Sunderfolk

To kick off Season 3 of Games Gone By, Austin and Adam pull out their smart phones and take a stab at Sunderfolk, the narrative tactical RPG from Secret Door, one of the studios under Mike Morhaime's publishing umbrella, Dreamhaven.

Join them as they discuss the game's unique controls, tabletop analogues, focus on cooperative gameplay, and whether or not Dreamhaven is actually making any money.

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What did we do? We went from Okami to what? Shadow? No way. We did that? Okay, we did that. I'm pretty sure we did that. To Metroid? Metroid is more mixed, for sure. For sure. Yeah, we had a dark quarter. Dark three-month span. And welcome back to another episode of the Games Gone By podcast. It is Wednesday, August 27th, at the time of this recording. I'm your host, Adam, and joining me, as always, Austin, the gaming expert and enthusiast. Austin, are you ready to talk about the first ever narrative, strategy, tactical, co-op, couch RPG that I've ever played? Yeah, and you didn't even mention that we played this game on our phones? Like, on Discord? Yes, today we're talking about Sunderfolk, a game that was published this year by Dreamhaven and their internal studio, Secret Door. Now, listeners might recognize Dreamhaven from the Play Nice episode, for this is Mike Morhaime, founder of Blizzard, his new project. He basically created a publishing house called Dreamhaven in 2020, when he left Blizzard, and this is one of their internal studio's first games. And this was also headed up by former Blizzard employees. As Austin, you mentioned, it is played with your phone, and it is meant to be a kind of couch co-op thing. Me, you, and Connor played this over Discord. But yeah, I was really surprised. How well this worked for me. How did you feel about the phone controls? Yeah, no, it's a very cool idea, right? I mean, obviously, the concept is to emulate the D&D experience almost, like the tabletop RPG, everybody get together, sit around a table or sit around a couch and play a game together. And we couldn't do that because we all live in different places, but we were able to kind of emulate that experience by just putting it on Discord. And playing from your phone, so we're all controlling the game from our phone, which is a really cool idea, I think. Absolutely. And we'll get into more of that a little bit later, if people are still kind of wondering what we mean. But this game is very much like you download a free app, only one person needs a copy. So we shared it on Discord, and we played it that way. And it was a lot of fun. And it is basically a like, kind of what I tried to stumble through in the intro there. It is a tactical strategy RPG that has like a narrative going through it, and just a really unique experience. If you've ever played something like Gloomhaven or Frosthaven, a lot of people were calling this Gloomhaven, but accessible. And I think that is a great description. For me, you and Connor also tried to play Gloomhaven. And after about three minutes of failing to decipher all the hieroglyphs on each ability card, we gave up. Yeah, that experience was not nearly as fluid as this one, which I think this one really drops you like right in. And it felt immediately comfortable. And it's so easy for everybody to just hop in and play. Because like you said, everybody can just play from their own phone device. And like, you don't need, you don't need three copies of the game or anything like that, which, you know, debatable money business model strategy. Yeah, yeah. Like, we'll probably definitely get into kind of some of the fallout of this, because I don't know how well this game has sold. Um, I really liked that kind of secret doors mission statement behind this game was to, you know, create collaborative social experiences that are deeply connective. Like, that's, that's their big mission statement on the website. And I really felt that hopping into this because we would just carve out two or three hours in an afternoon or like a four hour block on a weekend for us to hop in the discord call. And we probably finished the campaign that's about 20 missions, and we finished it in about 25 hours. So it was a really like tight experience that I think lasted as long as it needed to. Like by the end, I felt like I was ready to be done with it, but it never, it didn't go too long though. I wasn't like, God, you could trim like five missions off this game. Like I felt like it ended at a pretty appropriate spot and I, and I really liked carving out time for this. Like it was a lot of fun. Yeah. And so the gist of it is that you basically pick, uh, it's one, it's one to four players, although I would not suggest playing this by yourself. Um, you pick from one of, I think six character classes and you know, they're all anthropomorphic like. Animal style things, right? So you're, you have your bipedal, uh, bat and polar bear and weasel, uh, among other things. And it just ends up being like the combat is on a hexagonal grid and you all take turns, you know, every, everyone on your team goes in whatever order you want and then it ends and then it's like the enemy's turn. And that goes back and forth, um, with the exception of boss fights, which get a, a move after every one of your characters turns and boy, are those hard. That's a nightmare. Yeah. But it's, it's cool. Cause you have all these little ability cards and you start off with just a few and they're all really particular to each class. And a lot of them involve movement because there's so much environmental action in this game. You can push people off the edge of the map. You can push them into position for someone else's attack. You can push them onto like a pit of fire or lava or what have you. Um, so the, the, the grid is very important. Like your positioning is really important and all these different abilities that allow you to manipulate the battlefield and buff your characters and debuff the enemies and do this and that. It was, it was just so much fun. Uh, much like in a game. Kind of like D and D or something similar where as a party, you're thinking you're coming up with a plan and it's like, okay, how should we use our actions this round as a team? You know, not everyone just being willy nilly on their own. Although sometimes we had a player with us that did that, you know, as, as he does, you know, it happens sometimes you just, you make decisions and you just do them sometimes. Yeah. But it truly was just such a blast, uh, working together and trying to figure out like, oh God, like we have to get to this NPC or he's going to die in the next two turns. Like, how can we get over? They're using our moves and we'd always come up with something cool and satisfying. And, uh, man, I just like the gameplay of this is just a straight blast. If you're into strategy stuff at all. I would definitely agree. I think the fact that all the skill cards are so unique, like not just to the class, but I feel like each card you get does something totally different. Like, um, I played as the bird Arcanist. He's like a Raven and it's kind of like your mage character. And one of the things that his card, that the bird card could do was a card called Gravity Nexus. And this is definitely my favorite