Press B 297: Vampire Crawlers In My Skin

BAFTA Award winning studio Poncle. Let that sink in for a second. Vampire Crawlers is the eagerly anticipated follow up to the massively successful Vampire Survivors, and it is finally here. We have all played it. Some of us lost an entire weekend to the obsession and we need to talk about it. A casual, fast paced deck building roguelite? Yes please.

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00:00 --> 00:57 Some of us have to run before we can walk. And some of us have to survive before we can crawl. Today on. Are we There it is. Hello. Welcome, everybody. Jake likes to blindside me. And we are rusty. It's been like 800 years since we've done an episode, and we've all been very, very busy with life. But we had. We had. I had guests visiting. I had wonderful people of the podcast hanging out with me. So thank you so much for coming out, celebrating my birthday last weekend, guys. You guys are beautiful. Wolf's got some new digs and as you can see, looks pretty sweet.
00:57 --> 01:03 Yeah, ex. Well, except for these. These cardboard boxes here. Ignore those this week.
01:04 --> 01:07 It's part of the. That large is part of the aesthetic.
01:07 --> 01:09 Also. Sorry, YouTube.
01:09 --> 01:23 Yes, we're mildly. Sorry, YouTube. So we're. We're back. Pressby is back. We didn't go anywhere. We just took a little break, which, which happens, and it's fine. But you know what else is back? All of us. Sinistar. How are you doing, sir?
01:23 --> 01:30 I'm doing pretty well. It was nice to hang out with you. It sucks being back at work, but, you know, you got to pay the bills.
01:31 --> 01:43 Preach. Dude, I. I can't. I can't complain enough about work. Trust me. I. I leave it out of the polo so you guys don't have to hear me bitch about it all the time, because it. It would be a very lengthy polo. Speaking of hating being back at work, Jake, how are you, bud?
01:44 --> 01:57 Yeah, I mean, complain about work is practically my second hobby these days, but, you know, it's good to be back. Excited to talk about the game today. I've kind of fell into indie game hold the last couple weeks, so can't wait to talk about it.
01:57 --> 02:05 Nice. And I want to say this man has cold feet because he showed up tonight, but the AC vent is right underneath his desk. Wolf, how are you?
02:06 --> 02:21 I am great. Happily in a new place, much less. Vroom, vrooms. I can leave the windows open and just stare at trees. We had no trees where we were before. What? How are you going to be in western Washington, look out the window and see, like, four trees?
02:22 --> 02:45 To be fair, you were practically east, so it's fine. You might as well have been like, you were as east of the mountain as you could possibly have been. So it's fine. We're happy to see the new location east. No, you did love the. Love the new digs. Wolf has been sending pictures of his new pad. It's beautiful. It's amazing, and it's it's in my old stomping grounds. Actually. You're right next to where I used to live for a while there.
02:45 --> 02:48 Yeah, we got cherry blossom trees outside. It's gorgeous.
02:49 --> 03:35 It's gorgeous out there. Good call. Good call. Speaking of else, what else is a good call? I gotta tell you guys, this was not a sleeper to anybody, any of us because we were all very much. Once they announced this game coming out, all of us were pretty jacked. Nobody, everybody in this planet that has ever been to a Pressby show or talked to us individually. They all know how obsessed we are with Vampire Survivors. We absolutely love the game. The clanking of gems is akin to winning in the casino, which we have covered on numerous occasions as to where that feeling comes from. But guess what guys, we got a first person view of this game. What do you guys takes on this thing? Vampire crawlers. What do you guys. How do you guys feel? Let's, let's do a question. How do you guys.
03:35 --> 03:58 I love, I love a deck builder. I mean, you know, Slate, Slay the Spire is one of my absolute favorite games. It's kind of one of my go to's when I'm like, I just want to play something and you know, have a few minutes and maybe, maybe Crawlers is gonna come into that role. I haven't gotten far. I made it to the first bridge.
03:58 --> 03:59 That's all right.
03:59 --> 04:03 But so far, so far it's not easy. Oh no.
04:03 --> 04:05 An easy game. Jake, what do you got, bud?
04:06 --> 04:18 Yeah, like when I think of like Vampire Survivors, we all played the hell out of that game. It was definitely an addiction for months and Picle still do. Still do, yeah. Was originally a single developer game of
04:18 --> 04:22 the year, except EL won it that year. But it's still game of the year, so.
04:22 --> 05:12 Yeah, well, I mean they add content to Vampire Survivors like no man's sky does. Like it was constantly adding new free updates, a couple paid DLCs and I think I bought pretty much everything over the last couple of years. But when Vampire Survivors was our game of the year, I think or for a few of us. But also it was the BAFTA game of the year. The one year, which is to think a $3 mobile game was after a winning game is nuts. So I know I was pretty excited to see what they would do next. Similar to the guy who did Blotro. Like I'd love to see what. I'm curious to see what Blotro does next, but sign me up maybe. But I had heard that. So Panicle has grown to like, 25 people now. So it's a bigger studio. Still indie, though, and they partnered with Nosebleed Interactive. Who are the guys who did Arcade paradise, which is also another game I freaking love. It's the Laundry mat arcade simulator, so.
05:12 --> 05:13 Oh, yeah, yeah, you told me so.
05:13 --> 05:34 And I realized that and I was starting to play Vampire. Vampire Crawlers. I think I. I lost my entire weekend to this game. I. I finished it, or at least I unlocked everything. And it was like 23 hours, I think, when it was all said and done and. Okay, can't wait to talk about it. Really, really surprising how good this. What game was. Well, I should be surprised because Vampire Survivors was excellent, too.
05:35 --> 05:38 I'm only 7.1 hours in, but I'll
05:38 --> 05:41 tell you what, I got more than that in the demo, right?
05:41 --> 05:52 Yeah, well, see, I didn't play the demo because, so, you know, we fire up Vampire Survivors. And I remember my first impression of Vampire Survivors was like, when the. Is this. This is dumb, right?
05:53 --> 05:59 Right. Why. Why do I not have a button to attack? Why is it just doing randomness?
05:59 --> 07:22 I don't know what's happening. I don't know why I'm entertained by it. But I. But I was apparently to the point that I just played the. Out of it and. And incessantly and couldn't stop playing it, and I adored it. And then, you know, we just. We just kept pouring on, and like Jake said, they just kept adding more and adding more stuff, and when they finally, like, it felt like the. The swan song. Not the swan song, because that's the end of it. But I felt like. Like the culmination of everything was when they added all the. The Castlevania stuff to it. Right? You were actually doing Empire stuff, and that was, like, super dope and a lot of fun. So. But it felt like that was it, right? We were going to kind of bottom out. We were going to tap out. There might be some special guests coming in or whatever. And then we hear this announcement of Vampire Crawlers. And I'm not a deck building guy. I'm not. That's not my typical game that I play. Balatro might be one of the few examples that I got into, but. Holy cow, man. I. I have not been able to put it down since I just fired it up, because that was my problem. I'm playing Crimson Desert still, which is still my current obsession. I'm trying to stream Signalis. I don't need something else that I know is literally going to rob me of my time. And while Vampire Survivors can be like 30 minute chunks if you do it well enough. This game takes a lot longer than 30 minutes to play. Wolf, what is your experience with this? I'm going on a tirade and I didn't even ask you how do you feel about this thing?
07:22 --> 07:43 I am really enjoying this. Like I said, I just had to install the demo to see how much time I had in that because it doesn't tack that onto your main gameplay. I had 7.3 hours in the demo and I have 11 in the main game. So like the first time I fired the game up, I got like 60 some odd achievements.
07:43 --> 07:50 Yeah. And then you know, for like you turn your steam deck off and you turn it back on the next morning, there's still going on.
07:50 --> 07:51 Ding, ding, ding.
07:52 --> 07:53 Yeah, there's a ton.
07:54 --> 08:08 I probably would have played a lot more this last week, but since we've been unpacking, getting things in order and all that, I just haven't had as much time as I'd like. But yeah, I'm. I'm absolutely digging on it. I'm stuck on the second bridge, the weenie bridge.
08:10 --> 08:11 Well, what's the first one?
08:11 --> 08:15 The teeny, teeny, teeny teeny bridge. So the teeny weeny, teeny weeny.
08:15 --> 08:33 But yeah, by itself out of context, it's kind of silly. But yeah, I absolutely love the game. I've. When I figured out that I could endlessly play a turn essentially. Well near endlessly because at a point you can shatter your own cards from overuse in a single turn.
08:34 --> 08:34 Oh really?
