever have. So he feels like he's peaked and he's not feeling good about that.

[01:14:47] Because being the co-pilot on this ship, this is like a... It'd be like, you know, being a semi-truck driver in the sci-fi future where it's like, you know, like it's a decent job. But it's not where Jimmy... It's not like as high as Jimmy wants to go on the ladder that they keep using, right? And he's jealous because Curly is on a... He puts it as like he's on a different ladder.

[01:15:16] And the lowest rung on Curly's ladder is the highest rung on Jimmy's ladder. So imagine those like, you know, two-story sliding ladders in like big fancy libraries, right? Curly's on the higher one. And Jimmy has no way to jump over to Curly's ladder. And so they have a couple of conversations about this. And this frustration... We'll learn about, you know, the layoffs in a future scene.

[01:15:41] But the frustration that Jimmy has really like boils over. It's one of the two major reasons why he crashes the ship. Because he thinks that he's stuck here and he's jealous that Curly is, you know, succeeding. He's jealous of Curly. Yeah. And I think a huge indicator of this is that every single time Curly opens up, which Jimmy kind of provokes him to do,

[01:16:09] Jimmy immediately makes it about himself every time. Oh, he's a narcissist-like nightmare, Jimmy. He is. Another thing that I wanted to point out was that whenever Jimmy talks about the control, like whenever you're doing a psych eval, going, I like the control I have. That's not good. But Curly literally just brushes it off as if like, oh, I'm glad you're doing good. You know, you're doing better than I thought you would. It's like that was a weird thing to brush off.

[01:16:39] But because Curly brushed it off, I was like, oh, okay, no big deal. Like I also brushed it off. So, ignoring the warning signs. Yeah. Yeah. Really, really freaking cool. So, Dave did mention you're going – we do end up getting a letter that announces that Pony Express has gone under and everyone is being laid off. But before you're able to read it – Except for Curly. Except for Curly. Oh, yeah. Everyone is getting laid off. But Curly is getting a promotion.

[01:17:09] Before we get to read it though, we go into a nightmare sequence, which I put this after that last part because it – I don't know. It kind of – these nightmare sequences are kind of – some of them are pretty obvious where they take place, but some of them are just like a question mark. Yeah. I honestly like – I don't have a lot to say about the nightmare sequences. These are using public domain videos. So, like there's one that's like capitalist propaganda basically.

[01:17:37] The healthy company can provide a decent living for its workers and it has a cartoon and shit like that. Like you can see that and be like, oh, yeah. Obviously, the – it goes in line with this like just shitty capitalist world that the game takes place in. But there's a whole bunch of other stuff that like – it's there for shock value like the meat locker one. You're there and just go, ugh, that looks kind of gross.

[01:18:02] There's – there's a bunch of just, you know, things to make you feel weird, I would say. And there's like this game is really great at that. Like the sound design is really disgusting. The visuals can sometimes be really disgusting. But there's a bunch of other stuff that just kind of like – it's off. It's weird. It shouldn't be there. It doesn't belong in the game. Like that's how I feel about a lot of this like public domain footage that they show here.

[01:18:30] But then you have the commercial for the mouthwash, which, you know, will become story relevant soon. I do – I think a lot of these – because I'm pretty sure you're playing as Jimmy in this. I don't know why I think that. I couldn't tell you. Yeah. But I think that a lot of these become kind of enlightening whenever you look at it through that lens. That it's Jimmy imagining this. Like this is what's going on in Jimmy's head.

[01:18:53] Specifically kind of like – I like the black hole that's destroying the star because it kind of – the star represents Curly kind of the way that he idolizes Curly. Jimmy could and especially at the end of the game, all of this grief that he feels. He could feel as deep down that he is leeching off of Curly. Like he is slowly destroying him. He is pulling what Curly is into himself kind of. It could be. Yeah. Yeah.

[01:19:23] Like I said, I don't have a lot that I pull from these. And it's not to say that these weren't deliberately chosen by the developers because, of course, they were. But I just don't have a lot of things that I read into most of these other than – yeah, like we said, like the propaganda cartoon, the meat locker is real gross, the mouthwash commercial.

[01:20:14] Yeah. But yeah, a lot of it was kind of shock value-y. And then you get to the mouthwash commercial, which is great. I don't know if you ever looked at the fine print on the bottom. There's a lot of words down there. But one says consult with your local dental hygiene specialist before, during, and after use of Dragon BreathX mouthwash. That's pretty good. It's funny, but it also – it like – it is a little bit of lore, isn't it?

[01:20:42] Because it's like something happened that they had to put that on there, right? Like obviously this thing, this mouthwash, it's mouthwash. But you have to consult your dental hygiene during using it. I think – yeah, I think it's like a kind of like surreal – it might even be a hallucination of some kind. But yeah, just definitely like a surreal, weird thing to see on a mouthwash bottle.

[01:21:05] So what I put under here, I put a company that doesn't care about its employees' well-being sends them to transport a product whose creators don't care about their customers' well-being. You know what I mean? It could be if the mouthwash requires that level of supervision, maybe. Yeah.

[01:21:25] It almost – because it's implied a lot of the time – a lot of different times that the Pony Express, they cut corners all over the place, especially with their shit that they use. It kind of is additional lore building where it's like what are they transporting? Obviously they're transporting this really shady mouthwash. It almost – it's almost as if – and they're transporting so much of it that it's almost as if no one else will transport it but the Pony Express. You know what I mean? Yeah.

[01:21:55] It's part of the horror of everything is that you want to think – if you think about like a space mission, right? Everything that happens in spaceships is usually important, right? Yeah. Whether you're going to fight aliens or exploring or something like that.

[01:22:15] And you might assume – and I'm sure the crew assumes like after the crash they want to go check out what's in the cargo because they assume they're transporting something valuable and helpful across space.

[01:22:56] But it's just mouthwash. It's the sixth chapter. So something happens but – so the thing that happens between the nightmare sequence and this is what I'm thinking. They opened the door to the cargo bay and that's when – because the mouthwashing commercial is the last thing you see before you see the boxes are full of that. Like that's what it is. Okay. And so six – Yeah, they're always jumping. Six days before the crash. Six days before the crash. They're having their one permitted communal birthday party and this is after you've gotten that – after Curly has gotten that letter.

[01:23:27] And now we're about to learn what the letter was because the game glitches out before you get done reading it. Like you see like the first half of the first sentence. Yeah. It's also good to note that's how a lot of scenes end is the game – like it mimics the game slowing down and crashing. And then it just goes to the next scene. But it's always there to just like shake you up because when you're playing a game on your PC or something, you never want to see the game slow down. The audio glitches out like that.

[01:23:56] So that's how they do scene transitions. But you mentioned the company that doesn't care about its employees. We're on this over one-year mission. It's like 370 days or something like that. And there's five people.

[01:24:12] So it's not like you're going to have a birthday party every week, but you're only allowed to have one communal birthday party per year on the ship because they can't possibly afford to put the ingredients for five cakes on the ship or something like that. So it's just one way that you're just like, man, this company fucking sucks. So it's Curly's turn to have a birthday party as apparently last year was somebody else's turn. Like a Swansea's. Yeah.

[01:24:42] So, yeah, just shows you how shitty it is. And then you do the little mini game and it just shows you how like just how gross all the food must be on the ship. Yeah. When you see how it's all made. Yeah. Speaking of how it's made, the sweetener is locked behind captain's codes. Yeah. The captain has to make the cake because he's the only one allowed or certified to get the sugar. Yeah.

[01:25:11] And in the next scene, there's a very poignant conversation about where the company chooses to put locks on the ship. And so take note that they've really value locking up the sweetener as opposed to locking up other places. So this is the part where during the birthday party, Curly can't contain the termination news anymore. This is the next day. So if people are losing track of time.

[01:25:40] So the next day after the evaluation, he got the note. So he's telling everyone about this and everyone's kind of taking it differently. And I think that it really exemplifies everyone's character. Most notably, I noticed that Daisuke doesn't say anything during all of this. He's just kind of frozen. Yeah. Yeah.

[01:26:01] Well, Daisuke, like he's presented as if he's kind of like just a young fuck up kid who like maybe he's, you know, maybe he's failed out of something. Maybe he's failed. Maybe he's been fired from jobs before. Or maybe he's just like a confused kid who doesn't know what to do with his life because he's like he's really young. He's got to be in like his early 20s at the oldest. Right. Yeah.

[01:26:29] So he's super young and he's presented as this kid who's like his parents just like got him on this ship to like do something. Go on this ship, be an intern, learn how to be a mechanic or something. So when they get the news, I don't know if he like knows how to process this or like he probably doesn't feel like he has as much to lose as Swansea and Anya because they both freak out.

[01:26:54] I don't know if you like took note of this, but it kind of sets the sets the tone for what they're going home to where. When they find out that the company is going out of business, Anya and Swansea in particular freak out because they say this is like there's nothing waiting for them. Like there's Swansea's like I'm never getting another job. Anya has the idea that she's never getting another job.

[01:27:21] Like they feel like their lives are ruined by the company going out of business. And this is a good point to bring up that the developers of the game have explicitly said that this game is in a lot of ways about the video game industry. So when these people, when Anya and Swansea say that like there are no jobs out there, when we get home, there are no jobs for us.

[01:27:48] It kind of mirrors what has to be a kind of flooded talent pool in the video game industry because so many people have lost their jobs. There's so many people looking for the same jobs. And this is I'm more plugged into the media side where people have lost their writing gigs or lost their journalist gigs. Yeah.

[01:28:10] And then, you know, a website has an opening for a journalist and it's like hundreds of people, good workers that want to get the same one job that's open. And it's just like there's not enough jobs for all the people who are qualified. And that really lines up with Anya and Swansea here where they're like our lives are over if this if our jobs are gone here. I think it is on a more emotional level.

[01:28:34] I do like that you picked up that they're both freaking out because Swansea doesn't really seem like he's freaking out. But if you're like reading between the lines of what he's saying, because he is he is basically resigning to his fate. Yeah. Which is which is a way he's saying. Yeah. He's he's basically saying, like, this is it for me. Like, I'm not. This is it. So it's one way of freaking out. Anya is like having a meltdown, though.

[01:28:58] Yeah, she's thinking about her savings, really her lack of savings, which is super poignant for me over here. What did they buy a section six fucking game? Don't really have a savings. But it'd be better if I just invested it in the Trump coin. Do you hear? Jesus Christ. I did. Yeah. But yeah, so we've got we've got everyone's reactions.

[01:29:22] And then we have Jimmy, who is making this all about himself, which is great. Yep. Always. He always does. And like he like Curly doesn't. I think you can tell that Curly. And we'll find out from his actions later, he doesn't care as much as he should care. But you can tell that Curly does care about the crew to some extent because he does not want to break this news to them.

[01:29:50] Like he knows that this is bad for them. But he also he also tells them before he was supposed to tell them. Like he went against company policy to tell them early that this was happening. And so like Curly is not indifferent to this. But Jimmy throws it back in his face saying like, you know, well, you're going to be fine, Curly. Everything's cool for you. Think about me. Think about me. Like think of what am I going through here? Yeah.

[01:30:20] Which it's it's it's it's notable that he what he throws back into Curly's face is the things that Curly just confided into him. Yeah. Which is going to be a theme throughout the game where Jimmy will get new information and then he uses that he adapts his worldview to that information almost always in the wrong way. Like he takes the wrong lessons away from things. Yeah.

[01:30:45] There's a there's a quote that characters will use many times throughout the game that Jimmy just like latches onto and uses for his own gain. That's quite good. Yeah. And we definitely will definitely talk about that. But Jimmy, I wrote that Jimmy perceives that Curly must be happy that he can get rid of his responsibilities of the of the crew without feeling any of the guilt. This is just because that's how Jimmy would feel if this happened.

[01:31:14] A lot of the time when you when you hear him making accusations against somebody, it's because that is the only possible outcome he can perceive. Yeah. Yeah. In his head, there's only one only one way that someone could feel about this, which I watched this one video and they were talking about the font like the font of the game. They're talking about the characters like they all have different colors, which is very common in in games like has story heavy games like this.

[01:31:41] Everyone kind of has colors that that correspond to like what they're wearing, what they look like. Jimmy, he's wearing green, but his color is also green. And that is the color that is always associated with the correct answer, which Jimmy is always correct in his mind. You know what I mean? Yeah. Green's also associated with jealousy and envy a lot of times, too. So it fits with Jimmy as well.

[01:32:10] It's there's just been so much thought put into this game. And so maybe everyone's just going crazy, but like maybe they were just like green. But I doubt it. You know what I mean? There's just so much. These are not these aren't all coincidences. So, yeah. All right. Jimmy. Yeah. So Jimmy also goes one by one and kind of belittles everybody. The only person he doesn't really belittle is Daisuke, who he but he does.

[01:32:36] He talks about him in a derogatory manner still because he's like, oh, he's just a young kid. He's going to get whatever he wants. Instead of like really derogatory talking derogatory to Daisuke, he uses Daisuke's advantage of being younger and having a clean slate to make to put pity on him. You know what I mean?

[01:32:54] So, yeah, I kind of got the feeling that maybe Daisuke, like maybe his parents have some money or something and they like, you know, got him this job to teach him some responsibility or something like that. And so maybe Jimmy knows that. And he's saying like, well, he's going to be fine. He's just a young kid. He's, you know, after this is over, he'll be fine. He'll land on his feet. What about me? So after this, Curly cuts the cake, which is awesome.

[01:33:24] It's just an awesome contrast to what just happened. But the thing that's notable about the cake cutting is that he cuts it very strangely. He does a sawing motion on the cake. Yeah, it is kind of odd. Yeah. So this is foreshadowing for what is clearly going to be his fate towards the end of the game. But also, I wrote in here, may also indicate the quality of the cake.

[01:33:52] Because maybe the cake sucks that bad. Yeah. Maybe you do need to. That he has to slaughter it. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Okay. So we got two days before the crash. I had this written down as the 10th chapter. So quite a bit has happened since then. And this is probably my favorite scene of the whole game, I think. It's very good. Maybe. It's, yeah, top five for sure. So Anya and Curly are sitting on, it's kind of nighttime. The screen is blue. It's got like this night sky.

[01:34:22] And they're sitting on the couch in the lounge. And they're kind of having a conversation. And whenever I saw this, I, so for the listeners, again, I had this image in my head that Curly and Anya were an item. And so this accidentally, I don't know if they were doing this on purpose to mislead some people like me into thinking this. But this also like just gave me more, like more evidence that they, that the whole story

[01:34:51] was like a love story between Curly and Anya. Like I was really stuck on this for some reason. But what were you going to say? No, I, I was, I, I didn't pick up on any kind of love story between the two of them. Although like they are friendly and Anya does confide in him and she doesn't confide in Jimmy or Swansea. So yeah, I, I can see that.

[01:35:17] I was going to say that this, this scene is the first scene. I think that really gives you a hint that she's worried about her safety and it's done in a way that like you might read it and go, huh, what does she mean by that? And then later on the game will continue to like hint toward what happened between her

[01:35:45] and Jimmy without ever explicitly saying it. And, um, so for those who haven't played, um, it's strongly hinted at and basically confirmed in my eyes that Jimmy sexually assaulted Anya at some point during the, the pre crash section, um, of the ship. And it was like, we're, uh, two days before the crash. So this was, uh, long before this scene took place as well.

[01:36:13] Um, due to what we learn later on, uh, about Anya being pregnant. So, um, the part where she asks Curly in this scene, why do the sleeping quarters not have locks, but all these other places, the cargo, the cargo place has the world's strongest lock on it. The medical door has a lock on it. The fucking sweetener in the kitchen has a lock on it, but our sleeping quarters don't have locks on it.

[01:36:42] And she expresses this to, uh, Curly and Curly doesn't really have an answer for her about it. It's the first time that the game is like hinting to you that she's worried about her safety in some way. And then we'll find out later on exactly what she means. But, uh, if you're just thinking about it, it's not that hard to put two and two together that the only woman on a ship full of men would be worried that her bedroom door doesn't have

[01:37:12] a lock on it. Right? Yeah. And the, the incredible thing is that the, the proximity at which this point, this part takes place. It's just before Anya locks herself post crash in the med bay. So, so I, again, my mind is like, Oh, that was cool. There's a little foreshadowing for like this situation going on that explains what's going on a little bit better. I thought it was just a little bit of lore building, you know?

[01:37:39] And so there's a lot of things that happen in this scene that are, are red flags. And I think I want to tap back and just real quick on my, on my previous thing, talking about me, me imagining Anya and Curly being an item. I think that it, while you were talking about it, I was thinking maybe the only reason why I thought that was because Curly treats her like a human being. And the only other exposure you get to Anya is Jimmy treating her like shit.

[01:38:07] So I was like, well, clearly they're dating if they're so nice to her, but he just treats her normal. He treats her normal, but, um, I like what she wrote here about, cause they have that conversation about the broken pixel up in the corner of that TV screen. And they kind of have like a difference in philosophy of how they view things and using that TV screen and the broken pixel as a, um, a kind of metaphor for how they view things in general.

[01:38:35] And so Curly has like a bigger picture view of everything, and that can help inform why Curly is not worried about, not as worried as he should be and not taking action on, um, Anya's, uh, complaints about the things that have happened to her on the ship. So Curly treats her well when they're having face-to-face conversations.

[01:39:03] But another analog to, um, gaming industry news that we've heard or, um, just general, you know, workplace things where you have, um, a leader, a CEO, an HR manager or something like that who hears about something that one coworker has done to another coworker and looks the other way because looking the other way is in the best interest of the company as a whole.

[01:39:29] The big picture will tell you to not do anything about that complaint, especially if the person who did something wrong is in a high ranking position like Jimmy is on the ship here. And so one of the things that a repeat playthrough of mouthwashing showed me is that obviously Jimmy's at fault for what he did to Anya, but Curly's also at fault because he didn't do anything about it.

[01:39:55] Every time, like there, I think there's scenes later and I apologize if I'm getting ahead, but there's parts where it's like Anya has voiced her complaints. She has, um, voiced, she's confided her worries in Curly. Uh, later on, she tells him that she's pregnant and Jimmy's the father and Curly always says like, okay, I'll, I'll handle this. And then he goes and he has like the lightest possible conversation with Jimmy and just like pats Jimmy on the back. It's like, everything's going to be okay, buddy.

[01:40:26] So it's like their buddy, buddy. Curly is not helping Anya at all. And so this scene where they're talking about like their difference in perspective and how Anya can focus on this one small detail in like a wide, um, a wide array of things that are happening. We'll say to her, that detail is super, super important because what happened to her is really important to Curly.

[01:40:53] It's just one drop in the bucket of all the possible things that he thinks that he needs to be responsible for. Therefore, it's actually not that important. And that's why Curly is, in my opinion, he ends up being almost as much of a villain as Jimmy is because he could have stopped it and he didn't do anything. Uh, I, I agree with you. I agree with you in a lot of ways. Yeah.

[01:41:19] Uh, I think, I think particularly that we, we have another one thing I'll watch onto is the pixel, uh, conversation. Uh, this is another moment where you get to see Anya's general philosophy. And I don't think that this is Anya's actual philosophy. Uh, this, this, this philosophy of, uh, seeing, looking past the worst aspects of things in order to see the, the beauty in something.

[01:41:46] Uh, because she does mention, this is not the first time you've seen her talk about this. Uh, later on at one in the second scene, after you feed Curly the first time, uh, his painkillers, uh, she does repeat that. She doesn't think that, uh, people are defined by their worst mistakes. Like their worst mistakes don't define them. And this is another extension of that. It's yeah. To me, that's a coping mechanism for Anya to try to continue to persist in this environment.

[01:42:16] Like in order to do her job, in order to exist alongside these people, and especially with, um, so like Jimmy, obviously Jimmy's a little bit different because he directly harmed her. So she, every time you interact with her, when you're playing as Jimmy, she's super timid. She doesn't really want to talk to you. Um, I don't know if you notice, like every time you walk up to her, you scare the shit out of her. Like she screams when you go up and talk to her.

[01:42:44] Like she gasps and covers her mouth like so many times later in the game. But as far as Curly goes, and as far as the others on the ship, because the others were probably aware of this also, um, she has to, in order to continue living on the ship, she has to look past it for the time being and see, like, she has to be able to see how she can work with these people. I think that's like a coping thing. Yeah.

[01:43:13] So when I think that, when I think that, so like when she's says that part about how our worst moments don't make us monsters the first time, it's when you're in the med bay with Curly and he's, he's fucked up. I think she's talking about Curly and she's trying to find forgiveness for Curly for crashing the ship. Yeah. She dies believing that. Right. At that point, everyone thinks that that was Curly. I think that that part was about that.

[01:43:40] But one of my favorite things about this game is how that sentence that like rationalization, our worst moments don't make us monsters gets warped and corrupted throughout the game. And it ends up being Jimmy self rationalizing before he does something fucked up to be like, no, it's cool. I get a pass because our worst moments don't make us monsters. It starts out with Anya. Like, I think it's her trying and struggling to find a way to persist and live amongst the

[01:44:10] people and survive for 200 more days, you know, until they get home after all she's been through. I have it written down in here towards the bottom. Hold on. Let me see. They so the very beginning of this game takes place. So the ship is the the shipment duration is 382 days and the elapsed time at the intro is 147 days. So they're there. They still have like half of the half of the time we've alluded multiple times.

[01:44:38] We're about to get to the reveal, but Anya is pregnant at during the entire duration of this game and the amount of time that they still have left. I think I'm going to have this in a bullet point, but I'll snipe it right here in case I don't. The amount of time that's still left. She will definitely have the baby before they get there, before they get to their destination. Yeah, for sure. She's she found out she's pregnant and they have over six months left on the on the ship. Yeah. So most likely.

[01:45:07] So where are we at? I already lost it. Oh, OK. Yeah. So we basically covered everything. We're we're we foreshadowed the sexual assault with the lock talk. And then it was immediately undercut by I'm sure especially I would love to have like a woman's perspective on this, because I bet a lot of this stuff is a lot more obvious to someone who worries about this kind of thing more than typically a guy does. Yeah. Yeah.

[01:45:35] I mean, that's that's it's a really fucked up privilege that the two of us have that we don't have this, you know, running through our head. And I think this game in a lot of ways is is putting that experience on front street so that all the men who play it can play this game and say, like, yeah, obviously don't be Jimmy. Right. Jimmy's the worst. You don't want to be Jimmy. But also don't be curly either.

[01:46:02] Like, I think that's one of the main theses of this game is that you cannot be curly no matter how convenient it is, no matter how friendly you are with the Jimmy in your situation or maybe your hypothetical future situation. You can't be curly. So it's a good one for people to to play and take note of for sure. And I was happy on my episode on Tales from the Backlog.

[01:46:29] I do have a guest who's a woman and we didn't do this on purpose, but it turned out to be a really good perspective to have on the show, because obviously I think a lot of women are going to play this game through a different lens than the two of us did. Also, when is that episode coming out? Humble plug. Oh, yeah. It'll be out in in March. And that episode is with Ash Parrish of The Verge. Hell yeah.

[01:46:55] So it'll give you plenty of enough time, listener, to forget everything you heard us talk about and then experience it all over again. There we go. But like this game, it takes place out of time. This is before we talked to me. Very funny. Very silly. That wasn't on purpose either. So we're going to one day before the crash. This is chapter 18, apparently. I'm starting to get less and less confident with these chapters. So Curly's in the bedroom looking for Anya. And she's on the ground.

[01:47:26] What's she doing? She is... Oh, okay. Well, hold on. I got a little thing. This is a cool little tidbit that somebody pointed out. So Anya has a book that's sitting on one of her counters called Up or Down, The Illusion of Choice, which little on the nose. But it's also just a little thing laying around. Like you don't have... Just like the notes that... Just like Daisuke's notes that are written by Swansea earlier on, you don't have...

[01:47:53] You probably are going to walk past them and never even look at them unless you're just one of the people like me that are just a goblin looking at everything. That's why it took me three hours to beat this game. It's not because my PC's bad. It is interesting there. Like they... The graphical style is using that like super chunky, blocky PlayStation 1 looking aesthetic. But there are a lot of details in the environment if you care to look. Yeah. There's a lot of details all over the place in the characters and everything.

[01:48:23] In the dialogue. In the music almost. So Curly is in the bedroom looking for Anya and Anya is not there. She's in the cockpit. She has hidden the ship's gun case, which is locked obviously. You can only... Like we alluded to before, everything that's worth money is locked. Basically. Basically. Yeah.

[01:48:46] I mean, she could be hiding the gun case from herself and she could be hiding it from someone else because of the news that's going to get out soon. Also, one more note about Anya and the cockpit. Did you notice that Anya's ID badge is in Curly's locker in the cockpit? It's in like the captain's lockbox. Yeah. So you find that at the beginning of the game. That is one of two that I found. I didn't realize that they were like collectibles. Oh, they are collectibles. Yeah.

[01:49:16] I found Swansea's. I think it's Swansea's and it's inside of one of the vending machines. Like towards the end of the game. I found Swansea's too. But notable... It was notable to me because like why would her ID badge be locked up in the cockpit? Like that felt to me like it was some kind of blackmail going on to keep her quiet once they got home because it's like that badge is everything to them. Like it's... It has like a...

[01:49:46] It has like a credit card chip in it. So obviously they can use it for money or something like that. So why else would that be locked up? That is... I didn't... I never even considered... I never even looked at them. I picked it up and I was like, oh, cool. And then I just threw it away. No, it might be... I mean, it might be looking too far into things. But like why? When things are fine on the ship, like this is before the crash. Why would her ID badge not be with her stuff? You know?

[01:50:15] That is extremely ominous. Yeah. The implications of that are very ominous. But also because it's like... Oh, my first thought was Curly. But now it's like, oh, you know who also had... The co-pilot, Jimmy, had access to the... So it's like, oh, well, it probably was Jimmy. But why would he keep it in the... But also the cockpit is one of the only places with a lock. You can't get into the cockpit without... Without the captain, so... Right. Yeah.

[01:50:42] So, like, I don't know who locked it in there. And I don't know the reason why. But the fact that it is locked in there hints at something sinister, I think. But, yeah. We have more sinister things in our immediate future. So Curly finds Anya curled up in the cockpit. And she's hidden the ship's gun case. She reveals to the captain that she is pregnant. And then when he asks who, she replies, I told you.

[01:51:12] And Curly immediately understands who she's talking about. Which is wild. Because when she was like, I'm pregnant. I was like, oh, yeah, of course. Because they love each other. And then I was completely flabbergasted by this. I was like, what? Like, it made me, like, go through the filing cabinet in my head. And I'm sure this happened to a lot of people. Where I'm, like, recontextualizing in real time all of these. Because they don't ever explicitly say it's Jimmy.

[01:51:40] But as soon as she says, I told you. And Curly understands. So it's obviously not him. So it's like, it's probably not Swansea. And it's definitely not. I don't know why. But Dice K does not get bitches. I don't know why I think that in my head. No, Dice K doesn't fuck. That's for sure. Yeah. No, it's true. And then the fact that she said, I told you before. It means that she's told Curly about this in the past.

[01:52:06] And that, I don't know, that tone just kind of tells you, like, oh, she told him. And he did nothing about, you know, what she's telling him. Yeah, it's either that. It's either that or this is after the discussion about the screen, right? Yeah. And you kind of pick up that Anya speaks in riddles a little bit. She's not direct when she talks to Curly. So either this happened off screen where she confided in him that she's been sexually assaulted.

[01:52:36] Or she has been hinting at it this whole time trying to keep the peace because she knows that that's what she either knows that's the kind of person that Curly is or she knows that Curly won't help her about this situation because of his friendship with Jimmy. I think it's the latter. Yeah, I think that she I think that it was just something that's not shown to us. She did explicitly tell him what happened and he did nothing about it.

[01:53:00] And this is like something I've seen a little bit of criticism about the game for for like not directly telling you about the assault. And I think they give you enough. I'm just going to say I think they give you enough. I don't think that they needed to have a scene where Anya, you know, directly tells Curly what happened. And I think they have enough here. It's more human almost. I don't know because I really like the idea that she was alluding to it because we'll talk about this later.