08:35 --> 08:41 Yeah. Which summons a mini death to your battle. So then you gotta kill that as well.
08:41 --> 08:42 Jesus.
08:42 --> 08:48 Maybe, maybe explain how the cards work real quick because it's. It is a deck builder. But maybe some people aren't familiar with what a deck builder game is.
08:49 --> 08:49 Right.
08:50 --> 09:38 So there are purple cards which are essentially generate mana. So you can spend that mana on different types of cards. Cards range wildly in mana cost from. Let's. Let's assume you have no bonuses to your cards. They. I've seen them range from 0 to 5. You can extend, you can make them have a higher mana cost. I've never taken that one personally. To keep combos going and sort of that sort of thing. But I prefer chaining a certain type of card that lets you restart the combo at the bottom and continue up and you can actually reduce mana cost by up to two. So I've had cards that cost negative two. You play the card, you get two mana, which is great. I love that mechanic.
09:39 --> 09:40 That's cool.
09:41 --> 09:52 So as you play the cards, if you play them in order of cost, you know, 0, 1, 2, 3, it builds a combo and subsequent cards in the combo get a multiplier.
09:52 --> 09:57 This is if you have the pancake add on. Right, right.
09:57 --> 09:59 Which you unlock pretty early. Right?
09:59 --> 10:01 Yeah. You unlock pancake early.
10:01 --> 10:02 Yeah, yeah, yeah.
10:02 --> 10:09 And that. It's the pancake one that does. You start with like your lowest. Go next. Go next. And you build a isc.
10:09 --> 10:10 Okay.
10:10 --> 10:13 I assume you get other modifiers instead of pancake.
10:14 --> 10:19 Yes. I mean you find. You find more stuff while you're going. Yeah.
10:20 --> 11:14 You can get gems that you stick into cards that allow you to send the combo back down before going back up. So there's that sort of thing. So the different types of cards, I didn't get into that after the mana. So purple is mana cards, blue is defensive. I think I've only seen armors in that color. Red is Attack, which there's all sorts of attack cards. Just like there were all sorts of weapons in Vampire Survivors and yellow is items and those are all over the board from like stuff that you could pick up in Vampire Survivors to the other. The passive relics in Vampire Survivors. The same sort of thing. So you know, you play a yellow card, it could bump your. Your might, it could bump your experience, your gold pickup, it could bump your splash damage,
11:16 --> 11:21 candelabras, the gloves, the spinach, all of that stuff from the original.
11:22 --> 11:38 There's also crawler cards that give you a. Just whatever crawler you've picked. And eventually you can unlock the ability to take more crawlers on a run. Will provide a bonus to your play for certain color cards that you play.
11:38 --> 11:46 Yeah, I was gonna say with Antonio. With Antonio, who's early on, his card basically gives you armor.
11:47 --> 11:47 Right.
11:47 --> 11:54 It's a zero cost. And, and he, and he of course talks when he does it. He's like, you know, we're gonna defeat him or something like that, right?
11:54 --> 11:56 Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
11:56 --> 13:01 And like the mechanics of the crawlers is. Is there's two mechanics for each of the crawlers. One is happens whenever you draw the crawler as you'. Fight. Every time you. It comes up and you summon it, you get that bonus. And then there's also like a. A passive ability that you get. As long as the. The crawler is active. Cuz crawlers aren't active the entire time. They have a countdown. I can't remember what the name the term for it in this game is. So you may have Antonio for three turns and you get that passive bonus and then he goes away. But if you draw and play him again, you get the one time bonus, and then you get your passive again for a few other turns. But there's also crawlers that will mess with that. I had one particular combo of crawlers where every time I drew a yellow card, it would add amounts to the time they stick around. So the way I beat the game, I had three crawlers, and basically I had 300, 400 turns worth of them staying active. They never were inactive. So I had a crazy amount of back and forth with that. So it's neat how they give you different ways to play. You can break the game in various different ways, but you break it in a fun way and a way that makes sense for a Vampire Survivors sequel. Like, it's.
13:01 --> 13:19 I was going to say, one of the greatest things about Vampire Survivors is the actual expectation that you're going to break the game. Right, right. Like, you know, spoilers for those that haven't played Survivors. At the end, there's death. That ends your. End your runs. He always ends your runs.
13:19 --> 13:20 Yeah.
13:20 --> 13:29 But at some point, you figure out how to break that and destroy death. Right. And so it's an expectation that you're going to break the game.
13:29 --> 13:30 Yeah.
13:30 --> 13:39 Right. So you know what? You should know what the setup is. You're looking. I've been looking for the setup on how it's possible to continue on from a certain location. Right.
13:40 --> 14:16 And like Wolf, like you said, there's. Like you said, there's combos, and you mentioned breaking cards. And I didn't come into that situation until late in the game. And when I realized that I could play the infinite loop of play a mana card, get a bunch of mana, play a yellow card after a combo called attractor, which gives you card draw. And I had it. With a combo, I could draw 10, 15, 20 cards from my deck, the entire deck into my hand, and then play all the mana cards and just loop it back and forth. And by doing that, you end up finding ways to reuse your mana tombs over and over again. And yeah, they start to crack. And if you do it, I think twice, I think they break.
14:16 --> 14:20 Oh, it's. It's like four times or something. You can reuse them a lot. Yeah, yeah.
14:20 --> 14:34 But the first time that happens, it's like, oh, I broke the game. Literally, I broke the cards. But then the game has a function for that where it spawns, like a mini version of death that spawns. And that's, you know, that's one thing you can. And it adds to the fight, Right. It's. It's a very funny thing.
14:34 --> 14:43 It's funny because now that I know that I'll be willing to accept it. But if I'd been playing it and like the card broke, I'd be like, well, this.
14:43 --> 14:48 It's not out of nowhere. It's not out of nowhere. You start seeing the cracks on the card.
14:48 --> 14:48 Yeah.
14:48 --> 15:00 And they grow as you start playing them further. I was like, is this gonna break? So I kept trying. I was like, am I gonna break it? And I broke a good card. And I was like, oh, no, it's gone.
15:00 --> 15:02 Yeah, you.
15:02 --> 15:03 You bastards.
15:04 --> 15:04 Right?
15:07 --> 15:07 Yeah.
15:07 --> 15:08 Yeah.
15:09 --> 15:58 But there's the other factor of it too is some cards you get, like when you pick up in a run as you're calling through the dungeon, they're like single use, right? They. They break on on use or they disappear in use. But like you said, there's gems. Yeah, there's. There's gems that can prevent that from happening. Right. There's. There's abilities that make that not happen, or there's gems that can make a card extra powerful, but then it causes the discards when you use it. So you can customize a lot. Yeah, it's a lot of customization of the cards. It's interesting because when I first played it, I'm not a huge fan of deck builders. I do like them occasionally, but I'm not usually heavily into it. But Vampire Crawlers at the beginning doesn't feel like a full on deck builder because there isn't much manipulation in your deck. You add cards as you play, but it's not too often you remove cards really, but that changes the more you play it.
15:59 --> 16:34 That's very Slay the Spire, though. Slay the Spire is, is very much that way as well. Like your character that you pick has kind of a base deck which will be like, I don't know, 15 cards or something. And each time you start a run, you, you essentially, I mean, you can buy power ups, but you essentially start with that and you collect cards as you're going through your run. I don't, I'm trying to remember if, if Slay the Spire has a. Change your deck outside of collecting that way, I don't think it does that. I remember.
16:35 --> 16:38 But during a run, is there ways to thin your deck and slay the spire, like removing cards?
16:38 --> 16:38 Yes.
16:38 --> 16:39 Oh yes.
16:39 --> 16:47 You can remove cards. You can trade cards away. Yeah, there's. There's different scenarios on which you can remove cards from your deck.
16:48 --> 16:57 Yeah, I actually got crawlers. It doesn't happen as often. Like, the. The only time it really happens early on is when you evolve your weapons, your attack card. You take two cards into one.
16:57 --> 17:24 I was gonna say the first time I came up on a vending machine, I was like, okay, this is directly out of Slay the Spire, where you're trading a card for a thing that's. That is like. I mean, maybe Slay the Spire isn't the first one that did that. I mean, obviously, probably magic gathering the actual tabletop. Card games probably did as well. But, I mean, I played a lot of magic and, you know, there are things like banish, you know, from the game and yada yada.