[01:53:30] Hopefully I remember to bring it up. But she does directly tell somebody what happened eventually. But it's beyond it's when everything's beyond the pale. Like when it's basically there's a we'll talk about it later. But so what did you just say? I the media literacy is like on a on a downward spiral. It feels like, yeah, I've seen a lot of people do like reviews of this and they have no fucking idea what they're talking about. Like like becoming red in the head just thinking about it.

[01:53:59] But this this there's a couple of interesting things about this. So it reveals that despite Curly's lack of action, he knew things at the bare minimum were uncomfortable between the two. Right. Yeah. So that is from my perspective of her not directly telling him. This obviously doesn't make sense if you believe that it's the other way around. But I mentioned this before. This is the bullet point I mentioned before. There's too much time left in transit. So Anya is going to have the birth on the ship, which is basically evidence that Jimmy assaulted her.

[01:54:28] So I imagine it's probably there. One thing that happens earlier is whenever you will talk about this whenever he crashes the ship, I guess. But like the every almost everything that happens, the company automatically docks pay from the characters. They have a bunch of conversations about this. And I would imagine having a having a birth on the ship is going to dock their pay.

[01:54:53] Not only that, but I doubt they have the supplies necessary to care for a child on that ship. But yeah, I'm sure. But the the more important part of that is that Jimmy is going to have to accept that this is his responsibility and he's going to have to own up to it and live with it in so many ways. And he's just not willing to do that. So this.

[01:55:24] Like this sets up why Jimmy crashed the ship, this this. So we already know that he's losing his job. He was like he feels like he was lucky to get this job in the first place. And there's probably not something good waiting for him. And he assaulted a crew member, got her pregnant. Now there's going to be evidence of this and an expectation that he's going to like take care of things, whatever that means, you know.

[01:55:53] Go to jail. Yeah, probably jail. You know, support the baby financially when he's in jail. I don't know like what's waiting for him eventually. Like there's going to be reparations. There's going to be restitution. He's going to go to jail. Yeah, it's just like he can't process that he's going to have to own up to this and take responsibility for it and, you know, pay for it in a way or in a lot of ways.

[01:56:21] So that's like the next day after this when Curly tells him about this because Curly doesn't tell him the same day. He tells him the next day. And then, you know, we get the plan that Jimmy has for how to deal with this situation. That's like it's just so fucked up that that's what immediately jumps to his head. Yeah.

[01:56:46] Yeah, I want to wrap all that up because it comes together in a nice little bow. But in this area, we got Anya. She hid the case from Jimmy, obviously. And Curly repeatedly says he'd do anything to protect her despite doing nothing up to this point. Yeah. And what's interesting is that he could give her the gun. You know what I mean?

[01:57:12] Or he could – it's like there's so many different ways that he could do something about this even though it's kind of too late at this point. But Curly repeatedly attempts to console her but it's futile. And I think that she realizes this at this point. Like she realizes that it's kind of futile to depend on Curly because he's not doing anything to actually help her in any meaningful way. Yeah, exactly.

[01:57:37] He says that he wants to take responsibility for everyone on the crew and that he's, you know, he's going to make sure nothing bad happens to anybody. But when it comes time to actually like – so we talked about this in my episode. But like Curly does all the easy things to help take care of the crew. You know, he will have the birthday party. You know, we'll cut Daisuke out of the foam.

[01:58:04] You know, like the easy things that he's like, look at the leader doing stuff to help people. But when it comes to like the important thing, which is making sure that one of your crew members feels safe or responding to an abuse, an assault that happens on the ship. That's important but it's difficult. And Curly doesn't do any of the difficult things that would help people feel safe or show loyalty or love or responsibility toward them. Except for Jimmy.

[01:58:33] He like goes out of his way to make sure Jimmy feels okay. Which I think it's really – it's really apt too because like – that we're talking about that specifically because Jimmy looks up to Curly and kind of idolizes him in a way. Not that he idolizes Curly himself as a person but what Curly represents as the captain. And what he sees on the surface level is kind of what Curly does in the game, which is this easy stuff. And I'm literally free balling right now because I'm just going off what you said.

[01:59:02] But like it's like Jimmy imagines having all that responsibility as what Curly does in the game, which is just all of this easy stuff. He doesn't see all of the house of cards underneath that, especially when things go tits up. So he has this idea of what it is. Yeah, he says it to him later when he like apologizes in his own fucked up apology way where he says like I didn't realize how much you were dealing with.

[01:59:30] But it's like it's so hollow by that point. It doesn't make a real difference. Like and it doesn't absolve Curly. The fact that he's dealing with a lot as the captain doesn't absolve him from not, you know, taking responsibility for the well-being of one of his crew members. Yeah, which home. Oh, I got to see what that for. So, yeah, we'll just push through.

[02:00:00] OK, well, hold on. I'll read this little point I left here. Curly's attempts to keep a tepid piece left on you at the disposal of Jimmy. So basically we're hammering home. I just want to hammer the we want to hammer home the inaction and how it turns Curly into a villain of his own doing. And also I wrote Curly continues to say the crew is his responsibility, yet he refuses to do what needs to be done.

[02:00:25] Not only will he not confront Jimmy in any meaningful way, he will not help Anya protect yourself. That was what I was saying, alluding to earlier where there's a gun involved. The whole time there's been a gun. So it's like before it's just like, oh, this is the protective case. Like the you know what I mean? It's like it doesn't say there's a gun in there. So the first time you see it, you're just like, I don't know what that is. And then you don't you can't open it. So it doesn't matter. Yeah.

[02:00:51] And then later on, Anya takes her own protection into her own hands after the crash. She takes the gun at some point. But did you also notice that Anya sleeps in front of the motion controlled statue or the motion activated statue? Like when the crew's all sleeping out in the lounge after the crash, there's the statue of Polly. If you walk in front of it, it will like activate and do like a message.

[02:01:18] Anya sleeps right in front of that thing after the crash. Holy shit. No, I never noticed that. I didn't notice it when I played it either. But someone, you know, in a video that I watched pointed it out. And I was like, shit, yeah, that's all of Anya's stuff right in front of that statue. And it's like, where else can she sleep? Like the sleeping quarters are all foamed up or whatever. So where can she sleep where she's going to feel safe? And the safest way is to sleep in front of this thing that will warn her if Jimmy's getting close.

[02:01:47] That's so fucking awesome. I probably only set that thing off once. So like, you know, that's really cool. And I probably didn't even know why it went off. Just a little detail. Yeah. This game is full of this. So we're going to go to the zero days before the crash, which is the 20th chapter. So we are jumping way ahead in the game. It's actually not that far from the last thing we just talked about. A lot of this stuff kind of gets sandwiched together. The things that are like really close to one another.

[02:02:16] This is when Anya tells Jimmy about the pregnancy. Um, so you find, uh, Anya in the med bay on the ground. And it's implied that Jimmy probably lashed out at her. Uh, he probably hurt her there. But she never, she never says this, which is why I also think that she never actually actively said that she got sexually assaulted to Curly at least. But I don't know.

[02:02:45] So, so Anya tells Jimmy about the pregnancy. Uh, you don't see this. You just see, you just see Anya. And so Jimmy is out by the cockpit. And so you go and confront him, which is what you should have fucking did yesterday. Like, now you're going to confront him because Jimmy, uh, that's the thing is that Curly, whenever I said before that Anya just realizing that Curly's not going to help her.

[02:03:10] I think that's why Anya told Jimmy herself was because she knew Curly, she knew Curly hadn't done it yet. And so, and Curly didn't do it. It's so good. I mean, it's, that's not good, but like the, the game is good. Yeah. I, just for the record, I think that Anya probably did directly tell Curly what happened, but he just, you know, his, his leadership style is that he's not going to do the hard. He's not going to have the hard conversation.

[02:03:40] He's not going to do the hard thing. Um, the difficult thing. So, you know, it was as if the result is the same, I suppose is, is what I'm saying because Curly decided not to do anything. So Curly goes out and talks to Jimmy. Jimmy says like, you know, he kind of, like you said, you said, or the part with the birthday party, Jimmy spins this around on Curly where he says like, you know, this is going to ruin my life. It's going to ruin your life too.

[02:04:08] Cause it happened on your watch, which is like, maybe true, but, um, it's again, Jimmy's deflecting blame and responsibility off of himself onto other people. And so he kind of talks about this thing where it's like, you know, uh, what if there was an unfortunate accident that happened to the ship or something like that? And then they kind of talk back and forth and Jimmy says, I'll handle it. That's what he says.

[02:04:34] And then he turns and walks into the cockpit and Curly just watches him go. Like it's, it's just like the final nail in, in Curly's coffin. It's sealing his fate, his inaction when it comes to any kind of like difficult confrontation when like, it's not hard to know why Jimmy's going off into the cockpit right here. So he basically explicitly says what he's going to do. Yeah.

[02:04:58] And then he says, I'll handle it and storms off into the cockpit, but Curly just stands there in the hallway and just watches him go. And like, that's, that's the part that leads directly into the, the part where you crash the ship. So it's just one, yeah. One final act curl. It's like Curly's last conscious action.

[02:05:20] We'll say conscious decision, I think, which is to not do anything, which is emblematic of him as a leader. Yeah. And, and, uh, everybody knows what Curly looks like now. I think, well, I, I, I think this has got to be a bullet point later. So we'll, we'll talk about it when we get to it. But, uh, yeah, I, I do, I did nail down, like he once again does not take action. And I wrote, is it hesitation or did he fall into despair?

[02:05:50] Maybe he was just in disbelief. Like I, a lot of times, because I, I had a lot of empathy for Curly and it's hard not to, because he is like the person you're, you're taking care of. And one of the primary people who, uh, you, you, he's the only person you directly witness abuse from Jimmy through Jimmy's eyes. Jimmy is abusing him while he's, uh, giving him his medicine. He verbally abuses Anya, but you never actually see him physically do anything to her.

[02:06:18] And he respects Swansea and he doesn't, I don't know how he feels about Daisuke. Maybe he's envious. He just doesn't, he just doesn't interact with Daisuke a whole lot. Um, no, it's like the first time you play it before you realize like the whole scope of, of everything and all the decisions that people made. I think you would feel empathy for Curly because of his situation after the crash.

[02:06:44] You can see like Curly is Curly's in such a terrible state that, and he's, he's being kept alive by shoving painkillers down his throat in like the most gruesome way. Like it's super gross. He's in pain all the time. You can hear him like moaning out in the hallways. And so like, you do feel bad for him that he's in that state, but.

[02:07:06] And like, by that point, you probably haven't pieced together the full picture of what Curly did while he was the captain of the ship and what he didn't do. So then now having this like full context of all these ways that Curly could have stopped all of these terrible things from happening.

[02:07:26] Um, he, like in a way, every terrible thing that happened leading up to the crash was because Curly didn't do anything in a situation where he should have done something as the captain, as the leader. And so it is really great to play it again, watch it again, experience it again, however you experience it with the full context of the story and just realize that like, oh, that's Curly not doing anything.

[02:07:55] That leads to this horrible thing. And like, it's just, it's just a sequence of these, um, inactions by Curly that lead to like, you know, the horrible thing that happened to Anya and then the crash. It's all on Curly base. I mean, it's, it's on Jimmy. Jimmy's the at one who did the terrible things, but Curly enabled Jimmy by not doing anything when he had the chance.

[02:08:21] And I think, I, I don't remember if this is a bullet point or not, but I think that partially that is exactly, that is why Jimmy idolizes Curly so much is because of how much Curly enables him. Yeah. Well, yeah. Curly is just like this easygoing dude. Right. And so Jimmy probably looks at him and he's like, look at that. It's like, it must be cool to be like that cool, you know, laid back captain of ours. The cool uncle that fucking pillages his brother's house because of the Lego. Yeah.

[02:08:51] We need some elemity. God, we need some elemity, but this game is so morbid. Uh, we're going into the pre crash. Now we, we've, we're, we're spending a lot of time on each of these points. I think as we get towards the last third, we have gone through things so much that we don't, we can just reference things like we are slowly unraveling this, this big ball of yarn.

[02:09:12] We have done, we've done a lot of setup for things that are revealed in the post crash scenes as like, you know, you're learning about things that happened in the past in those post crash scenes. A lot of times. And we've just done all that setup ahead of time. Uh, which, uh, is apt right now because this is the very first scene we're about to talk about, which is the pre crash. Uh, so this is just the, this is just where Jimmy sets up the ship to crash.

[02:09:41] Uh, I wrote the, I think I already talked about this, but the, I wrote the player doesn't know who they're controlling, but if you take note of what seat you begin the game in, it is the left seat, which is right. Yeah. We talked about this a little bit earlier. Yeah. Um, this is, uh, there's not much to say about this. We go into the crash, which is directly after the zero days before the crash. Uh, well, I mean, obviously. So, well, the crash, uh, is from Curly's perspective.

[02:10:09] And you see Jimmy kind of curled up in the ball. This is, there's the, the alarms are blaring in the, in the signs, the warning crash imminent, uh, warning signs are happening. Um, Jimmy, or Curly expresses disbelief at, at this point, whenever he confronts Jimmy, uh, even though Jimmy told him what he was going to do. Right. Yeah. Which is why Curly's decision to not do anything is even more confounding. Right.

[02:10:39] Right. It's, it's like, I don't know how Curly could have expected anything else because he has heard from Anya that, that Jimmy is a violent, impulsive, you know, person. And, um, so he, he sees Jimmy say what he's going to do. And then he sees Jimmy walk off to do the thing he said he was going to do. And he just stands there.

[02:11:07] There wasn't even like a, Hey Jimmy, where are you going? Uh, there's nothing from Curly in that scene there. So, uh, me, I mean, obviously I think like you, maybe it's just because you could like never fully accept that someone could do something so destructive and terrible as to like purposely crash the ship.

[02:11:32] Even if they had been talking about it as, you know, a possibility before, that's the only like generous read I can give to this where, you know, I'm not going to give an example, but like someone says they're going to do something terrible. Yeah. I got you. I think my mind's in the same spot. Right. In your head, you're just like, yeah, they say it, but like, they're not actually, no one would actually do that. But then he actually did it. Yeah.

[02:11:58] I, it's like, it's either this or I don't know, like maybe Jimmy really got through to him with this cause he's convincing. Maybe he did convince Curly that for even for a moment, it just took a moment, right? This convinced Curly to not do something again, because if he doesn't, then this pristine piece that Curly always tries to strive for is going to come crashing down.