17:24 --> 18:26 And so, yeah, the idea of a deck builder is like the ways to remove cards from your deck and then add cards to deck. So you're basically adding the cards you want to keep and then thinning out the ones you don't over time. And yes, latest fire sounds like it does it a lot. Vampire Crawlers, there are definitely instances where you do that. The vending machine is one. There are chests where you need to sack two cards to open the chest and get one. Evolution takes two cards, makes one. So there's ways to. Ways to do it. But especially early on, it didn't feel like there's that much deck manipulation, which was fine because, again, I'm not really heavily into that kind of thing. Later on, once you've unlocked, done more unlocks, there's a bit more of that and you have more control of. As you play for that point, though, you're kind of into it. You're kind of hooked. It's got your hooks into you, and you're all in on it. But in the beginning, it didn't turn you off. I think overall, the game was great at easing the mechanics onto the player. Like you mentioned the pancakes to enable the combo. So right from the beginning, the first game of Vampire Crawlers, you don't have the combos, you don't have multiple characters. There's a lot of mechanics you don't have. You get them every step as you unlock a dungeon. Right. So it's.
18:27 --> 18:27 It's fast.
18:27 --> 18:33 Like, it happens very quickly, but it eases you into all the mechanics over the first, like, maybe six, seven runs.
18:34 --> 18:37 Jake, I have one question, though. Gwent.
18:40 --> 18:40 Gwen's pretty good.
18:41 --> 18:43 There is a lot of tunnels in this game. Just.
18:43 --> 18:44 Yeah.
18:44 --> 18:49 So, Jake, I have a question for you. How many bridges are in this game?
18:52 --> 18:53 Three, I believe it was.
18:54 --> 18:57 Okay, so each of the bridges is just a single floor.
18:57 --> 19:13 It's a single floor and yeah, like the bridges compared to other stages. Very fewer power ups on the, on the screen. It's like a single tunnel as opposed to a small dungeon. Very challenging. Each fight has many waves of enemies in each fight and it gets harder as you go.
19:13 --> 19:16 Yeah. And they're, they're. None of them are the weak enemies either.
19:16 --> 19:17 They're like stuff.
19:18 --> 19:21 They're the hundreds of hit points enemies. Yeah.
19:22 --> 19:59 It's kind of nice because it feels like it steers you to go back and go deeper into the other dungeons to get more stuff instead of just plowing through the main world map. Because I, I just kept going like I'd unlocked. You know, you get to the first one with the forest, then you get to the library and then you got your thing and I was like, oh shit. Okay. You go straight to that. And it just beat my face. Face in the ground. And I was like, what the. So I went back and. And then beat the. The five levels, you know. And then it opened up more and I went, oh, there's like a ton more in here I didn't know was here. So that's, that's cool.
19:59 --> 20:04 I beat the first two enemies on the bridge and then just got my ass handed to me.
20:04 --> 20:05 Yeah.
20:05 --> 20:06 What were you going to say, Wolf?
20:07 --> 20:25 Am I correct in assuming that the stages aside from the bridge all have like. I don't know necessarily if they all have five floors. I don't remember the first dungeons. If they had fewer, they might have only had three at the very beginning. Most of them have three stages, right?
20:25 --> 20:42 All of them, yes. So mo. So the first three areas, right. Like forest, library and is it milk factory, I think or dairy factory, have five floors each and then there's three different levels. Like three different in separate runs. Right. Like three different levels of that. So there's three different runs of the forest. Three different runs of the. Of the library.
20:42 --> 20:43 Yeah.
20:43 --> 21:07 And the. The bosses are different for each. And there's also unlockable item, at least one unlockable in each of those stages. But the last few stages are different in terms of the meta floors. And then not all of them have more than one level, but that's something I expect. I would. I would not be surprised to see updates to the game adding more to this for sure. And then you have to kind of separate with bridges as well.
21:07 --> 21:08 Yeah.
21:08 --> 21:32 I have a question. So like the first few levels of the forest, I went and fought every fight and broke everything and then went and killed the boss. Right. And then used the shovel and Then later on, I was like, I've unlocked the path to the boss, and instead of going and losing health, I'm just going to go do the boss. Did I. Did I hamstring myself by doing that?
21:32 --> 21:33 No.
21:33 --> 21:46 So the thing with it is early, like, sometimes you. You get as much experience as you need to get the. The cards and the build deck that you want, and once you have that, you can just keep going. There's sometimes you.
21:46 --> 21:46 For.
21:46 --> 22:25 For me, like example, I like getting more health on my. On my character. And you can only do that if you play a certain card over and over again. So you have to do the battles to kind of cycle that health card. But if you have a great deck and a great build or if it's a. For me, it was a very particularly hard stage. I just want to get through it. And I was already pretty powerful. Yeah, I skip fights, but especially once you've beaten the stage once already and you've already gotten the unlocks, then there's not much reason to explore. But definitely there's decks or situations where you want to farm the xp, you certainly don't have to. I mean, hell, there's a character that actually gives you XP bonus, and when you have her, you're gaining so much extra XP anyway, you're not really losing out by skipping fights again.
22:27 --> 22:46 Even on the last floor, if you've got a combo big enough when you play her card, you could get like, two, three levels from just playing that XP character card. I don't remember the character, but I was like, holy shit, I'm on the fifth floor. I'm like, level 45, and I just got three levels in a row from
22:46 --> 22:50 playing her, and that's more than enough to be the stage.
22:50 --> 22:56 My next question is, if I don't like a fight, can I opt to listen to a really weird song?
22:57 --> 23:01 Not in this game. That's the other game I'm playing. We'll talk about that later.
23:02 --> 24:19 That's it. That's a different. That's a different episode. Yeah, yeah. No, I. I definitely. I haven't broken anything yet. Like, literally and metaphorically. I have not. I know there's more to it, because I know Vampire Survivors was a deeper game than what we all thought. I mean, the fact that I was playing it for 15 minutes and survivors and you guys were like, no, dude, keep going. I was like, this is lame. You're like, it's not. Just keep going. And it has that meta depth to it that it just blows my mind on some of these games. That have come out lately. And I know this is in there. So if I were to play this and not have touch survivors, I'd be kind of like, meh, it's a card. It's a card game. It's all right. But I know that there's way deeper that needs to be found. Obviously Wolf being the pro gamer he is, and Jake being the persistent gamer he has, have found a ton of stuff that my, you know, two hours after work that I can squeeze in, you know, to find stuff. I just. I haven't examined anything and I'm not patient. I'm not a patient player when it comes to this stuff. I'm just whipping cards to be like, oh, I like spinach. Let's get that mite up. Because I'm gonna. The more might I have, I'm gonna start ripping through stuff. So I'm just like, every time I get a spinach leaf, I'm throwing it
24:19 --> 24:31 up there and brings up a question I have. Okay, so does the mite bonus from like one round carry over to the next round?
24:32 --> 24:33 Depends on the card.
24:34 --> 24:50 No. So might. Does not last past the battle. So it might amount for, you know, for number of projectiles. And a few of those don't. Don't last past the battle. They reset. There are permanent upgrades for that run that you can add, but they're very small. I think isn't a vending machine. You can sack an armor and get
24:50 --> 24:57 a permit plus one. I literally meant a round of cards. So you're in a fight, you use a spin. Ouch.
24:57 --> 24:57 Yes.
24:57 --> 25:01 Your turn ends the whole fight. You still carry that? Okay.
25:01 --> 25:03 Yes. Okay. Yes. Right.
25:03 --> 25:13 It's after the battle. The things on the left will reset back to their base stats that you had before the battle started. The things on the right, if you increase those during combat, they stay up.
25:14 --> 25:19 I was gonna say the vending. The vending machines give you permanent for that floor.
25:19 --> 25:22 Yeah, that's. That was the. Jake's point. If you find it.
25:22 --> 25:23 Engineering.
25:23 --> 25:25 Yeah, okay.
25:26 --> 25:42 Yes, sir. Yes, sir. So, yeah, so I. I haven't been able to like, I know there's mana cards, but I don't know if I've. I had to have seen them, but I don't feel like I've seen mana cards because I haven't seen anything. You've. You've seen my. You've seen. Okay, yeah. Oh, okay. Yeah.
25:42 --> 25:42 The books that give you.
25:42 --> 25:49 Man. Okay, yeah, yeah, yeah. The tomes, the weighty tomes. Yeah, okay, I have seen those. All right, cool. Then I am Doing it. Right?
25:49 --> 25:50 Yeah.
25:50 --> 25:59 Well, you know what it is chart is. It's the characters. Right. So when you. When you pick a character, I think it's. I think correct me or wrong wolf. It's five cards that come with that character. And then when you.