[02:12:22] Not, not just the actual piece, but also the image of the piece because Curly also cares about what one thing about this game is that almost, almost all of the men deeply care about how they are perceived, how they are judged. Right. Yeah. Well, I mean, well, yeah. I mean, how do you think Curly is getting promotions?

[02:12:44] He's getting promotions because he gets the deliveries done and he has what appears to be a peaceful, dynamic, successful teamwork on the crew. Right. Yeah. I mean, so even I said, almost all of the men care about this because the person I was excluding was Swansea, but, but Swansea's final moments are him explaining himself. And he wouldn't do that if he didn't care about how he was perceived before. You know what I mean?

[02:13:12] He like literally lays all, ah, we'll talk about it in a minute. Uh, so, uh, but, um, oh, what are we talking about here? So this is the crash. So Jimmy runs in there, uh, Curly makes it to the cockpit or, or Jimmy's there, but Curly makes it to the cockpit and into his chair, even though it's not shown. But it is subtly revealed later if you're paying attention to like the environment and everything. And it's okay, listener, if you didn't notice, uh, Daddy Nate is here and he saw it.

[02:13:41] So just believe me. You gotta believe me. Uh, we go into a nightmare sequence and I put this here because this is after the crash that Jimmy did. So this is the part directly after the first thing you do. Yeah. I put this after the crash. I don't know why I did that. But, uh, so Jimmy tries to escape the malfunctioning ship. Uh, this, uh, statue that Anya is sleeping in front of, uh, its name is Polly. It's the mascot of the Pony Express.

[02:14:10] And this thing kind of follows him around. And this thing becomes a direct metaphor for many things. But one of the things is kind of responsibility and what he needs to be responsible for. And the thing that is primary in his mind besides his job that he's losing is that he has made Anya pregnant. Obviously, this is one of the first scenes of the game. So you don't know this yet.

[02:14:34] But something that, uh, you can hear whenever this scene is coming to an end is the screaming of a baby. Yeah. Yeah. Which I would, I just thought was shock value at first. Yeah. I mean, it's, it's, um, psychological horror games will put a lot of stuff in the soundscapes to creep you out. And a baby crying is, is one of those things. Yeah. Yeah. God knows that makes me want to die. Uh, so two months after the crash.

[02:15:02] So large jump, by the way, we've been going day by day. And now it is two months after the crash. Right. And this is the subtle, like the subtle hint that I said before earlier that Anya is actually really good at her job as a medic, that she kept Curly alive for two months after what must have been like an absolutely horrific.

[02:15:23] Like, like think about what happened to Curly right after the crash that he's in this somewhat stable, you know, um, condition two months later because Anya is really good at her job. Um, but then she's in this scene is the first time that you're ever like made to doubt that she can actually do her job because she's not able to give, um, Curly his pills. Yeah.

[02:15:51] At some point it's also mentioned that she failed out of medical, but she failed the medical tests multiple times and Pony Express is the only place that would hire her, which is another notch on the Pony Express is cutting corners and doesn't care about their crew and all of that jazz. But it's also, it also explains why Anya was so distraught whenever she got the news that she was losing her job because she couldn't make, get another job anywhere else.

[02:16:15] And if she has on her resume, the Pony Express, that place that was so shitty and hired the worst people that they went under, even though they were cutting all the corners, they still went under, which is impressive. Uh, it's like, that's probably not going to help her, uh, in the long run. So a lot of things stack up against Anya, especially through Jimmy's eyes. Uh, so in this area, this is the second part of the entire game, right? This is after you crash the ship in the nightmare sequence.

[02:16:45] You're talking to everybody and they're discussing breaking into the cargo hold, which, uh, Swansea mentions that the Pony Express will dock their pay even if they're rescued. This just shows how expendable the company views their employees that even in a life or death situation where they're crashed on an asteroid, they can't go into the cargo bay or they'll lose or they'll get their pay docked, which is incredible. It's, it's how little they think of them that they don't even know what's in the cargo bay. They're, they're transporting this thing across space and they're, they're not even allowed to know what's in there.

[02:17:15] Which it's like, it must be real important then, right? Which is kind of the implication. Yeah. He's taking the role of captain because obviously he's a narcissist. You don't know that at this point, but, uh, Anya requests that he gets the captain scanner, which is most likely in the cockpit, uh, which they even after two months haven't really gone into. I wonder why, what could have happened in the cockpit that would make them not want to go in there anymore?

[02:17:42] Uh, so Jimmy goes into the med bay first and you, this is the first time you get to see Curly. Um, uh, I wrote that twice. I don't know why. So, but, uh, Curly has no limbs and he has no skin and he can't move anymore. Everyone already knows this, but, uh, this is kind of symbolic. I wrote of his inaction, right? Because he can't move anymore. Kind of like how he never moved to protect anybody on the ship.

[02:18:08] And it's also, uh, it also turned him into the passive observer. Uh, even though again, he's always kind of been a passive observer. A lot of like this stuff is like metaphor come to life for him. Yeah. It's like, um, he turned a blind eye to the things that he should have been really focusing on. And now he has no choice, but to see, see it all. Yeah. But to watch, but it's also like, I don't know if you noticed, but he can't blink. He doesn't have eyelids anymore.

[02:18:35] He only has one eye, but like, it's kind of also symbolic that he just watched. Like he only watched things happening and rather than doing anything. Uh, another thing that, that, that, that I think this way later on, but another thing is that it's very judgmental. Having someone always watch you, uh, gives you the feeling of being judged and Curly is silently judging because he can't speak anymore.

[02:19:01] Uh, and that is obvious at one point in the game that he is judging the crew and the situation. Uh, and I'll talk about that later, but, uh, let me see. We, we talked about the, the eyeball. Okay. So the player being introduced to Curly as a patient long before seeing Curly as the captain kind of turns him into an object, right? Yeah. Like you, you don't, cause you can't talk to him. You can't really interact with them besides playing with his mouth and getting the achievement for what is it?

[02:19:30] The puppet achievement for opening his mouth over and over again, which I did immediately. It's, um, should be noted just how gross it is to do these interactions with Curly because uh, you have to, you have to feed him his pills like you would a dog basically. And they didn't, uh, they didn't skip over the gross choking sound effects of him trying to swallow his pills.

[02:19:59] And they, they talk about how painful it is for him to swallow his pills and his breathing is really labored afterwards. And you, I, like I said, you can hear him like audibly in pain, uh, throughout a lot of these sections. So a lot of times when, cause you, you have to do this multiple times in the game, go give Curly his pills. And I like started to really dread doing that because of how gross it is.

[02:20:27] And it got me thinking, um, there's two parts in this game where somebody is badly injured and there's a decision to be made about whether to keep them alive or not. And Curly is the first one. And the, the decision has been to keep him alive, even though like, if you can realistically look at that situation and say like, there's no way.

[02:20:51] Number one, no one's coming to rescue them, but also number two, if they do rescue them, what is Curly's life going to be like, even if he gets state of the art medical care, right? Like his skin's not going to grow back. His limbs are not going to grow back. He doesn't have, he basically has no quality of life. He's just being kept alive.

[02:21:16] And so there's the decision made to keep Curly alive past way past a natural, like lifespan, we'll say. And then later on in other characters in a similar situation and they make a very different choice. Someone else makes a very different choice. It's kind of interesting to me that, um, this game's not quote about euthanasia, but there are situations. Yeah.

[02:21:44] I think it's also interesting because immediately Jimmy is like, Hey, why are we even keeping him alive? Like that is something that immediately he says to Anya and she, this is whenever she first drops that little nugget of knowledge that, uh, the, uh, the, we aren't defined by our worst mistakes. Like people aren't defined by that. Uh, and I, I think it's really interesting because this not only does Jimmy co-opt that,

[02:22:11] but he also co-ops the idea that Curly needs to be kept alive because eventually he starts talking about bringing him to justice. Uh, I have it written in here that, uh, the crew believes Curly is the one who crashed the ship and he can't speak up to defend himself in the state that he's in. And this is either because Jimmy immediately lied about it to save himself because Curly was found in the cockpit after the crash.

[02:22:35] Uh, or which is what I think is how it is, is that Jimmy at, is that the crew intuited that Curly was the one who crashed the ship because of where he was found. And Jimmy just never corrected them and went along with the narrative. And I think it's that second one because Jimmy never has a unique idea in the whole game. Yeah. Well, it's, it just goes along with what we assumed as the player too. We assume that Curly crashed the ship because he's the captain and he was in the cockpit, um,

[02:23:05] when the ship crashed. So of course he crashed the ship. So why would anyone else doubt that the captain was the one steering the ship basically? So, um, it, it fits for sure. Uh, so we interact with Anya's Jimmy and like we were saying before, like I said, right at the very top, Jimmy and Anya interact with each other completely differently than Curly and Anya. And, uh, she kind of sucks up to him in an annoying way.

[02:23:33] And at first it's because like, oh, I guess it's because she's, she's definitely buttering him up to feed Curly the painkillers. And whenever, whenever she brings this up, uh, he starts berating her. And at first I was like, everyone, almost anyone's going to be like, well, it's weird that the nurse doesn't do her job. And this is clear. She clearly butters him up because she's afraid of retaliation. Yeah. She doesn't want him to scream at him.

[02:24:02] But also I have it written in here that I wanted to note that Anya is around three months pregnant at this point. Uh, the player doesn't know this at this point, but in hindsight, it is totally understandable why she, why this, this particular thing makes her nauseous, right? Well, yeah, that there could be any number of reasons. I mean, like she's probably spending most of her time in there with Curly and like, that's,

[02:24:29] that's too much for one person to just be there all the time. Like it's, it's gotta be intensely stressful, painful, scary, all of that. Even if it's her job, she didn't sign up to, you know, be in the care of someone in a condition like Curly. So even if it's just as simple as like, Hey Jimmy, can you buy me five minutes and just like do this thing for me?

[02:24:54] Um, it could just be that, but it could also be like Anya has like, as we've talked about, like a very, uh, she has a history with Curly and maybe she doesn't want to give him his painkillers. Maybe she doesn't want to deal with him. Um, she has to sometimes, but maybe she doesn't want to, uh, maybe she is like, Hey Jimmy, you fucking suck. You go do, can you go do this horrible, uh, thing?

[02:25:23] And I'll just like take the brunt of whatever insults you want to throw my way. Like, I think there is something else to the fact that Anya doesn't want to give Curly the painkillers. Yeah. Uh, I, I specifically have it in here that this is, this was brought up by a, uh, a female YouTuber. I can't remember what the video was, but I've listened to so many videos on this game at this

[02:25:48] point, but, uh, Jimmy's constantly berating her for not wanting to perform a first, a forced insertion insertion, which when you word it like that, it's like, Oh fuck. You know what I mean? Which it really paints a grim picture of Anya's existence on, on the ship. You know what I mean? Yep. Yeah. I can see that. Uh, so that's fucking grim. Uh, so Jimmy feeds Curly the painkillers. Also very grim.

[02:26:17] Um, Anya, uh, was curled up in the lounge. She's nauseous and it makes sense why knowing all the information, uh, Jimmy at, this is where Jimmy is questioning why we're wasting supplies on Curly. Uh, and then that is whenever she drops that thing. We already talked about that. So Jimmy is talking to Swansea in front of the utility room and Swansea says it's full of emergency foam. And one thing I wanted to know about this is that it's weird that Jimmy respects Swansea so much that he just never opens the door.

[02:26:46] Like it is locked, but I mean like he's the captain, right? I mean, I guess he, he's bosses everybody else around, but he doesn't do anything about Swansea stopping him from going in there. No, Swansea doesn't like take any shit. And I think that like there's, so Jimmy's putting on like this, this captain act. And I think that what Curly can't do anything. Anya's afraid of Jimmy. So she's just going to do whatever it takes to survive.

[02:27:14] Basically dice K will look up to, he's probably young enough. He'll just look up to an authority figure. Swansea sees through the bullshit. Like there's the, throughout the entire post crash thing, there's one character who never buys any of Jimmy's bullshit. And it's Swansea the whole time. So like Swansea is just like, no, get the fuck out of here. You can't go in my room. And Jimmy's like, okay, I can't go in his room.

[02:27:42] Um, I think that it's, it's in line with what Curly did as the leader, which is to not do any of the difficult things. And if there's a chance to take the easy road in any situation, Curly took that. And now Jimmy's doing the same thing too. The, the correct thing to do in a survival situation would be to say, Hey, Swansea, get the fuck out of the way. Like we need whatever's available in there.

[02:28:11] We need it. We all need to be on board with the same thing, but Jimmy doesn't want to confront Swansea and have a difficult conversation. So he's just like, all right, Swansea says we can't go in there. We can't go in there. Yeah. And Swansea's, uh, Swansea's excuse for this is that the room is basically full of the foam, which there are, there's a window on the door. Like you can see in there. Yeah. Uh, with the graphics you can't, but I imagine they can, uh, in, in the, in the, uh, reality they live in. Uh, there are rooms that are full.

[02:28:41] Like there were, they talk about the, the, the bunk bed. What is it called? The bunk room? Yeah. The sleeping quarters are, are inaccessible. Um, a lot of their, they say that like one of the reasons they're in such a desperate situation where they have to break into the cargo to look for supplies is that a lot of their supplies and food and stuff like that are like all foamed up in, you know, storage rooms and stuff like that. And that foam is extremely sticky.

[02:29:10] And it's like, man, I, I, I don't think I, I don't think I wrote about this in here. Cause I think I would have already said this, but one thing that dawned on me at some point when I was just listening to somebody play the game was I, I was like, why, where's all the fire? Like, where's the fire damage? Where did, where did Curly's skin go? Because he got burned. Right.

[02:29:39] And so I, I realized, or this is what I think. Right. Um, I think so when you go in that room, I probably do mention this cause you do go in that room at some point. And this is how I figured out at least what happened to his limbs is that, uh, Curly's seat doesn't have foam in it. And, uh, Jimmy's seat does. And he went there. This is what I said. It's the, it subtly hints that Jim, that Curly did make it to the seat and tried to stop the thing.