25:59 --> 26:00 I think it's four.
26:00 --> 26:01 Is it four?
26:01 --> 26:01 Okay.
26:02 --> 26:07 And then when you add. If you add another caller to your team, then that other crawler brings in one card.
26:07 --> 26:10 Oh, you get those number. Oh, okay. I didn't realize that. I.
26:10 --> 26:21 So when you pick a character, the cards in the bottom, you'll see. So if you pick Antonio, I think he starts with like a dagger and an armor or something. Right. And if you pick the. The Alucard knockoff, he starts with a to and a fire wand or something.
26:21 --> 26:21 Okay.
26:21 --> 26:39 So that's how you can kind of customize it. The character that I. I pretty much beat the entire game with starts with the Song of Mana, which is this awesome, expensive spell. But when you use it, it also gives you a mana card you can also use, and it's a wild card, and that's Is brutal. It's crazy. So I use her for the most time.
26:39 --> 26:43 So, Jake, since you've. Since you've rolled credits, as it were.
26:45 --> 26:47 Yeah, there's credits. There's also one of the.
26:48 --> 27:03 One of the favorites. One of the favorites that I love from Survivors is when you get, like, some of the enhanced, like the combined. Like, you get the pill, you get the beams, and you get the rate, whatever. Does that start showing up in this?
27:05 --> 27:12 Yeah, there's definitely. There's definitely evolutions. They're definitely similar. A lot of the same combos from Survivors are here, but the mechanics are different.
27:12 --> 27:12 Right.
27:12 --> 27:16 I used to love playing Garlic and evolving Garlic and Survivors.
27:16 --> 27:17 Yes. Garlic was great.
27:17 --> 27:44 Yeah. And you can evolve that in. In crawlers as well. But it's a bit different in what it does. It only the damage will scale with the combo, but it only heals you two health, which is great. In the beginning, I've used the. The cr. That's actually how I beat the bridges, is I use garlic and crawlers to beat the bridges. But there are better ways to heal later on that you get. But there's a lot of oddball items like a wagon wheel from a bone that's in here. And there's, like, no upgrades for those. Like, Survivors never had upgrades for those. But they're here as well. But they're powerful.
27:45 --> 27:46 There's cherry bombs.
27:46 --> 27:59 The cherry bombs, and the panda that's here. The bayonetta knockoff with the two guns. I love those guns because they are 1 cost 3, 1 cost 4. I believe it is. And then there's also an evolution where you. Where it's a much powerful gun and
27:59 --> 28:02 they're not the birds.
28:02 --> 28:10 Oh, the birds are brutal. The black and the white birds. Yeah, they evolve them. You get the green tropical paradise effect. That's a really sick damage.
28:10 --> 28:18 That's kind of what I was wondering because I remember when you evolved the birds, it was like my screen, it's like I'm gonna get seizures watching this. Right?
28:18 --> 28:41 Like it's. I don't think it's to that level because it's not as constant as it was in Vampire Survivors. But if you are stacking things and your mite's pretty high, like if you get the rune tracer upgrade it just everywhere, like. But it's not one attack, right. It's like that one turn and then it chills out after that. It's not like you're getting what you call a technicolor vomit. Is that what you were calling it?
28:41 --> 28:42 Yes, yes.
28:42 --> 28:55 It's like to that extent. Yes, to that point. But not in like for. For 20 minutes. You know, if you're just like, okay, nothing can kill me now. You know, that kind of thing. But it does happen.
28:55 --> 28:56 Honestly.
28:56 --> 28:56 The.
28:56 --> 29:22 The pentagram is kind of a crack up too. Just because if you. If you're in a big fight and you get a strong combo going on like your first or second round, you can wipe out everything except the boss in that fight with a pentagram because it's. The bigger the combo gets, the more rows it wipes out. So I've wiped out like 12 rows at once. And then the. The boss who was not visible just comes out. There he is.
29:22 --> 29:23 Right, right.
29:23 --> 29:27 But you don't get any XP when you kill with the pentagram. That. That's the only pentagram.
29:27 --> 29:32 No, I think that was the same. I thought that was the same a
29:32 --> 29:34 percentage on the survivors where it was
29:34 --> 29:40 like, no, remember it. It flash. No, there's no gems that stay on the ground.
29:41 --> 29:42 I didn't realize that.
29:43 --> 30:25 There is. There is a gem. There's two gems in. In crawlers. One will deal damage based on the amount of gold you have and the other one deals damage based on the number of kills you have. And for the bridge or for the couple of the larger stages, having one of those gems on your like your mana card, especially one that you're going to cycle often. I had that combo going where I would use a mana tome and Because I had the death gem embedded into it. It was doing, like, 10 damage to a single random enemy, and it was just constantly cycling, like, the gems. The gems really open up the game. And that's kind of where the. The upgrade system happens is, like, you early on, you unlock something that lets you add slots to cards, and that's your gold sink, right? Yeah. And when you do that, you can, like, you can get slots and cards.
30:25 --> 30:38 Like, one of the ones that I like to do frequently when I'm doing the upgrades on the cards is the return to hand, and I do that on, like, a free card so that then I can just, like, spam it, right?
30:38 --> 30:38 Yep.
30:38 --> 30:41 That's when you start running the mana cards. Yep.
30:41 --> 31:33 That's when you start using the Man, I use those on the. On the weighty tomes so I can get, you know, three or four mana and then boost my up. And then it's like when you. When you first start, you're like, when you, like, get the Hellfire, right? Like, you combine the fire wand and whatever to get the Hellfire, and you can't use it because you only have three mana. It costs four. It's like sitting in my deck going, come on, man. And then that's when I started. And again, now that I'm realizing it's the tomes and stuff, I'm. I've been a lot more, I guess, particular about what I'm seeing, which is what is how you're supposed to play this game and not just, oh, cards, cards, card, cards. You're supposed to be, you know, procedural about how you're doing it. No mana card. Stack, stack, stack, mana card. Some armor, good to go. That's around, like, that's basically how I've been playing it. But initially I was just like, oh, attack, attack, attack. And some armor. Oh, what's this?
31:33 --> 31:48 It took me a while. It took me a while to realize that the gray cards were static wilds. So, yes, they never benefit from the combo, but they'll keep a combo going so that you can reset back to a low number building on it.
31:48 --> 31:49 That's cool.
31:49 --> 32:14 It took me a long time to realize that. Otherwise, I was just like, well, I'll play that to start. And then once I realized that all the numbers were a little bigger from playing that, I was like, wait, it's a wild. And then one is. Once you start finding the wild gems to stick in a card, like, you put that in a three or four mana tome, now it's like, it's free, and it Keeps the combo going whenever you need it. So I love that.
32:15 --> 32:15 That's cool.
32:15 --> 32:42 And then you have Song of Mana, which, when you use Song of Mana, gives you a wild card for generating mana. There's also the bouquet item that you. You unlock fairly early. And then when you use the bouquet item, you have a chance of getting a heart card, which is also wild card. So there's ways to generate wild cards in your deck itself. Combined with finding wilds as you explore a stage, you can. You can stack them. And the thing too is when you get a wild in your hand that's disposable, it's going to break. You don't have to play at that turn. You can just pass and keep it in your deck.
32:42 --> 32:42 Yeah.
32:42 --> 32:57 Like, and just. And just keep it until you need it. So. And like, there's. Some of the evolutions will require you to use that need. That needs a disposable item. Like the Stone Mask is used for an Evolution. If you use it in a round, you. You lose it. So you have to kind of keep it and not play it.
32:57 --> 32:57 Right.
32:57 --> 33:02 And so you have a chance to evolve that combo. So that part I didn't realize until early on.
33:02 --> 33:04 The other two is with you burn those cards.
33:05 --> 33:06 Yeah. You don't have to.
33:06 --> 33:10 Yeah, I didn't think about those being an Evolution combo.
33:10 --> 33:10 Yeah.
33:10 --> 33:15 Yes. Yeah. It's much like a lot of the combos from Survivors are. Are in crawlers. Like.
33:15 --> 33:19 Yeah, it's been long enough though, that I've forgotten them all.
33:19 --> 34:06 When you pick up the Stone Mask, you keep it right. In Survivors because it's just a. A thing you grab one time. You think about one time burning it. No, I mean it's Survivors. Not. Not in Walt Carlos. I mean it. Survivors. You pick up an item, you have it, it's in your person forever, and then you're like, huh, which one do I want to evolve at this point? Like, what am I going to waste? Or what am I going to look for? Because that's how I always play Survivors. It's like, okay, I'm going for this guy. I'm getting the. The left and right arrows. And then I'm going to get the, you know, the sprig or whatever, and then I'm going to try and beat death. Right. So in this one, it's like you have to be more calculated about. Like you said, if you burn a card, like the stone Mass card, it's gone. You don't. You don't think about it. You think, I had the card in My deck, I should have it. No, you you wasted. So you can't get that evolution out of it. So that makes a lot of sense.
34:06 --> 35:19 The most important thing too is at the. Except. Except for the bridges. I don't think the bridges is always the same. Well, no, maybe in the bridges, but generally in every stage, the first floor has a monolith where you break it and you get the red evolution option. Right. Otherwise your evolution options are pretty randomized. You can get it from level ups or loot or whatever. I think actually maybe not level ups, maybe just loot, but there's always a guaranteed one evolution on the first floor. So before you open that monolith, you know that's going to be guaranteed evolution on the first floor. So you make sure you have the evolution you want, like the cards in your deck before you go to it. That way you're going to get the evolution. If you go to it with only half the combo or an incomplete evolution, it gives you the card you need, which is kind of pointless for the first floor. So when I realized that, I'm like, okay, yeah, so like, if I have the. If I have the. If I have the cross and I have. I think it's spinach, then. Then I know, okay, I can go to the first monolith and then I. I involve it. Otherwise it's wasting my time. Right? So that's how you get a guaranteed evolution on the first floor every single time. That, that's. That's kind of expected. The second floor of most stages will have a monolith that gives you a managem, which permanently gives you plus one mana for the rest of that run. So like, you know those two things going into every stage. Like, you're gonna get evolution on the first floor, man on the second floor. And you kind of plan accordingly.
35:20 --> 35:41 I have a question. So maybe you guys have noticed this and I think Jake and or Wolf will be able to answer it because center, if you've seen this, let me know. But there are certain boss battles, and I noticed it later on and I think it was after. I think it was after one of the libraries. But the boss will get little purple eyes around it.
35:41 --> 35:41 Yes.
35:41 --> 35:51 Seem to be counting down. What is that? I don't know what that is. And then it throws like. Is that just a thing that some bosses do? Is that something I triggered?
35:51 --> 35:52 Do you.
35:52 --> 35:54 Do you want a spoiler? Is the question.
35:54 --> 36:04 Is there a spoiler involved in that? Wolf is smiling over there like he's got like a gift for me and he doesn't want to share it yet. If it's a spoiler.
36:04 --> 36:07 I haven't figured out exactly how it works yet because.
36:07 --> 36:08 Okay, okay.
36:08 --> 36:12 I. Some fights I'll use. I'll just keep going and going and going.
36:12 --> 36:12 Yeah.
36:12 --> 36:21 And it's like, nothing happens when they do it. And, you know when you do that against death, he gets through his eyeballs, and then, boom, you're dead.
36:21 --> 36:22 You're dead.
36:22 --> 36:22 Okay.
36:23 --> 36:25 So I'm not exactly certain how it works yet.
36:25 --> 36:28 If it's a spoiler thing. If it's spoiler, it's not really spoilers.
36:29 --> 36:38 It just. It's a mechanic. It's a boss mechanic. And I didn't get it until very late because I thought at first that, oh, boy, the. The eyeballs are happening. I better play my cards fast before the eyeballs hit me.
36:38 --> 36:40 That's. Yeah, that's what I was. Oh, no.
36:40 --> 36:41 I figured out that it was like,
36:41 --> 36:46 each card you play, each card play triggers an eyeball. So that's. That's what it is.
36:46 --> 36:49 Is it a card style, or is it just a card played?
36:50 --> 36:51 Just any card played, yeah.
36:51 --> 36:55 Okay. Okay. I didn't know if it was, like, an attack card or something else different. Okay.
36:56 --> 37:12 So when you're fighting a boss, I kind of encourage you to slow down a little bit and realize maybe I don't want to spam every card in my hand because I'm just going to trigger the eyeballs to fill up. Because when the eyeballs fill up, the boss does a special attack or does damage to you. So. And, like, there's ways to. To mitigate that, which I didn't find out till very late in the game. Like, I got stuck.
37:12 --> 37:13 Okay.
37:13 --> 37:26 In one of the later stages, and I could not beat it. I had unlocked everything in town. I got everything I could, and I could not get past the bosses until I figured out how to navigate the eyeballs and get around it. So once you figure that out, it's a lot easier.
37:26 --> 37:32 That's kind of insipid, the way that that works, because I would also be like, oh, I got to get all my cards out.
37:32 --> 37:59 It feels like. Listen, the. The. The RPG in me is like, that's a countdown. Like, it's counting down, and obviously, I'm triggering the countdown, but I'm not realizing it. I'm just seeing the. The eyes appear, and I'm like, it's going to do a super attack. I gotta kill it before it hits me. And then they fell out, and it gives me, like, a junk card, and I'm like, What the. What is even this? It's something weird, and then it's, like, confused, and I can't pick the goddamn cards I want to pick.
37:59 --> 38:47 Yeah, it's like there's a few different abilities, right? Yeah, yeah. It's like. It's boss special attacks, like confusing freezing cards damage. Some of this is really big damage. I think it's dependent on the boss, if I'm not wrong. But the figuring out how to fight against the eyes is kind of like. It's like, kind of akin to, like, survivors at beating death for the first time. Once you realize you can beat death if you build your character a certain way, it's the same thing in Crawlers. Once you realize how you can beat the eyeballs or stop them, the game becomes much easier to figure out. It's kind of like a checkpoint. It's interesting, but there's a play all button next to the cards. It says, play all the cards. My daughter is 4, so when she sees me playing them on the Steam deck on the couch, she wants to play, but the way she plays, she just smacks the X button and plays all the cards. But that'll kick your ass against the boss, right? For the most part, yeah.
38:47 --> 39:04 That's funny. Okay. I knew there was some kind of thing to it, and I. And I'm sure I would have figured it out had I slowed down and thought about it, but I seriously was just like this. I just automatically. It's gonna do Mega Flare. It's. It's the Hummet. It's gonna hit me with a. You gotta do this.
39:05 --> 39:05 Hit it with everything.
39:06 --> 40:01 Yeah. I needed a reflect spell. Fucking know, that's. That's kind of where my head was at. So. Okay, that's cool. See, these things are cool. Like, that's what I love about, you know, Survivor Crawler type games like this, that there's such. There's such hidden in there that you just discover because you're, you know, if you're me and you're impatient and you're just whipping out there and not paying attention to the process, you're getting your ass kicked because you just. I'm just. I don't know what the hell I'm doing. There's not really. There's not really instructions. Like, you just. There, There are, there are, there are. But for people like me who don't like to read game instructions and they just want to play. Listen, I work manufacturing guys. I read instructions all day long on how to build stuff. I don't want to read instructions on How. That's why I like Crimson Desert. Dude, there's nothing telling me what. I'm just doing it and it's cool and it's fun.
40:01 --> 40:01 Read.
40:02 --> 40:25 Yeah, no, say the book. But no, it's. It's. If you slow the down and you. And you dig into it, you'll get more information and. And then it makes the game a lot more fun. But that's why I have you three to calm me down and explain to me. Slow down, dude. Don't eat that second burger, you idiot. Like, read the books, dude. Read it. Oh, okay.
40:25 --> 40:55 If you ever get stuck in in Vampire Crawlers, the best thing you can do is in town go to the unlocks building and that's like a page of all the unlocks and chivos. And it tells you for not everything, but a lot of them just tell you, here's how you get this. You know, get a level 40, play this character to level 10. Like it tells you go. It gives you small goals that you can go do. And that's what I was doing whenever I got stuck, I got stuck in the bridge. I'm like, fuck this bridge. I go to look at the unlocks list. What am I missing? What can I do besides while I'm waiting or building up money to unlock shop stuff?
40:56 --> 41:06 That's how Survivors was too. You'd go look at the chivo list and it'd be like, here's the ones you've got. Here's your. Like the. The ones you need. Basically it told you what you needed.
41:06 --> 41:07 Yeah, right, right.
41:07 --> 41:19 Like there's 161 chivos, like steam achievements and I got all of them and I never get chivos. And it's because in this game they're not very hard to get. Like they're. They're pretty much there and they tell you how to do most of them play.
41:19 --> 41:26 That was. That was Survivors as well. I mean I. Before the expansions I went and 100% of it as well.