[02:30:07] Uh, he's, his seat is surrounded with blood. So they cut him out of the foam. And I think the foam stuck to his skin and they had to peel it off. Could be. Yeah, it could be. I was going to say like, you don't see fire damage and stuff maybe because it's two months later, you know, but it could be a graphical thing. The cockpit's like completely fucked in like so many ways after the crash too.

[02:30:35] So it's, uh, it's, that is a pretty grim picture you paint of, uh, of how they get Curly out of the cockpit for sure. I just, I, I think that has to be how it would happen to him. The only thing, the only thing that's different is that like he had clothes on, but maybe, I mean, maybe there was an explosion and then immediately the foam happened. Like it's, it's hard to, because that's how it would have to work. I think that's how the foam works. Yeah. Like immediately the foam comes out because otherwise Curly would have been sucked up into space.

[02:31:03] So yeah, maybe, I don't know, like flash burned his clothes off and then I don't know, but, uh, what are we talking about here? Uh, oh, we were talking about the foam in the room. Okay. So we're in two months after the crash and this is the same time period, but this is a different chapter. So there's a little bit later in the game, but, uh, Jimmy gets the scanner and he goes and opens the cargo bay and this is cargo bay. And this is when he finds the mouthwash. This is after seeing the, the, the ad for it.

[02:31:32] Um, everyone has kind of a different reactions to this. Uh, Anya's hysterical basically. And one, one thing, but the first thing that she does is she kind of checks it for, cause she's the medic. She looks at it for a possible disinfectant, uh, cause they don't have much of that. And she realizes that there's too much sugar inside of it. So she knows that sugar content. And this is foreshadowing for later. I think we already brought it up, but, uh, another, the, another person grabs the mouthwash

[02:32:00] Swansea and he points out the ethanol content. And then he reveals that he's 14 years sober and that ends today, which makes sense. Yeah. He just, you know, it, it pushes him over the edge. Um, so yeah, it's, uh, it's important to note, like you said, that Anya points out that this is not useful for disinfectant, um, because of who disregards that advice, that professional

[02:32:30] advice. Yeah. Yeah. Um, another thing that somebody brought this, I think this was the same, uh, female YouTuber where she brought up that one of the reasons why Anya must, she was like basically shaking at this point. Uh, and it's probably because she realizes that she's about to be alone on a ship with three drunk men. One of them being somebody who sexually assaulted her. Yeah. Yeah.

[02:32:57] That's, that's definitely, um, easy to see for sure. There's also just like the, the absolute disappointment on so many levels, but on like the survival level, because again, they're, they're opening the cargo there. They're, uh, possibly incurring punishment from the company for opening this cargo because of a desperate need to find food, medical supplies, you know, things that can help them

[02:33:26] survive and to find something that is like, you would be hard. You'd, you'd be hard to think of a less useful thing to find than, you know, thousands of boxes of mouthwash. So, um, it's just, there's so many reasons why it, it break. I mean, it, Anya breaks at this Swansea breaks his sobriety at this because it's like Anya has that, that reaction. Like you said, I think that's a good point to point out.

[02:33:56] Swansea's just like, this was our last chance and our last chance gave us mouthwash, which is not useful at all. So fuck it. I'm, you know, he's probably like, well, I'm dying soon. So yeah, I'm going to drink this fucking mouthwash. He definitely is. He, he is resigning to his fate for sure. Um, though he does have some plans and we'll talk about that in a second. So now we're three months after the crash. One month has passed. This is the seventh chapter.

[02:34:25] So two chapters after that one. Uh, so Jimmy wakes up in the lounge to the sound of Curly's cries of agony. This is awful. This is like, this is like the most painful part of the whole game for me, for some reason, like hearing him as you walk around the whole ship, you can hear him everywhere. It is awful. Um, so the dorms are covered in foam, forcing everyone to sleep outside together in the lobby. And this is the first time I think this is the first time you see, well, no, because you walk around at the very beginning.

[02:34:53] I didn't notice it then, but I noticed it in this point because you're, you're literally sleeping. You're woken up. Uh, and so it's, uh, interesting because Jimmy was assaulting Anya before. And I assumed that their quarters might've been, I don't know if they had a public quarter, like a, a room or if they all had individual rooms. That's kind of how I imagined it. They had individual rooms. They don't say. I imagine that because I assumed that she was assaulted more than once and it would be hard if they had a communal room.

[02:35:22] So the reason why I'm saying all this is because I wrote in a, in a point that says, uh, it might be a contributing factor to Jimmy's increasing hostility towards Anya because it's harder to get what he needs out of her, like get what he wants out of her because they are always around each around, like all the other people now. Um, it could be, um, it could also just be that they're sleeping in very uncomfortable,

[02:35:47] um, places like they're sleeping on the floor out in the lounge, a place that's not meant to be a sleeping quarter, like plus all the other things that are going on with their situation. So you could understand why, um, people would be on edge even without that more sinister thing. Yeah. Um, so we have this, this is a, there's a board game that's inside. Have you ever like, have you ever like looked at this board game?

[02:36:17] I don't think I even saw the board game. Um, there is a YouTube, I wanted, this is something I forgot about, but there's a YouTube video that literally goes into extreme detail about the board game. I'm pro it's probably good that I didn't actually look at that, but I did make notes about the board game. So there is a board game that there are four. It's like, sorry, have you ever played? Sorry. Yeah. Yeah. Like, like 30 years ago. It's basically a game where you get your pieces and they go into the home base and then that's where your pieces need to go to win. You need to get all four of your pieces there.

[02:36:47] You need to rescue them. Interesting. Uh, and so, uh, one thing that you, uh, one thing about the game is that all the pieces are color coded. And so each of the colors also happened to be the colors of the dialogue boxes of the different characters. And so you can immediately recognize that this is kind of emblematic of the state of the game, like of the state of the characters and the pieces themselves are literally like in positions that kind of give you an idea of their mental state. Right.

[02:37:15] It's, it's interesting, but we're not going to really go into that. Cause I can't see the board right now. One thing I did write though, is that curly doesn't have pieces. Sorry is a four player game, which is interesting because the ship was, is supposed to only have four people on it. That's one of the things that I don't think we ever, uh, we glossed over at the beginning, but there's four, uh, cryopods, a huge part of the story centers around these cryopods.

[02:37:41] Um, and so there being four of them and four sorry pieces, Daisuke was a intern brought on at the last minute. Uh, that's just a whole bunch of like interesting, like little tidbits. I don't know. Uh, but Jimmy, anyway, back to the story. Jimmy doesn't know if curly has had his painkillers. So he goes off to find Anya and I have a bunch of bullet points in here kind of going over curly and Jimmy's like relationship.

[02:38:09] So I kind of curly's at the will of the rest of the crew and in his current state and, uh, his lack of agency contrasts with his portrayal as a responsible in charge guy in the flashbacks. Um, because you have, this is the seventh chapter. So you've had a little bit of time with everyone and you've gotten to see the dynamics. So see jumping between curly being the character you control, then back to Jimmy, who's kind of fuck and you're in control, but he's kind of fucking everything up.

[02:38:36] Um, it's, it really changes the way that you kind of perceive curly as this odd. He's like presented to you as an object and then a person with free will. It's really weird, you know? Yeah. And especially when you still think that curly's like the good version of Jimmy, you know, like Jimmy is the shitty captain. He's an asshole. Even if you might think he's a hero early in the game, um, you spend longer thinking that curly is a good person than Jimmy.

[02:39:05] So, um, the contrast and he, like when you think that curly is the one who crashed the ship, you're playing as curly. He's, he's seemingly helpful and you can, you know, see that wonder why he actually crashed the ship and then see like the horrible state that he's in afterwards. It's, um, it's good. Uh, yeah. So the, the rest of that I wrote down is Jimmy thinks that he has the right to do as he pleases with curly, um, that curly is just a prop to be used.

[02:39:34] Like as a good captain would be saving his crew. He views curly as this object. That's kind of what, like this, this thought that I'm trying to get through to the listener, but, uh, uh, curly, uh, is another outlet for control outlet of control for Jimmy though. And because Jimmy, uh, Jimmy directly in directly influences curly's life or death, right?

[02:40:00] Um, but, uh, this kind of mirrors what happened previously with Anya that curly was letting happen where he can't control Anya anymore because they are in the, the, they don't have their sleeping private sleeping quarters anymore. Right. So he uses that control that need for control over curly instead. Yeah. I mean, he's, he's always gotta be, he says that he says that he likes being in control. So any situation where he can take it for sure.

[02:40:30] Um, I thought that the, the good part about this is like Anya is find somebody that she can actually confide her issues in when she's talking with Swansea. I think it's during this chapter, um, where it's not like said, but later on, um, you can kind of infer, um, this is a part where Swansea might've told his plan, uh, for that cryopod.

[02:40:59] But also I think this is the part where Anya says what Jimmy did to her, to Swansea and Swansea's attitude towards Jimmy, um, flips after this. Um, also he kind of falls way more off the wagon than he's seen previously. He does. Yeah. Um, it's also interesting to note, uh, as we get further and further into this post crash

[02:41:25] part of the story, Anya kind of like fades out of the story as it goes. And then after she kills herself, she's never mentioned again in the story. Jimmy does not like, cause we're seeing this through Jimmy's eyes and what Jimmy thinks is important. And even in when we have these sections that kind of take place in Jimmy's subconscious Anya is not there at all until the very last part of the game.

[02:41:55] Maybe not the very last second to last part of the game. When Jimmy kind of has to answer a little bit, like he has that, like talking to God scene. And, um, that's, you know, a long time where Anya has not been a part of this until that very end thing. So she's kind of fading out of the story at this point here. So, um, where were we at? Uh, three months after the crash. So this is where, uh, she's, she's confiding in him.

[02:42:24] This is definitely where this happens. Uh, uh, Swansea kind of talks about that later, but, uh, uh, Jimmy kind of assumes that they're talking about him and that again, Mr. The player, of course they're talking about him. That's every, everything's about him. I think that it's really cool because it misdirects the player because around this time, this is when Anya is going to like pretty soon. Anya is going to lock herself in the thing. And that plants the seed that, uh, Anya's the one that wants Curly to die secretly.

[02:42:53] Uh, which obviously Jimmy's pushing for. So Jimmy gets the medicine. Uh, he brings it back to, uh, Curly and then berates Curly for as if it was Jim as it was, uh, sorry, as if it was his fault that Jimmy has to take responsibility for everything. Uh, which I thought was really interesting. And then he force feeds him again, which I don't know if you, did you think that he was beating Curly or did you think that what I thought was, uh, he was force feeding him

[02:43:22] too painfully and that Curly was thrashing around. Like he was shoving the medicine down. They had said that it hurts Curly to give him the medicine just in general. So, um, I, I mean, I think that, I think that any kind of like physical contact is painful for Curly, I'm sure. And they're going to have to hold him down to force pills down his throat. Cause I don't think he has a tongue or anything like that anymore.

[02:43:47] So, um, I, I didn't read it as like extra violence, but it was like, this is a very painful thing for Curly just to have the pills given to him. Yeah. Uh, so we'll jump four months after the crash. This is the eighth chapter. Uh, this is the one where you find Daisuke in the floor. Uh, he kind of talks about his aimlessness and you can see his poor self image kind of,

[02:44:13] uh, on display, which makes sense because he's, he followed the leader with Swansea with drinking the mouthwash. Uh, Jimmy goes to find Anya in the lounge who is also considering the mouthwash, which I want to remind everyone that she's five months pregnant at this point. So she, that's obviously not cash money, but, uh, they all think that they're going to die. So Jimmy goes and gets the ax. Uh, Swansea, Swansea is like dancing.

[02:44:39] He's drunk and he stabs it into the screen, which I think somebody brought it up that it's kind of foreshadowing how he's, what else he's going to do with that ax because Daisuke is kind of like the sunny disposition of the crew, even at this point in the game. And the fact that he destroys the sunny screen is like, Oh, this is what he's going to do a little bit later. Right? Yeah, I can see it. Yeah. I, I, to me, it was more just like a defiant, like you want the ax, get it out of the screen

[02:45:08] and he just busts it up and leaves it in there. Yeah. It's another cool thing too. Cause you see this part of the area in a flat and like a, uh, a nightmare sequence earlier in the game and like, you're like, what the fuck happened to the screen? Maybe it just looks cool. And they did that. So there's a lot of little like nuggets of, uh, uh, of that going on. Uh, so Jimmy gets the painkillers and Anya again is like buttering them up and then he blows up on her whenever she asked him to give the medicine.

[02:45:35] Um, I, I wrote that he lists off all the things he's done for the crew and he's like, this is all the shit I've done for you and it's five things, right? Yeah. I think that's the part where, um, it, it shows up in the UI too. Like what you see as the player, um, it like cycles through those quests that you've been given in the way that you would see, like, this is your primary quest now. And it cycles through those.

[02:46:03] So that plants the seed also that those UI elements that say, this is your quest. Um, that is what is actually in Jimmy's head. It's not your quest as a player. That is Jimmy's main drive at that moment, whether it's getting the ax or giving, uh, curly his painkillers or later on when that turns into just take responsibility, take responsibility that shows you what's in Jimmy's head at the moment.

[02:46:31] He doesn't care about anything else except for, you know, taking responsibility or setting things right or whatever that, that main quest objective would say. Uh, I also want to point out that he and he and, uh, Anya are the only people that know that she's pregnant at this point. And so he's overlooking the fact that she's obviously not just because of the pregnancy. And like, so it's all, it's like extra mean.

[02:46:58] Uh, but I, uh, I wrote that all the objectives he lists off were actually Anya's ideas. Everything that he lists off is something that Anya suggests. And he's like, now that's my idea. Thank you. Um, uh, so Jimmy feeds the pills and this is whenever he steals the, our worst moments don't make us monsters, which is funny because at this point you still think Curly's crashed the ship.

[02:47:23] And so, but this is fucking, this is him trying to explain himself to Curly, which is just, ugh, God. Yeah. So I think that that, that phrase, our worst moments don't make us monsters starts out from a place of like, say basically saying like your worst moments don't define you as a person. Like we are more than what we do in our worst moments.

[02:47:52] And it's like not an excuse for doing monstrous things. Like you can't like kill somebody and then say, well, our worst moments don't make us monsters. I'm still a good person. But like, there are things that we do in our life that we're not proud of maybe. And so it's a way to, to like in that situation, be like, I'm not proud of that, but that doesn't define my entire being as a person.