41:27 --> 41:31 So we were chasing each other. I think on how far we remember it was.
41:31 --> 41:46 It was. I think it might have been the first or second trip to visit you. We sat on your couch since dress myself and you. And it was like it was either. It was either vampire survivors or time wasters. And we were just like, I'm unlocking this.
41:46 --> 41:59 I'm unlocking like 151. Son of a bitch. I felt like Legolas and Gimli being like, that one was already dead. Like the Lord of the Ring reference for today.
41:59 --> 42:04 There you go. Well, that's that's because. That's because my AX is in its cerebral cortex.
42:04 --> 42:10 It is. There you go. It's twitching. It's already dead. I hope they.
42:10 --> 42:25 I hope they add more to this game like they did Survivors because Survivors, especially toward the end there, they had some wild dlc. Not the Castlevania was. Was my favorite. And it's cool as they also added an Among Us one which my daughter loves. For the Among Us characters and power ups, they added a Contra dlc.
42:25 --> 42:26 Yeah. Which is.
42:26 --> 42:41 Which is nuts. So I. I hope they take that kind of spirit and they bring it to Crawlers. I know Crawlers is a much more, I think a more expensive game for them to make. So I don't know if we'll get quite the same amount of DLC from like Survivors did, but hopefully get some because I could see them doing all kinds of wacky stuff in this.
42:42 --> 43:17 With how successful this shit is, how could they not? And if the team's bigger. Yeah. How could they not? Like, they just probably. They're probably got like in the wings, but they're waiting for approval from whatever collaboration they're going to reach out for. I mean, right. Hopefully we won't get like a Fortnite collaboration, but you know what I'm saying, like we get something that's. That's. That's big right now that people will jump into. Like we're gonna get a GTA 6 collaboration before we get GTA 6. You know what I mean? Like, it's. There's so many options out there that you could do some cool with that and just put it in the vampires universe and sold.
43:18 --> 43:18 Oh boy.
43:18 --> 43:22 You got four people here that are gonna spend money on that as soon as it drops. Like, without question.
43:23 --> 43:27 Well, they sold what, a million copies in a week in first week.
43:27 --> 43:27 Yeah.
43:27 --> 43:29 Hugely successful.
43:29 --> 43:30 That's awesome.
43:30 --> 43:42 You know what the was for them is that demo was super well received and there's a lot of content that demo, like you spent. I didn't spend seven hours like you did, but I spent at least a couple hours in a demo, which is unheard of.
43:42 --> 43:42 Right.
43:44 --> 44:12 If we are in a place where we can shift gears, I want to. We already kind of brought up Steam Deck for, you know, when we were doing Survivors and Time Wasters and I think it would be a good call out, Wolf, if you could talk about the changes you made to make it work on your deck as better. Because the one. One of the great things about Survivors was it it sipped power. Right. And so you could play Survivors for A long time on your deck.
44:12 --> 44:13 Yeah.
44:13 --> 44:22 Steam Deck, for those that don't know. Rolf, you found some changes in the. In the settings that I was like.
44:22 --> 44:56 I was like, there's got to be something that's just eating away at the battery life on this thing. And it didn't make any sense. So I went to look at the graphical settings and I saw that the resolution was set to 2560 by 1440, even though it was in full screen mode. And when I changed that to 1200 by 800, I saw the screen do something and change a little bit. And so I was like, okay, that must have actually done something. So I don't know if that's something that just went under the radar for them or what, but, yeah, that seemed to have helped. I also disabled Motion Blur.
44:57 --> 44:57 Yeah.
44:57 --> 44:59 Because get rid of Motion Blur.
44:59 --> 44:59 Anyway.
45:00 --> 45:09 Yeah, I don't like Motion blur as it is. And then there was one other toggle setting that was in that same screen that I turned off because I was like, I don't care about that.
45:09 --> 45:10 Is it like blue?
45:10 --> 45:30 And I turned off. Yeah, it might have been bloom. And I turned on Vsync, which I don't know if I needed to or not, but I was like, vsync is never bad. So I turned it on. But yeah, my battery life now I can. Like, I could not do a single run on a single battery before.
45:30 --> 46:01 That's crazy because mine was set. I checked that because after we had that talk, I looked and my stuff was all set to Steam Deck style stuff I took. I turned off Motion Blur because, hey, I don't know what the hell you need it for in a game like this. And B, I also don't care for motion blur and literally anything, so I don't. I just turned that off just as habit. But I. I was playing that thing for probably a good hour and a half and I just. And I went to like maybe from 80 to 20 and an hour and a half, two hours.
46:02 --> 46:02 Wow.
46:02 --> 46:08 I thought I was getting. I was getting a pretty good run at it. So I. I was. I was like, wonder what's going on with this stuff?
46:08 --> 46:13 But that was probably getting more like two hours of battery life out of it now, at least.
46:13 --> 46:18 Yeah. Okay. That seems where I'm at. Yeah. What are you. What are you doing, sister?
46:19 --> 46:22 Well, I'm installing it on my deck first and I'm gonna validate the settings.
46:23 --> 46:23 Yeah.
46:23 --> 46:24 Because I've been playing it on the desktop.
46:25 --> 46:25 Yeah.
46:25 --> 46:26 Oh, okay.
46:26 --> 46:32 Yeah, just in the room next door. If I run over and get It I can tell exactly which settings I toggled.
46:33 --> 46:33 Mine's down.
46:33 --> 46:37 Survivors was the ones out of battery, so.
46:38 --> 46:38 Yeah.
46:38 --> 46:40 Yeah. What was that, Jake?
46:41 --> 47:08 The Deck Vampire Survivors in the Deck was one of the few games where I got like four hours of battery life out of the thing. Otherwise, I'm used to hour and a half, two hours with the Steam deck. So. I was also pretty surprised that when I first started sitting down without it being chart plugged in, I'm like, how come I'm only getting an hour? Why is it eating battery worse than freaking Diablo 4? It's pretty crazy. But the option I used was there's like an option for 3D effects on cards, and I turned that off, I think.
47:09 --> 47:25 Oh. Weirdly. All right. So, yeah, I had to change my resolution to 1200 by 800 like I said, and I thought I had turned off Motion Blur and Bloom, but I see they're still on. So literally the resolution change is what fixed my battery.
47:26 --> 47:32 Okay. That's weird that it was that high on the deck. I guess this thing is deck compatible. Is that any Steam deck?
47:33 --> 47:41 I wonder if it had to do with the demo settings from before. I don't know, but that could be it.
47:42 --> 47:42 I don't know.
47:42 --> 47:43 That's bizarre.
47:43 --> 47:54 I'll have to verify because maybe it's pulling from desktop, because I've been running mine at 4K full screen on my desktop. I'll see if this spins up at 4K.
47:54 --> 47:57 So I have not played it on desktop at all.
47:58 --> 47:58 Okay.
47:58 --> 48:01 I haven't played this game on my Steam deck.
48:01 --> 48:22 That's weird. That's crazy. Yeah. When, when I was looking at it the other day, I was like, all my stuff is Steam Deck level stuff, except for the motion Motion Blur and the Bloom and the other stuff. I just left the Bloom and stuff on because, you know, sometimes you got to have a little J.J. abrams in your game. You know what I mean? But I, I, that's weird that the resolution was the way that was. That's strange.
48:22 --> 48:23 Yeah.
48:23 --> 48:34 Yeah. So if it seems like the game is draining a lot of battery, check your video settings settings in the game and just make sure that the settings make sense.
48:34 --> 48:35 Yeah, for sure.
48:35 --> 48:39 I'm sure that's something they'll fix over time. I think right now it was just an oversight.
48:40 --> 48:40 Yeah.
48:40 --> 48:43 Yeah. I'm sure it'll be patched within a couple weeks anyway.
48:43 --> 49:07 For sure. Yeah. This, this game, other than, other than the battery draining life thing that we've that Wolf has ran into, this game seems fairly flawless as, as you would expect it looks kind of janky when you first fire it up. And then you find out that's just part of the charm because that's, that's Survivor's charm. And it's got that cool pixelated retro look. But it's all in 60 frames, you know, so it's pixelated but smooth.
49:07 --> 49:09 First person, 60 frames.
49:09 --> 49:09 Yeah.
49:09 --> 49:15 It's all the sprites. It's like the Doom sprites where it was like they're 2D.
49:15 --> 49:22 They're all sideways. Yeah, yeah. You walk around them and you can see the edge, but they never stop spinning.
49:22 --> 49:23 Right.
49:23 --> 49:30 It's cool. It's. This is a great. This is a great pickup. And I think it's like 10 bucks or something like that or whatever.
49:32 --> 49:33 Nine bucks if you have survivors.
49:37 --> 49:52 I was looking at the Chronicles website and Ponticle has the website saying, well, how come it's $10? In their FAQ they said we have to charge our games based on the amount of work it is to develop them. And we are a larger team now. So we're charging $10. Which I don't think they need to justify it to me.
49:52 --> 49:54 I mean, honestly, I think absolutely not.
49:54 --> 49:56 20 plus hours for 10 bucks is
49:56 --> 50:00 pretty good in a world of 70 and 80 dollars games.
50:01 --> 50:01 Yeah.
50:03 --> 50:06 10 bucks is a. Is a burger at like that's an
50:06 --> 50:14 s. That's not even a burger. That's barely a burger. It's like maybe if you go to Taco Bell on a good night, that's two burritos.
50:15 --> 50:30 Yeah. We went on our travels to and from your place Chard, which is a long trip. It was multiple hours. We stopped at Arby's and Sinstress and I got one combo and one sandwich and it was like 16 bucks.
50:30 --> 50:36 Yeah. That's more expensive than Vampire Survivors and Vampire Crawlers, dude.
50:36 --> 50:37 Yeah.
50:37 --> 50:53 And you get hours of entertainment with this stupid game. And if you're not like, I'm not. I am not a deck builder player. That is not my gig. But Vampire Survivors was my gig. And that universe makes this super fun and a lot of fun to play playoff.
50:53 --> 51:05 I am going to say though, if you like this game, if you enjoy this game, it is really close to Slay the Spire. And that game is so good.
51:05 --> 51:08 I did enjoy the Spire. Yeah, I did enjoy that.
51:08 --> 51:09 Yeah.
51:09 --> 51:14 And. And that game plays incredibly well with the controller and on the deck as well.
51:14 --> 51:17 So yeah, this game plays great on the Steam deck.
51:18 --> 51:24 It's like Slay the Spire with a bigger sense of humor and dressed like a first person dungeon. Crawler.
51:24 --> 51:31 Right. And the humor in it is fantastic. Right, Right. It's just more Empire Survivor.
51:31 --> 52:27 I will say the only thing I. The only. There's two things I didn't. I didn't, I didn't dislike or hate, but I was, I was kind of feel like it was missing. And the first one was in Survivors. Every single character and item had a text blurb with it. I can't remember if it was like a special part of the app, the program let you look it up, or if it was on the interface itself, but you got a one liner on each. Every single character or every single monster. I think it was. There's a bestiary. And I know the person who wrote that was Stephanie Sterling, who used to be a game critic. And really witty. Really, really witty writing. And it was small. It was tiny, insignificant, but it was always funny. I always liked it. And there's none of that in Crawlers. There's no written text like that in Crawlers, so I'm missing that. The only other thing is, even though I got like 20 plus hours of entertainment out of this, I do wish there was more because when I look at the stages now and, and how. And how many stages there are, it does feel like it's a little bit light. But then I look back at Survivors and I think it's comparable to survival.
52:27 --> 52:32 It was really light when it first came out. Like, yeah, there's so much content in that now.
52:33 --> 52:34 Yeah.
52:34 --> 52:59 Back then I'm sure we all beat it relatively quickly and we're like, okay, next dlc. My life is getting sucked away. Like, that's, yeah, it just planned for it. Take the day off. You know, it was like when Claire Obscura came out. You're gonna take the day off. Damn. Day off. Because you're going to play it. You know, it's. I, I, maybe not to that level, but this will be something that the four of us will be like, okay, new DLC is coming out next week. Let's. Let's fire it up, see where we get, you know, and we'll talk about it together as a team.
52:59 --> 53:01 Got to get the next set of Chivos.
53:02 --> 53:07 This is our squad goal, is playing Vampire Crawlers. That's a legitimate squad goal.
53:07 --> 53:10 If this is a squad goal, I'm in.
53:10 --> 53:15 Finally. That's what it took. Turning into all my other suggestions.
53:15 --> 53:17 You need someone else to come up with the squad.
53:17 --> 53:17 Go.
53:17 --> 53:18 That's.
53:18 --> 53:18 No.
53:18 --> 53:20 I needed a. I needed.
53:20 --> 53:21 Almost offended.
53:21 --> 53:23 I needed a good game.
53:25 --> 53:51 I will say, like, I bought Starfield a couple Weeks ago. So I've been working through Starfield and then Diallo 4 has a new expansion, so. And they're both great. I'm having a lot of fun with it, but, man, last weekend I couldn't. I couldn't put crawlers down. I was constantly playing it at my desk, on the couch, everywhere. Yeah, it's solid. I haven't. I almost feel like I haven't used my Steam Deck in a while. Almost like it was collecting dust. So it's nice to just sit in bed again and play a fun game on the Steam Deck. And it just. Yeah, it's.
53:51 --> 53:52 It's great.
53:52 --> 53:59 Yeah. Mine. Mine's just been sitting in a stock for a couple months now, so this is. It's coming back out.
53:59 --> 54:09 I'm the only one that's been still consistently using my Steam Deck, but it's because I'm moonlighting downstairs to get it on my tv. Okay, good. I have.
54:09 --> 54:18 My PC has been unhooked for over two weeks until today. This is what I've been waiting on. But I play on it all the time anyway.
54:18 --> 54:25 It helps that my. My chair that I'm sitting in right now works with my ankles and it's one of the few places I can sit in my house.
54:25 --> 54:26 That's fair.
54:26 --> 54:27 Yeah.
54:27 --> 54:35 Yeah, that's fair. I don't get a lot of time up in my office during the week, so I just transmit downstairs because it's way easier than coming up here.
54:36 --> 54:39 Shout out to Sunlight, moonlight or whatever it's called.
54:39 --> 54:39 Hell yeah.
54:40 --> 54:42 Sunshine, Moonlight.
54:42 --> 54:43 That's what it is.
54:43 --> 54:47 Dope. Dope. Shout out to Jake helped me set that garbage up.
54:48 --> 54:55 It's great. It's. And it's not just for Steam Deck. It's also for anybody who has a rog ally or even if you have a phone and you have a controller attachment for a phone.
54:55 --> 54:56 Works out.
54:56 --> 54:57 Attacking Sunlight is great.
54:57 --> 54:57 All kinds of shit.
54:57 --> 55:02 Yeah, well, it's, It's. It calls to me because it's an open source project.
55:02 --> 55:03 Yeah.
55:03 --> 55:11 And that's really cool. You can run it. You can run it on Linux, you can run it on Windows, you can run it on Mac, you can run it anywhere.
55:12 --> 55:32 It's great because like Steam has done a lot of great stuff with the Steam in house streaming. But it just. Unless you're on the perfect conditions of the strong WI FI signal and not a lot. Not a lot of walls between you and your PC. I still got lags in timeouts, but when you use Sunlight, moonlight for whatever reason the way they've done it works almost flawlessly. It's so clean. Yeah. Yeah.
55:33 --> 55:47 Sweet. All right, guys, well, how do we feel? Is there anything else that. Anything that we want to pivot and touch on or do we feel like we've given this game, it's enough due for the amount of time that it's been out?
55:48 --> 55:56 I mean, I looked. I only have 100 minutes in the game and we've now talked essentially an hour about it. So I'm.
55:56 --> 55:58 Yeah, great questions. You have fantastic questions.
55:58 --> 56:03 Well, and I'm. I'm gonna. I'm gonna close up here when we're done and spin it up.
56:04 --> 56:09 Yeah, I think Crimson Desert needs a little love for me tonight. But I'll fire it up sometime this weekend. I'm sure of it.
56:10 --> 56:48 Yeah, I've been playing a bunch of games the past week. I've actually been really playing a lot of games, but I need to sit down and actually stick to one. Now that Vampire Crawlers is done, I'm probably gonna go back to Vampire Titanic. Titanium Court, which is a match 3. It's a match 3 tower defense ish type game, but it's also very, very much a narrative driven game. It's more of a story and a text heavy game and slowly get started. It has great songs about fish spawning and death and stuff. It's great. But yeah, maybe I'll do a separate video on Titanium Court. I don't think you guys want to hear me talk about it, but I think it's a separate video.
56:48 --> 56:48 Jake. I so do.
56:49 --> 56:57 Jake, I'd hear you talk about plungers, bro. I hear you talk about bidets, bro. I listen to that episode quite often, so I think you're okay.