[02:48:16] And so like, I think it, maybe it's a quote that Anya had taken from life off of the ship, you know, or something like, maybe she read in a book or something like that. And then Jimmy hears it and he's like, oh, that's my, that's my like, get out of jail free card. Like I could just, this is my golden ticket to always being a good person because my worst moments don't define me. They don't make me a monster.

[02:48:39] So like the North, the ultimate narcissist, Jimmy is just basically like, you know, I'm basically free to do whatever I want here because our worst moments don't make us monsters. Yeah. It's kind of like that, uh, you know, the, the Christian, if I, I can do whatever I want on Saturday, as long as I go to church and pray it away on Sunday kind of thing. Yeah. It's like a running joke in my old hometown. Uh, so we are going five months after the crash.

[02:49:08] Uh, this is chapter 11 dice case. This is when dice he wakes on wakes Jimmy up and says, Hey, Anya's locked in the med bay. This is right. But after Anya asks why there's no locks, uh, why there's only locks on the med bay and various different places. So. Right. And the, the only way to get, so she's locked in there and you think like the game has set you up to think she's got the gun. She's going to kill curly. Yeah. So, so we need to get in there.

[02:49:35] The only way to get in there is the vent from the utility room up that Swansea says is too dangerous to go through. But, um, Jimmy can't fit apparently like dice case smaller than him. So dice case can actually fit in the vent and dice case says Swansea says it's too dangerous. Swansea probably knows what he's talking about. It's too dangerous. And Jimmy first kind of like, this is like one of the, it's, it's just like an evil fucking

[02:50:04] thing that Jimmy does. Um, amongst the evil things that he did to Anya in the past, he basically first guilt trips dice K into like, he knows that dice K doesn't feel like he's contributing much to the crew. Right. Yeah. So he says like, this is your chance to help out. Anya needs your help and you're the only one who can get through that vent and help Anya.

[02:50:30] So, uh, he tries that dice case not convinced. And so Jimmy then pulls out the, this is an order from your captain card to go in there and, uh, dice K immediately gets like, I don't know exactly what happens in there, but he gets like sliced up, electrocuted, all kinds of horrible stuff happens to him in that fan. Yeah. And he still, despite the injuries, he still gets through the vent, crawls through and unlocks

[02:50:59] the door to the med bay so that they can get in. Like he, he does the job despite this. Yeah. Like this horrendous injury that happens to him. Um, but again, it's all on Jimmy just being like, no, you have to do this. Yeah. You know, he appeal, he does everything. He does every manipulative thing in the, in the book. Like he appeals to dice K being like, Hey, Swansea would be proud of you that you did this. Like he does all the things. He does everything. Yep.

[02:51:28] Uh, I do want to highlight before that happens. So we do have a conversation with Anya before. Uh, and this, this is something that really stuck with me. Um, she tells Jimmy that he was right all along and that she should have done this like in the, in the first place. And that kind of highlights how much Jimmy's pressuring her to either abort the presidency or commit suicide. Like, yeah, I think that like he basically just told her to kill herself, uh, before.

[02:51:55] At some point in the past, he had probably said something like that to her. But you, as the player have seen Jimmy's hint that they shouldn't be keeping curly alive. So when she says that you think, Oh, he said we should put curly out of his misery. And now she's finally going to do it. And she says the thing again, she says, uh, our worst moments don't make us monsters.

[02:52:20] Um, as she's behind that locked door and you think that it's because she's going to kill curly, uh, when in fact she's going to do another horrific thing. Um, she also co-op, she does what, uh, she does what Jimmy has been doing to the entire crew this whole time. And she takes something that Jimmy says all the time. Her last words are that she's going to take care of it, which is something that Jimmy constantly says to everyone. Yeah. Yeah.

[02:52:50] So she, I think that she's obviously she's resigned to what she's about to do, but I think she's, so it's interesting hearing different people use that quote, our worst moments don't define us, don't make us monsters in these different contexts. In this context, she's kind of like preemptively asking for forgiveness, I think for what she's about to do.

[02:53:16] Uh, only we don't know what she's about to do until we get through that door later. But it, it feels different from when Jimmy preemptively says that before he does something terrible. It just feels different coming from the two characters. Yeah. Uh, I think another thing is that when he's convincing Daisuke to what the first thing they have to do is drug Swansea and we'll talk about that in a minute. But like, so with Jimmy, Jimmy says to Daisuke is that we can save Curly. Yeah.

[02:53:45] Like to, to Daisuke, but Jimmy fully knows that she's about to kill herself in there. Like he has no, he is under no illusion that Curly is under any danger. I'm not convinced, but I'm also not like, I'm not prepared to argue about that. I think that like Jimmy just, you know, she's locked in there. We have to get that door open, you know? Yeah. Yeah. Uh, so Jimmy says they need to make a drug that'll, that's in a, in a cocktail that will knock Swansea out.

[02:54:14] I think the, the, the pertinent thing about this is that this is potentially something he either did to Anya before the crash, or it's something that he's been doing to Daisuke and Swansea while they've all slept together in the lounge in order to get to Anya, which would further, whenever you said that she sleeps in front of the motion detected like thing, I think that that is another like little seed in that like kind of fan theory, I guess. I didn't see this that way.

[02:54:41] The way that I saw this is, um, the important thing about this scene is that when they busted up the foam to open up the extra medical supply cabinet, they found one bottle of, um, disinfectant and this is how Jimmy chooses to use it. Not saving it for an actual medical emergency. He chooses to use it in this cocktail to knock Swansea out. Um, you know, instead of going down and like, you know, having a man to man conversation

[02:55:09] with Swansea saying like, Hey, Anya and or Curly are in danger up there. Come help us kick down the door. Let us go through the vent. Yada, yada. You mean Swansea has a fucking ax, like use the ax, bust down that door. Um, it's just, oh, well, there's a convenient way that I don't have to have this hard conversation. I don't have to have this confrontation. We can just knock him out.

[02:55:33] And it uses one of the most valuable things left on the ship, which is a bottle of disinfectant, which immediately comes back to, to, you know, it comes back into the picture because then Dice K is like badly injured, uh, at risk of infection. They could really use disinfectant, but they used it all on that cocktail. So it's like the short-sighted, terrible decisions by Jimmy as a leader that come back to bite him.

[02:55:59] And then that puts him in another position to make more short-sighted and terrible decisions with, you know, deciding to pour the mouthwash on Dice K after he's injured. Um, which is important because like Anya earlier had said, we can't use mouthwash as disinfectant. It's not going to work. There's, there's too much sugar. You'll get infected because of all the, you know, the sugar and stuff like that.

[02:56:27] And Jimmy obviously either didn't hear it or just disregarded what she said about that because Jimmy's like, Oh, he's injured mouthwash, you know? Yeah. Uh, it's man, the, well, let's, let's continue. It's just a cascade of, of terrible fucking decisions by Jimmy over and over and over and over and over again. Yeah. Yeah.

[02:56:55] And Daisuke, Daisuke suffering the consequences is definitely something that Jimmy is. Jimmy wants all of these people to, he wants them to sacrifice so that, so that he gets all of the, the credit. Like he gets the judge, he gets to be the one that is judged as the hero. Right? Yeah. Cause that's what he perceives power as. Um, so yeah. So I'm kind of skipping over a whole lot here.

[02:57:24] Oh, uh, so you brought this up earlier, but Jimmy, so Daisuke and Jimmy are about the same size. They mentioned specifically that's that Swan say can't fit in the vent. I don't think it's ever mentioned that Jimmy can't fit in the vent. Yeah. But Jimmy, like, yeah, you're right. But Jimmy's like, you know, telling Daisuke, like, it has to be you that goes through there. Cause like, obviously Jimmy's not going to put himself in harm's way because he, you know, he has to, he's more important or whatever.

[02:57:53] So like, it has to be Daisuke. Daisuke's younger. He's more athletic. Like he can climb up in the vent. Sure. But like, you are right that it's, it's never said that Jimmy can't fit. It's just to Jimmy, who is our perspective. He's our point of view character to Jimmy. Nobody can go in that vent except for Daisuke. Like obviously Jimmy's not going to put himself in harm's way. Yeah. Yeah. Uh, so whenever you do the stuff with Daisuke after he's injured, it's worth noting that

[02:58:22] you have a third timeline, uh, introduced and this is the judgment timeline. Uh, so this is eight hours until judgment whenever Daisuke is, uh, wounded. And one interesting thing is that, you know, Swansea is talking to him and they reveal that, Hey, we use the disinfectant and everything. Uh, uh, Jimmy starts blaming Swansea for forcing him.

[02:58:47] I think this is what I was like struggling to remember because, uh, earlier it's that narcissistic, like I cannot possibly be at fault for what I did or what happened. It has to be their fault. And Daisuke is incapacitated. Curly is incapacitated. Anya is dead. So it has to be Swansea's fault. He's the only one whose fault it could be now. Right? Yeah.

[02:59:12] Uh, one really cool thing is that, uh, Dice, uh, Jimmy and Swansea split up to go look for, uh, I guess the mouthwash, but like they're looking for something to use as this effect and they end up using the mouthwash. Um, whenever you go into the bed bay where, uh, where Swansea is, there's this cool effect where Curly and Anya are both at. So you don't immediately get to know the fate of everyone. You know, something happened to Anya because, uh, Daisuke exclaimed that something happened,

[02:59:42] but he never mentions Curly and you're under the impression that she attacked Curly as well. So you don't get the information just yet. Yeah. And like that, the fact that you, it's blurred out to the point where you can't even see the half of the room where Anya and Curly are shows you that Jimmy doesn't care about either of them. They don't exist to him. Like, especially after Anya dies, she doesn't exist to Jimmy.

[03:00:12] Therefore he doesn't even see her over there. That's what that effect is. I think. Yeah. And just like a complete refusal to acknowledge what he's done, you know? Yeah. Which is why all the, the flashing red take responsibility and Jimmy's like, you know, he says the words take responsibility so many times. It, while he's saying that, while that's your main quest objective, take responsibility.

[03:00:39] You're seeing all these examples of like Jimmy avoiding responsibility. And like even before the crash, Jimmy and Curly both avoiding responsibility. So like that phrase gets corrupted too. And then we get to the end and we see what Jimmy's idea of, okay, I'm finally taking responsibility. This is what I'm going to do. Like it's nowhere close to what taking responsibility would have actually been. Yeah.

[03:01:06] It's just like, Jimmy's just such, he's the worst. And so like we eventually get to that point, but that's, that's further ahead. But that is very, that's very apt for this part coming up, which is where he is running away from the horse. And literally again, the horse is representing responsibility along with a whole lot of other things. And the way that you get through this little maze area is that there's a horse running,

[03:01:31] a horse monster running around and the way you have to stop moving and remain silent to avoid attention so that the responsibility leaves and doesn't, uh, doesn't actually engage with you. Doesn't actually come in contact with you. And another thing is that you can only see the creature with the captain scanner, because that's his idea of what a responsible person is, is somebody who is, is the captain who has the scanner and, uh, I wrote, uh, how Jimmy interacts with the horse is ironic with how

[03:02:01] he treats Anya, who also is avoiding, uh, Jimmy's unwanted attention and is horrified of what would happen if they came in contact. It's really good. I'm going to be honest with you. I fucking hate this. So there's three more involved gameplay sections in the game. There's this part. That's like a stealth boss fight.

[03:02:25] There's the graveyard scene with Swansea and there is the, um, the chase maze part with the centipede monster later on. And I fucking hate all three of those sections. Like this game is not beyond, um, criticism. And I think that the three, like by far the three worst parts of the game are anytime they

[03:02:49] put in a more involved gameplay section, like, uh, anything that's more than walking sim game. Like I couldn't stand any of those sections. I hated them for a different reason. It is because it tanked my frames because I'm sure so bad. I'm sure. Yeah. Dude, the fight with the fight with Swansea was almost impossible. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I bet. Even, I mean, even playing it on like, you know, without frame drops, it's not, it's not good.

[03:03:19] Like it, the issue with those is that this is a two and a half hour game with like 30 chapters in it. Like there's a lot of chapters you're constantly moving. Like each chapter is like five minutes, 10 minutes long. And so you're like, you're moving through the story. You're bouncing between timelines. The pacing is like excellent for most of this game. And every time you get to this section, the pacing grinds to a halt and like, I'll do this section.

[03:03:49] I'll get mad. Cause like, I don't, I never fully understood how it worked. And then I get out of there. I get to the end of the section. I'm like, what's happening in the story, right? Oh, I came down here looking for mouthwash or more disinfectant. I think, but then at the end it jumps to another timeline. Like, I think that these, I don't want to drag on these too much, but I think that these like really suck.

[03:04:14] And yeah, it just kind of, I was like thinking about this and I think sometimes about like narrative heavy gameplay, light games that just have the, the confidence or the decision making or both to just not try to throw things in. And like, this game's really good. And the developers had some ideas. They're like, wouldn't it be cool if we had a little first person shooters section?

[03:04:43] Wouldn't it be cool if we had like a, a stealth boss fight and like trying ideas is fine. It just doesn't work sometimes. I just think that these suck. Like, I don't want to be the, Oh, it probably sucks on purpose kind of guy. But when you would, now that you've grouped them all together, you want to know one thing that kind of ties them all up. They are the three times in the whole game that Jimmy ever put effort into what he was doing.

[03:05:09] Like he had to, he had to go get the mouthwash on his own. Like he didn't have the objective and then he had to fight Swansea. Like he physically fought him for sure. And at some point, and then the other one where that, where he's fighting the centipede thing you have to run away from, that is actually him for real this time coming to terms with what he's done. You know what I mean? Oh, that's like, that's yeah. That's him escaping, trying to escape the final escape from responsibility.

[03:05:39] It's very funny that those are the three parts that suck. The parts where Jimmy is actively doing something. So we, a little while later, you know, we talked about how Swansea is going to mercy kill Daisuke. Did we? I think we did. I hinted at it because there's the part like nobody will put Curly out of his misery.

[03:06:02] But as soon as it becomes apparent that Daisuke is like hurt, injured beyond saving, especially after Jimmy poured the mouthwash on his wounds and basically guaranteed he's going to die a long and slow, painful death. Swansea immediately gets the axe and goes in and ends it. The thing though, is that as soon as he does it, Jimmy's kind of screams at him that he was going to fix it. Yeah.