56:58 --> 56:58 Yeah.
57:00 --> 57:01 You don't even have a bidet yet.
57:01 --> 57:12 I don't because I want to hear more about it and I want Jake to tell me all about it. Wolf, do you have anything you'd like to add to the Vampires Crawlers?
57:13 --> 57:26 No, I think that's it. Like this game, is it? The demo kind of came out of left field and I'm so happy it did. It was a lot of fun and the game has been great.
57:26 --> 57:43 Fantastic. All right, well, I guess we can go around Robin and see what everybody is up to other than moving into a new house or working their butts up at their current jobs. We'll start with Wolf. Wolf, what are you currently up to? And do you have any plans after you get settled in?
57:46 --> 57:56 Yeah, I. I still need to play my. Honestly, I need to start my Sisyphean game. It's already May now. Geez. And then.
57:57 --> 57:58 Yeah, plenty of time.
58:00 --> 58:04 And then. Yeah. And then I got. I still gotta play Rascal.
58:05 --> 58:07 Yes. Please record that.
58:07 --> 58:12 I want to see RA have time for that and I didn't. Maybe after I'm settled here, I'll be able to do that.
58:13 --> 58:13 Nice.
58:14 --> 58:15 Only two hours. That's all you need.
58:16 --> 58:17 It's just two. I thought it was one.
58:18 --> 58:20 Is it one? Oh, because we did the mini one. Mini one.
58:20 --> 58:24 Yeah, that's right. This is from the. The Game Awards. Yeah, that's right.
58:24 --> 58:24 Yeah.
58:25 --> 58:29 Sistar, what do you. Back in. Back in town.
58:29 --> 58:34 I am back doing my DJ stuff tomorrow on Soul Archaic's channel.
58:34 --> 58:34 Nice.
58:36 --> 58:50 And I want to shout out. We're very, very close to getting to our 300th episode. Oh, yeah. And we're kind of working on something maybe a little interesting for that. We're also coming up on seven years.
58:51 --> 58:52 Yeah.
58:52 --> 58:53 Which is crazy.
58:53 --> 58:59 That's crazy. We're gonna have an episode about the best 300 games that we've played. It's gonna be a great time.
58:59 --> 59:01 No, we barely got to a hundred.
59:03 --> 59:11 I got my hundred. I don't know about you guys. Great. And Jake, what do you. What do you got in the pipeline, sir, if anything.
59:11 --> 59:43 So I'm gonna do. I'm gonna do a video on Titanium Court. I'll probably do a what is Titanium Court? Video just to show people that game. Because I don't think it's on a lot of people's radars, but I definitely think it's worth playing for a certain type of gamer. And then I am working on the ranking of Mario. I swear to God I am. But you would not believe the issues I've had trying to record that. It's been a. I'm used to doing this. The streaming. This is what I'm used to doing. I'm not used to using obs to record things. And I've had some growing pains put that way. But I'm going to get back to it. I'm going to try and find a way to just bank a few of them. So we'll see.
59:46 --> 01:01:02 And I'm going to try and get back to Twitch sometime this weekend and get back to playing Signalis, which is the retro inspired horror game. That's really good. It's fantastic. You've probably caught me. You watch the podcast. You've probably seen a couple episodes of that already. And I'm going to dabble in some more Crimson Desert because it has my soul and I cannot. I cannot let it go. I'm absolutely in love with this game. And maybe I'll do a. What is a Crimson Desert episode. Maybe I'll follow suit with Jake. I also need to get further in my Sisyphean game because I've played an episode and mine's in VR and summer is coming. So it's either I don't do it for summer and I do it in the winter and I do it on December 31st at 11:59pm Try and button that thing up. Much like the chrono trigger. You've got billions of years to get through this, though. It's. It's been challenging getting all that stuff set up. And it's going to be 84 degrees here on. On Sunday. And that's. Yeah, that's. Wolf knows he's got big eyes, but he's also got central air, which I do not have. Yeah, yeah. So it's going to be. It's going to be challenging to do some VR in the summer here. Quickly approaching, but that's fine.
01:01:04 --> 01:01:17 I spun up my Sisyphean as well, which I'm playing on my Commodore 64, the new one, and I forgot how fucking hard old school games are.
01:01:18 --> 01:01:19 Fantastic.
01:01:19 --> 01:01:19 Yep.
01:01:20 --> 01:01:22 Welcome to the classics. Yeah, I love the classics.
01:01:23 --> 01:01:26 I'm playing the original Wasteland, so there you go.
01:01:26 --> 01:01:27 Yeah, yeah, yeah.
01:01:27 --> 01:01:32 There's trainers like, you set their own rules, man. Like play the game how you want to play. If you want to use a trainer,
01:01:32 --> 01:01:34 you know, when you are the boss.
01:01:34 --> 01:01:39 When I get to December 31st at 11:59, I'll pull out the trainers.
01:01:39 --> 01:01:39 Yeah.
01:01:42 --> 01:01:43 At the same time.
01:01:43 --> 01:01:44 Yeah.
01:01:44 --> 01:01:45 What was your game?
01:01:45 --> 01:01:47 Yeah, it was my game for Cisfian.
01:01:47 --> 01:01:48 Fuck. Good lord.
01:01:48 --> 01:01:48 Oh, my gosh.
01:01:48 --> 01:01:49 Review.
01:01:49 --> 01:01:50 I don't know.
01:01:50 --> 01:01:52 Mine was Star Ocean 2 remake.
01:01:53 --> 01:01:54 Yeah, mine is Galaxy.
01:01:55 --> 01:02:04 That's what it was. I was going to play Mario Galaxy 2, guys. Let me tell you how many times I've installed and reinstalled that game. At least a few times.
01:02:04 --> 01:02:08 Are you going to Gold rank Mario 2 or Super Mario Galaxy 2 diamond ring?
01:02:08 --> 01:02:11 Are you playing Galaxy 2 on the Switch too?
01:02:11 --> 01:02:12 There it is.
01:02:12 --> 01:02:33 So I'm debating whether I played as try and play it on Dolphin or if I played on the. The Switch 2 remaster. I have to figure it out. I've been trying to get Dolphin to work on my desktop and it works, but it's used to having like a gyro controls and the control I'm using is kind of wonky, so I might just bite the bolt and pick up the Switch 2 version. But I gotta see I saw an
01:02:33 --> 01:02:37 article this morning that said the Switch 2 version added a chapter to the storybook.
01:02:38 --> 01:02:49 Yeah, that's Nintendo. Leave it to Nintendo to drop a DLC to update like a 30 year old game. Yeah, more lore. Especially after that Mario movie. It's. It's nice.
01:02:51 --> 01:03:24 All right, well, okay. All right, well, we do have a Patreon, guys. Let's not forget to announce that we have a Patreon. So you are welcome to come, please. If you don't have the means or you don't want to, you are not forced to. But we do have some people that are in our circus, Charles tier and above. And those people will get a shout out every episode. So I'm believing they're still on there. So if not, you get a freebie. But cathusiast Jeff and Von Beardley, we, we love you guys. Thank you so much.
01:03:24 --> 01:03:24 Thank you.
01:03:24 --> 01:03:32 Continued support and everybody else that is even following the Patreon. We appreciate that support as well. It does not have to be monetary.
01:03:32 --> 01:03:32 Just.
01:03:32 --> 01:03:57 Just being there is good enough for us. Being there is also great. If you join our discord, come and hang out with us. Tell us why Vampire Crawlers is the greatest game, why it is game of the year, year 2026, or why it is trash. We'll have plenty of people tell you you're right, wrong or indifferent. We also have Presby.org still, which I don't know why Jake keeps getting that. The meme will not die.
01:03:58 --> 01:03:59 It will never die.
01:03:59 --> 01:04:00 It will Never die.
01:04:01 --> 01:04:15 Press b2cancel.com. Come and hang out with us there and catch future episodes. No, catch past episodes. We don't even know what our future episodes are. If you know what they are, please let us know so we can have some shit in the chamber.
01:04:16 --> 01:04:19 Is this. Is this like Spaceballs where I can.
01:04:19 --> 01:04:46 You're watching now now. What's happening now is happening now. What happened to then? I could do a little bit now. When this is now, now. Anyways, guys, thank you so much for coming and hanging out and we've been pressed me to cancel. Go pick up Vampire Survivors and Crawlers and join us on another wicked adventure and we will see you hopefully next week. Until then, have a wonderful night.
01:04:46 --> 01:04:47 Ciao,
01:05:05 --> 01:05:16 Sam.