[03:06:30] Cause Jimmy has this idea that he's going to fix it and Jimmy can't handle other people taking responsibility or taking charge. You know, he has to be the one to give the orders. He has to be the one to fix things. Like he, he just can't handle somebody else doing it. I think another interesting thing is that like, uh, he had ample opportunity to stop Swansea and he didn't like Swansea hesitated for a while.

[03:06:58] Whenever he brought the axe up, he sat there for a minute and then it's kind of like, yeah, it kind of reminds me of, of Curly, how Curly just kind of watched things happen and then reacted to what happened rather than not a man of action. Yeah. Uh, this is, you know, they talk about the cryopod thing again, Jimmy can't fathom that Swansea's not doing something self selfish. Uh, so Jimmy's pushing his own reality onto others.

[03:07:27] Again, uh, Swansea reveals, he knows all the sexual assaults, which you mentioned was it probably happened during the talk that Swansea and Anya were having. I think you're correct about that because later on after the Swansea boss fight, he talks about how whenever they was, he was talking to Anya, he, he said he didn't talk to her really. He basically just listened. That was like part of what he said there. Uh, another thing is when you go in there, Anya's reaction to Swansea kind of implies that that was him telling her that there's only one cryopod.

[03:07:57] Um, uh, so he, they, they kind of go through all of this. The thing I want to point out is that, um, this happened months later after that. So not only, so not only did Curly have knowledge of the sexual assault for a while and didn't do anything. Swansea also didn't do anything. Yeah. And that's why I think I said earlier, like nobody's really faultless. And like, I would assume also that Dice K knew as well.

[03:08:26] Everybody knew there's no way to not know on a ship situation like this. I don't think Dice K knew Swansea knew everybody knew nobody did anything. Um, it's, it's really, and we can talk about this later when we talk about, um, that scene with Swansea at the end of his life. But it's really only after Swansea starts drinking that he starts doing things that are actually helpful.

[03:08:53] Um, on board, he starts to be nicer to people. He starts to listen. He starts to actually like say that he's proud of Dice K and that he liked him and he was trying to save him. Like we see Swansea in a lot of those scenes, the dancing in the lounge or just, you know, hanging out with the acts in front of the utility room. But he is actually helpful.

[03:09:18] He listens, you know, all of those things after he starts drinking again, which like, I'm not trying to say that that's like a good step that he took in his life or anything like that to, to, you know, go full on the mouthwash. But, um, it is interesting. And he kind of backs this up a little bit later when he talks about what's going on in his head.

[03:09:41] Um, but he is better to everybody around him except for Jimmy after he starts drinking. Yeah, we'll definitely talk about that. I like that because I didn't notice that. I never made note of that. So it is interesting that he is a better, he is, you're right though. He is a better person after he starts drinking, um, at least to the crew. Uh, so, uh, at this point you can go into the med bay if you want. And Jimmy can see Anya's corpse along with, uh, Curly who was there. He never moved. He never left.

[03:10:11] Uh, one thing that I want to harp on is that the, this is where the gun case is revealed to like, this is the location of the gun case. And it was under, it was where Curly was, which makes sense because on, this is another hint that Anya was with Curly all the time. It makes sense that this is where she hid it was where she always was. And, um, but what I'm saying is that the gun cases are revealed because I think it implies that this is the way that she wanted to kill herself originally, not using the painkillers.

[03:10:41] And I think the reason why that is another point in that is that whenever she's saying that the, she wishes that the, her, their people's worst mistakes weren't defining them. I think she's saying that to Curly because I think she understands she has to take the last of the painkillers and that's going to suck for him. That, yeah, I can see that too. Also like she's apologizing to him. Yeah. Yeah. For that. Yeah.

[03:11:09] Um, uh, so again, I said, Jimmy's problem is yet again solved by someone else's sacrifice. So now that, now that that pregnancy stuff is over again, Anya just disappears from the story because it's from Jimmy's perspective. Uh, and whenever you receive the gun, Curly starts laughing. And this is probably my favorite part of the whole game besides the part where he's, uh, Curly and on your talking to each other because it reveals what, uh, what Jimmy is really afraid

[03:11:39] of. And that is his idol judging him. And I think one thing I want to point out is when the time, when the third timeline is introduced, it is eight hours to judgment. This is important. Judgment is very, very important to Jimmy. And who is more judgmental than somebody who's always watching you, especially a superior on the corporate ladder. Yeah. Uh, so after this, uh, Jimmy leaves Swansea attacks him with the ax.

[03:12:07] And so I am split on this because I, I, I think I believe that this isn't real. I don't think Swansea actually attacked him. Um, because, because he gets to the cockpit somehow and then Swansea is trying to enter the cockpit. And another reason why is I'll explain later, but, uh, you, in order to protect yourself in the cockpit, you get a rope and a pipe.

[03:12:31] And whenever you find Swansea, uh, in reality, he's tied up with that rope in the chair in the utility room and he's beaten up most likely with the pipe. So I don't think you ever use the rope in the pipe to block yourself off. I think that was a delusion in Jimmy's mind to kind of like justify killing Swansea. Yeah. Like, Oh, I was attacked.

[03:12:53] I think that from this point onward, especially we had had a couple of these like interstitially throughout the game, but from this point, from Anya's death and Daisuke's death onward, um, I would venture to say that most of what we see isn't real. Um, Jimmy is, Jimmy's already a very unreliable narrator, but as things get more into his psyche

[03:13:21] and his, his really just fucked up hallucinogenic perspective on what's going on. Um, I think that you can look at basically everything, um, except for, uh, the, like the very end when he puts Curly in the thing. Um, and you know, he, he kills Swansea. We see that. Um, but I think that basically, I mean, almost everything else is a hallucination or inside of

[03:13:50] his head in some way. Like there's just no way that any of this actually happens the way that it's, um, the way that it's presented. I also think that it's cool that Swansea is the only death that you see, because I think that that death is justified in Jimmy's eyes. Like that again, because he thinks he's like making the story up that he was attacked. Like he went crazy.

[03:14:15] Um, uh, so you go through this, you go through this nightmare sequence and this is where you have to walk backwards, which I just wanted to point out that, uh, it's the opposite advice that Curly told him at the beginning of the game during the avowl, the psyche avowl, that he needs to keep moving forward. So you literally have to walk backwards. I think that that's pretty cute. I think also there's a post-it note on that vent that says no turning back.

[03:14:42] So like you die if you turn around, uh, so you have to walk backwards and always keep that in view. Um, which also, I mean, like where Jimmy is mentally now, there is no turning back. There is no redemption, nothing like that ahead of Jimmy. It's full speed ahead. I think like we have like the take responsibility things that are up on like the quest objectives and stuff too. So it's full speed ahead towards the end.

[03:15:11] Um, so eventually you end up in like this weird, like sideways, uh, med bay and there's a bunch of axes around the vent. And this is where the second part, this didn't dawn on me until like yesterday, but, uh, the axes around the vent could symbolize that, uh, uh, Swansea did in fact attack Jimmy and the way that he escaped was through the vent. I think he, he might've gone through that vent.

[03:15:39] And another thing is during this, the section, uh, an ax chops into the wall of the vent. Yeah. Which one of the, one of the jump scares that got me is that ax hitting the wall. Yeah. Uh, so I, I never really kind of put those together cause I always just had the idea that he never got attacked, like maybe cause Swansea didn't seem violent until. Well, Swansea, like he did come after Jimmy with the ax after Daisuke's death.

[03:16:04] Like Swansea did go after Jimmy in real life and he was very justified in doing so. Um, so yeah, I mean, it is true that he did attack Jimmy. Uh, and I think that he should have attacked Jimmy. Jimmy's got to go. Yeah, I think so too. I don't know. Um, I, I just always thought like, cause it seemed like Swansea was broken, but a broken man would attack as well. I, it's, it's interesting how we could have like different interpretations of so many different things.

[03:16:35] Um, so this is where the boss fight happens though. And then we're going to talk about, we don't need to talk about the boss fight besides the fact that it's like, it's a big mural for Daisuke. They're fighting over there. I guess it's like, they're fighting over the idea of who gets to mourn. You know what I mean? Because they both felt like they had responsibility over Daisuke, Jimmy being like the captain and whatnot. Yeah. Yeah. I can see that. Yeah.

[03:16:58] Um, so then we have the scene right where Swansea is in the chair tied up and it gives this awesome, like side view Swansea's tied up in a chair, Jimmy standing in front of him, pointing a gun at his head. They're both silhouetted. And in the background, we have this FMVs of just like, you know, small town life back on earth. Right. Yeah. And Swansea kind of like tells his life story and it's, it's great because it's like, it's really

[03:17:28] sad. Um, he talks about his life and how he did everything that he thought he should do. He got married, he got a house, he got a mortgage, he got a job, he got a collared shirt. I think he says, um, and he, he was miserable in his life, um, in that. And he was also an alcoholic and he, he talks about how he, he was living his life. He got sober.

[03:17:57] He, he, there's a quote that's really, really good where he says something to the effect of, um, I never wanted to believe that I was one, one mistake away from going back to my worst self, which is like you talking about like walking the tight rope. Like if you're, if you, if you're an addict, which I don't want to speak too much about it, I don't have the experience, but his thing where you, you, you're always walking

[03:18:27] that tight rope and like that one mistake can send you back. He talks about that. So it's really heartbreaking in that way because you see him lose it, um, in the game, but also he, this is like, it's, it's like this game has layers, even in this short conversation. He talks about right after he says that he says the best days of his life was when he was drunk, too drunk to care or worry about other things in his life.

[03:18:56] So like we've had by this point, I think a lot of players will have had a bit of a one 80 on Swansea. He's an asshole at the beginning of the game. And you're meant to like, think, oh yeah, he's the dick on the crew. And then you get this one 80 where you're like, actually, he kind of cares about people. He's the only one who seemingly cares about Dice K and about Anya. But then you get this thing right here at the end where if you just think about the happiest

[03:19:25] days of his life were when he was too drunk to care about anything around him, to care about his family's wellbeing, to care about things he should be taking care of. He's avoiding responsibility, too. Everybody in the game is avoiding the responsibility, except for like maybe Anya. Like, and I mean, Dice K in a way. Like, Anya has had so much put on her that it's really hard to blame her for what she did,

[03:19:55] I think. Yeah. But Swansea, it's like this final thing where it's like, oh, you like Swansea now? Guess what? He's been avoiding responsibility his entire life. Or he's thinking back to the happiest days of his life when he avoided the responsibility because he was too drunk to care about anything. Those are his words, which is crazy that they pull all of this off in such a short span of time.

[03:20:25] We're already past, like this podcast is longer than this game is. And we're, there are so many details in here. It's, it's like incredible how much they pack into like even just this scene, this scene with Swansea is like, I don't know, less than five minutes long, but there's so much detail. There's so much character packed into this short little thing. It's extremely monologue that he gives. It's, it's great.

[03:20:54] This is my favorite scene in the whole game is this one-on-one with Swansea. Yeah. Yeah. It's definitely one of my favorites as well. It gets, it, uh, bringing back to Anya really fast. It's like the, the whole character arc is wrapped up because she takes control. She, for the first time on the entire, like on her entire journey on the topper. And what she, you know, what happens with her is a, is a tragedy, but it is her taking control. You're right. Yeah.

[03:21:21] And so whenever we talk about Swansea here, uh, I think it's really amazing how they allow him to explain his alcoholism, but he never, but as an, as an expression of his character or like, uh, he never uses this alcoholism as a crutch. In fact, why a big reason why he's saying this to Jimmy is that he wants to get the idea through Jimmy's head that bad people can do good things. He's subtly hinting that he should try and salvage.

[03:21:50] Even after all of this, he should try and salvage something. Which is what he does, but in classic Jimmy fashion, he completely misunderstands the assignment. Yeah. And, uh, Swansea picks up on this. Cause like you said before, Swansea sees through all of Jimmy's bullshit. Cause Jimmy tells him that he's going to fix everything, completely ignoring what Swansea just confided in them because he wants to make it about him being the hero. And when Swansea sees through this, he just replies, fuck you. And that's when Jimmy shoots him. Yeah. Yeah.

[03:22:19] Jimmy realizes he has no power over him. Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. So, and like in Jimmy's idea of saving the day and being a hero, Swansea doesn't factor into that live or dead. He's not a, not a part of the equation. Yeah. Cause he's hyper fixated on saving curly. Yeah. Uh, so we pop back in this utility room. One interesting thing is that like, he's tied up here. Uh, he wasn't tied up in the, in the, like the monologue section.

[03:22:48] And this is whenever you get to see that he is definitely bruised and beaten, uh, probably with the pipe. Uh, then you have this nightmare kind of like section, which is like most of the rest of the game. Uh, this is the part where my computer almost crashed. Uh, when you walk through the eyeball, the eyeball hallway, which is really cool, but it's not very cool at one frame per second. So I was like, I can see that. Yeah. Yeah. The funny thing is, cause they always like fake out glitches. So I was like, is this a fake out? I don't know. Yeah.

[03:23:19] Yeah, for sure. Um, so then we have this, uh, puzzle where Curly's, uh, you have to force Curly to cannibalize himself. This is probably one of the more notable like TikTok moments of the game. Um, yeah. Uh, what's interesting is that if Jimmy really wanted to be a hero, he could have used parts of himself, you know, to feed Curly. He didn't have to hurt Curly, but of course he's not going to hurt himself. Just like, he's not going to go into the, he's not going to do anything himself. Yeah.

[03:23:45] I, I don't have a good read on, I don't have a good read on this. I don't have a good read on the part where you have to cut Curly's leg off. Um, I don't know what this is symbolizing. Um, because I don't think that in real life he's making Curly eat his own flesh. I think that we're so far into hallucination land. And there's no way in my mind, there's no way that this is what's actually happening.

[03:24:13] And I don't, I don't know what this is symbolizing. I, I think, I think it does happen because, uh, I think they were running out of supplies, which if you walk around, you can see like kind of how dilapidated everything is getting. I think like everything hits the fan because the supplies are dwindling and running out. I think that partially is what influenced Anya to take her own life and her, her sudden realization that they're almost done.

[03:24:41] Um, if you look, this is where you, this is where you find Swansea's card, by the way. And it's in the broken, uh, vending machine. Yeah. And they're all busted up because they're trying, they realize there's nothing left in there. Um, I think that probably he started eating Curly and realized, oh fuck, like this was where he like kind of snapped out of it. But, um, another thing is that he could have cut up, like, it's like the other people died. Like you could use them as meat. Why didn't he use them?

[03:25:09] Um, like he, like there's a period of time where you could have used them for, for nourishment, but he decided to hurt Curly instead. Like just a little bit more control over him. Like that's the meat we're going to use is Curly's meat. Um, but anyway, we don't have to harp on that cause it's not that interesting. Uh, this, this is where we have the, the Jesus conversation that you talked about before. Yeah. This is, um, this is facing God one-on-one and answering for your, this is judgment.

[03:25:37] As you said, we're counting down to judgment and this is the judgment. So, um, I, I really liked this scene and the first time I played it, I didn't quite understand it. The second time I played it, it's like crystal clear what's going on here. And this is, um, Jimmy was called out by Swansea. Swansea calls out Jimmy for his bullshit, but this is Jimmy being judged in like the religious

[03:26:06] sense. And, um, is I, so I forget, is this, so it's before, um, is this before? No, it's not before this, this conversation. Yes, it is. It's before, sorry. This is before Jimmy puts, uh, puts Curly in the cryopod. So, um, he, Jimmy's convinced that he saves, he, he knows how to save Curly and he's going to take responsibility.

[03:26:34] And so like he gets in front of the, the statue of Polly, something like this mountain of mouthwash bottles. There's like a light coming down and everything like that. It's, it's a very religious type of, uh, presentation. And so Polly's playing the role of, of God or whoever else is judging you. And he basically just says like, he, he calls Jimmy out for being a, you know, a lousy leader, a piece of shit, um, not taking responsibility.

[03:27:00] And Jimmy, first of all, Jimmy tries to throw out that line, our worst moments don't make us monsters. And Polly just cuts him off. He's like, dad, what are you talking about? Like, uh, and I love that how like, finally someone throws that back in his face that like, this doesn't apply to you right now and your situation. Um, I also really liked that he has all these ideas after only after Swansea calls him out. It's not this, even this coming to God moment isn't him.

[03:27:29] It's not originally, it's not coming from a place of self-reflection. It's like just pulling things that have been said by others because they, they think like, oh yeah, I've got it all figured out. I took what this other person says. But what I liked the most about this scene is that the, the Polly says something to the effect of you have to take responsibility. Um, you know, you have to do this and, and Jimmy's like, yeah, it's cool. Everything's fine.

[03:27:59] I'm saving Curly. And Polly's like, oh, you think this is about him? And it never goes further than that, but it shows you like the actual judgment being placed on Jimmy is not about Curly at all. It's about Anya who, when he's litter, when he's having the conversation with God, when he's perhaps thinking about the sins, he apologizes in this conversation for what he did to Curly.

[03:28:30] But Anya and what he did to her never come into this conversation from his perspective at all, because he's not even thinking about what he did to her. And the Polly God statue is like, oh, you think this is about Curly? And then we can intuit that your actual judgment is not about what you did to Curly, even though it's probably part of it. Your actual judgment is that, is what you did to Anya.

[03:28:58] And then you, you know, deny, deny, deny, deny, deny, to the point where he doesn't even really remember her at this point. It's, it's really, he also, it's also a lot of the, what happened to Swansea and, and Daisuke to a smaller extent to both of them, because he is directly, he is directly killed three people and one person still alive, but he's apologizing to the person who's still alive. Yeah. Yeah. It's the only person he cares about.

[03:29:27] And like, so what is he apologizing for in that moment? He's apologizing for crashing the ship and like putting Curly in this position. That's what he's apologizing for. I think he may say something like, I didn't understand everything that you had to deal with. Like, so Polly says, I think Polly asks like, so are you sorry? And he's like, yes, I'm so sorry.

[03:29:55] I'm so sorry for what I did to Curly. And yeah, Polly's like, dude, this is not about Curly. Uh, uh, yeah, Jimmy really, uh, idolizes Curly. And I think it's because he's turned him into an archetype rather than as a human being. And, uh, that is reflected in the conversation that he has with Curly while he's on fire in the void. That's right. If you remember that.

[03:30:20] So, uh, Curly offers to be the scapegoat in this conversation, which is just so Jimmy, like how, how far his delusion has gone. Right. If, if Curly could talk, this is what Curly would say. Uh, it also, uh, also Curly seems to be the only person that Jimmy's willing to apologize to. We've mentioned that before when he talked to Polly, but, uh, interestingly Curly, oh, we talked about this as well. Uh, so Jimmy idolizes Curly as a hero.

[03:30:47] I put, uh, Curly ran into the cockpit to try and change course, but more likely Jimmy really just idolizes Curly because he's the one who gave Jimmy chances. Uh, Curly's the one who got Jimmy the job, uh, in the first place. Um, and, uh, also Curly allowed Jimmy to run rampant and abuse his power on the ship and overlooked what he did. So I think that that's partially it. There's that. There's that. There's, I mean, Jimmy and Curly are friends as close, you know, as anyone on the ship is to having a friend. Those two are friends.

[03:31:16] And then like, I think that Jimmy has always wanted power and control in whatever form he could get it. Curly has that. So he respects that. And I think that he, like you said, he respects the way Curly wields power and control in ways that look easy and cool and, you know, relaxed and not, you know, calling Jimmy out for the crimes that he committed.

[03:31:44] Uh, and now I'm thinking about the Pauly conversation again, because, uh, one thing that he kind of does is that he constantly plays the victim and he acts like he's being punished for one mistake. Right. Okay. And his, and what is that one mistake that he's feeling like he's being punished for? Okay. So I made one tiny mistake. I crashed the ship. Like, can I, can a guy get a little forgiveness around here?

[03:32:10] I think one of the reasons why he feels so remorseful now is that he knows that any possibility of redemption, uh, he had died with Anya. I don't think he knows that. I don't think he's thinking about Anya. I think that he's, he thinks that redemption is within sight all the way to the very, like all the way till the credits roll in the game, because I don't think that he processes that this conversation and this judgment is focusing around his, his actions towards Anya at all.

[03:32:39] And he comes out of this conversation emboldened that he actually can save the day because of what happens afterwards and what he, what, like what he thinks is going to be the thing that saves the day after this. I think that like he once again, when confronted with his misdeeds, when confronted with all the wrongdoings, all the ways that he hurt people, he twists it in his head, completely misunderstands

[03:33:08] the message and turns it into, okay, there is one thing that I have to do after that's done. I will be the hero. I will save the day. Yeah. Well, what I mean by that, I don't think, okay. So I think there's a subliminal guilt about Anya because that's what he's haunted by, right? He's haunted by the baby cries and all of this stuff in his, in his, in his things.

[03:33:29] The, the monster we skipped over the centipede, um, the poly centipede monster that is birthed out of the thing you have to do the ultrasound on. Um, so like the baby's playing into his psyche, but I don't think he's worried about, I don't think that he cares about Anya. And I don't think that he cares about the baby as a, as a human, as a baby.

[03:33:57] He cares about that as a thing that is as a monster that is going to wreck his life. I mean, this is like, to me, a remnant from when this was a thing looming on his horizon that this baby is going to come into the world. It's his baby. Everyone's going to know what he did to Anya. I mean, like he might be going to prison, but at the very, like, I also think that he sees the baby as a monster that's going to destroy this life that he's built for himself

[03:34:25] or any possible future that he has or something like that. So I don't think that at the end here that he's concerned or even subliminally guilty about what he did to Anya. He's just worried about the baby. The baby is a monster that's going to get him in the future. Yeah. Uh, I think that, yeah, I think you're right about that. Um, I, because, uh, I think essentially he has this guilt. He does, it's not, he knows that he's going to be punished is what he's trying to avoid

[03:34:53] and that it's spread along everyone right now. And then as Anya died, that's the first death. And as soon as that happened, it set this domino effect forward where at the end, the only person he had to focus his guilt on was Curly, which as this, as this rapidly deteriorating situation went on, uh, he ends up deifying Curly basically where Curly is like also God like on fire in the void of space.

[03:35:23] And then he basically has the last supper with him on the table, which may or may not have happened, but it looks like a little bit like the last supper. Um, yeah. Uh, so we go one hour before judgment because there's a lot of like biblical like things going on right now, but, uh, so he brings them to the cake, the table. This is where everyone is, uh, around it. And then he has conversations with the dead body, a hotline Miami style.

[03:35:48] Um, uh, he talks about Curly being up high on his ladder. So he's continuing even at this point to villainize Curly in order to justify eating him. Um, I think this is another reason why I think that he definitely, he at least ate some of Curly. Uh, and then he's trying to turn himself into the underdog. And that is whenever he gets the idea. Oh, like, I think all of this is happening simultaneously. That that's happening in real life.

[03:36:14] And then the conversations with Pauly and the burning Curly are happening in his head simultaneously. Right. Yeah. Yeah. Which obviously can't be portrayed in the game. They have to be done in a different order. But so whenever he gets this idea, that's when he grabs Curly, carries him like a bride over to the cryopod. Um, he, I, I, this is the most infuriating part of the game for me because he gets to believe that he wins.

[03:36:44] Yeah. He, so he puts Curly in the cryopod, he seals it up, he turns it on, and then he shoots himself. So like you said, Jimmy, after everything that happened in the game and after all the ways in the last, especially like the last part of the game where all of his wrongdoings have been thrown back in his face, he still dies thinking that he's a hero.

[03:37:11] Which is just absolutely fucking disgusting and makes me want to peel him apart like a banana or whatever. Like, yeah, exactly. Uh, like an ape on ketamine or whatever that was. Um, I fentanyl, that was fentanyl, not ketamine. Um, I, I think that Jimmy has a quote as, as the, like the, the cryo gas is starting to freeze the tube.

[03:37:38] I think he has a quote where he says like, I did it, you know, like mission accomplished. Like, yeah, good job, Jimmy. And when I was taking notes for my own episode, I had written down like in multiple places, but this time in all caps, this fucking guy, you know, like he, like I said, he dies thinking that he saved the day. When, what did he really do?

[03:38:05] He put a, he put curly who is like just so disfigured. So, um, in such a horrible state, physical state into a cryopod. So he's going to go to sleep. What if some, what if best case scenario, somebody finds the ship, they explore the ship, they

[03:38:32] find the cryopod, they take curly out of it. What happens after that? Curly is not going to have any quality of life after. What does it mean to save curly? Yeah. At the end of this story. I wanted to say way earlier in that, like, it's so funny that, uh, one of the, so Jimmy saves curly, the only person that he, he saves is probably the person, the way to save him probably would have been to kill him shortly after discovering him. Right.

[03:38:59] Like that's, I mean, and he even hinted at that or like, it might've been just a classic Jimmy thing where he was like, yeah, someone, you know, why are we keeping this guy alive? But in, in the corner of his mind, like he, he couldn't actually do it. So he's just kind of throwing that out there. Hey, if anyone wants to take care of that, you know, which was, could be a classic Jimmy thing, but to, I mean, the alternative would be for him to get in the cryopod, which would not be, you know, better.

[03:39:29] I don't think. Yeah. But at least if he got in the cryopod, there would be a very small percent chance that he would actually have to take responsibility in the future. So maybe that is better because if someone found Jimmy, he could tell his story, I suppose. And he could make up what happened on the ship. I don't know. There's no good ending to this game. Uh, I, we're left with here.

[03:39:57] I, one more thing that I, that supports my idea that Swansea probably didn't attack Jimmy is that Jimmy saved the one person who can't tell what happened on the ship. But that's true. Yeah. Um, and so notably, uh, Jimmy, Jimmy only knows about the one pod for like 20 minutes before Daisuke goes up and then he gets hurt. And then like all that stuff happens at once.

[03:40:27] So as soon as the smoke is cleared, he kills Swansea who could probably overpower Jimmy and take the pod for himself, which is what Jimmy believes Swansea wanted to do anyway. And it's like, he killed, he killed Swansea over that. And after trying to eat Curly, maybe not being able to stomach it or just realizing the futility of it all, uh, throwing him in there to believe that he's the hero to shoot himself only to

[03:40:54] assumedly Curly never even get rescued because that's something that they throw in or they threw around also. Right. I mean, it's, it's pretty reasonable to think that unless the ship is sending out a distress call and someone finds it, no one's going to find the ship. So Curly is just going to be frozen in there for 20 years or how I think they said it was 20 years and then thaw out and die alone in the tube. So yeah, to, it's just one final thing, right?

[03:41:24] For, for Jimmy to think that this is the ultimate victory and that this is the heroic thing that saves the day. Just one final, just misguided idea at the end of the game. Um, another thing, and this was just some, from random, uh, random Twitch user at this point. Uh, he said, he said that Curly probably wouldn't even survive the cryopod because he had exposed muscle. He didn't have skin.

[03:41:52] So either he would die in the freezing process or in the thawing process. And just imagining Curly dying in the freezing process as the credits begin to roll. Like that's Curly's last thought is that like, here I am and Jimmy killed himself and I'm dying now in the, in the pod. It's like, exactly. Oh man. Yeah. No, uh, no good endings, no matter how you interpret what's going to happen at the end. Well, oh man, that was a lot.

[03:42:21] That was mouthwashing. A game so good that the reviews go on longer than the game's length itself. I am so, I profusely apologize, Dave. I knew this was going to be long. I didn't know it was going to be one of our longest episodes ever, but I want to thank you so much for coming on and, uh, and enjoying the ride with me. I don't know if enjoying is the right word. Of course, it's a really interesting game to talk about.

[03:42:46] So it did, uh, it did take us a while to get to the end, but every step along the way is interesting to talk about. So, um, I definitely appreciate it. It's been good conversation, man. All right. Uh, go and check out Dave. He's got, I'm going to have all of his links in the, in the, uh, description. He runs tales of the backlog of the top three podcast. Uh, and then he's got all his different social medias that you can go find. Uh, I appreciate it. Uh, I don't know how to end these. I never know how to end them.

[03:43:15] Let's go wash some mouths together. Listeners. Goodbye. Goodbye. Goodbye. Goodbye. Goodbye. Goodbye.