thing that I did almost the entire time. We had some fun with Gravity Nexus. Every mission is just like, how can I, how can I build up to use Gravity Nexus? Because each, each class has like a specific unique character trait. So the Arcanist has mana. And so a lot of the cards of the Arcanist can play. They require a certain amount of mana and mana will build up throughout the, the mission. And sometimes like use another card to build up your mana or you can interact with something in the environment that'll give you mana or whatever, but you're, you're constantly balancing this pool of mana. And so Gravity Nexus would take like six mana. So it was always like, okay, how can I get enough mana to use Gravity Nexus? And then what position can I be to use it? Cause it would draw enemies from like three squares away. And bring them all directly to you. So you can hit them for like seven damage. And this was just so much fun to pull off. And that's what really made the game so enticing is like every mission was okay. I have a vision. How do I pull off that vision? Yeah. I played the Bard and there was a, so his sort of special ability was that you could swap places with a friendly unit without using one of your moves. One of your move actions. So many times per round, right? You start off being able to do it once. And then as you get stronger, you can do it a few more times. And then there's this ability called Crowd Surf that it did extra damage based on how many unique hexes that you occupied during that turn. So it was all about like chaining allies together and doing like, you know, like the Macarena through the whole freaking thing here. And like getting to the end of like a 10 move action and pulling off the damage. Oh, it's just so awesome when things went according to plan. And it just felt so satisfying to like plan them out as a group. And then all three of you do your big thing and you kick its ass. And it's just, oh man, I mean, like I will have some complaints about this game throughout this episode, as I always do. But I want to get out front that like, I just had so much fun every single time we sat down to play this. It's such a cool experience that like, it feels, it really does give you that experience of like getting together as a group and just like coming up with ways to tackle these problems. And it's maybe not as expressive as something like. Because it does have to work within a framework of, you know, certain movements and certain things that you can do in a game board. But it does let you within that really play around with a lot of options. And I think another interesting mechanic that the game introduced that we both felt kind of mixed about when we started was the fate cards. Oh, the fate cards. Yeah. So every time you go to play an ability, you would draw a. A fate card. And these had different modifiers. There were like neutral modifiers that would either do nothing or they would like cast an effect like a slow on the enemy or it would give you more mana or something like that. Or they could have a positive or negative effect. So it could do additional damage or less damage. And but you can also do less damage while maybe boosting your your next attack or whatever. Right. So all these fate cards had different modifiers. And. As you went through the game, you got more and more of these fate cards and can kind of adjust your deck. And I think by the end of it, I really love this mechanic. Oh, I'm completely with you. Yeah. Because it's basically like, you know, all the neutral cards have a value of zero. And the positives are like plus one, two, three. And the negatives are minus one, two, three. And that gets added to your damage score for that attack. But like, as you were saying, there's also different effects on it. And it would get to the point where you could replace your negative one with maybe a negative two. But that negative two also would heal everyone around you when you got it. Or you could replace. A plus two with a plus three. But the plus two had like a little bit of a bonus, whereas the plus three was just damage. And so there was like a little bit to balance there with that trade off. And then, of course, as we were upgrading buildings, which, gosh, there's so many mechanics in this. We would unlock like more slots for these cards, but you didn't have to use them. So you could decide, like, do I want to add more negative cards for those potential bonuses? Or do I just want to have less negative cards? And I love that flexibility. And all the effects were so unique. You know, there were some that were specific. Like, to your class. I love the ones that were just like, for me, it was like, when you kill something, you'll spawn a bunch of health or whatever it was. So then the teammates could come around and pick up the health hearts off the ground. And, dude, I just, yeah. For a system that at first I was like, this seems like the worst aspect of tabletop games. It's like rolling a natural one. Like, this sucks. It quickly became one of my favorite parts of the whole game once we started to get more fake cards. Like, I'm with you. I totally, that grew on me so much throughout the game. It's an infinite. It's an infinite. It's an infinite. It's an infinite. It's an infinite. The emphasis of how this game lets you experiment and, like, play around with things. There's so many different, like, trinkets that you can get. Because most of this game's gameplay takes place on this kind of hexagonal grid where you're attacking enemies and, like, playing the tabletop version, right? But you can also, you spend a decent bit of time in the town, which is kind of like this menu kind of hub area where you can go to shops and buy different weapons. Or trinkets or things that boost your abilities. Or you can buy food that will boost your stats for the next battle or give you certain effects. And you can talk to the townsfolk in this village that you're in. And, like, all of these little mechanics all fed into the ultimate goal of, you know, fighting these enemies and playing on the hexagonal grid. But there's so many different little things that you can do to boost your approach to the battle. You know? Because it was so customizable throughout. Yeah. And all the town stuff takes place just on your phone. So you don't have to worry about, like, watching other people's conversations or waiting for them to do this and that. Like, you all kind of can, at your own pace, do the in-between mission stuff. And then when you're all ready, you know, you queue up for another mission. And, you know, there's, I guess, like, the RPG elements come in the form of, like, you know, you gain levels and get new abilities. But mostly I would say it's the equipment. So you have your two trinket slots, which you can use once per mission, each trinket. And it's a pretty substantial effect. But the real fun items were the weapons, which you unlock, like, halfway through the game. And those would, they have to have something that empowers them, like, triggers them. So for me, the first one I got was, like, whenever I swap with someone, it triggers. And then I can cast slow on someone. I remember you got one that was, like, when something happens, you can do just a little bit of range damage to something. Yeah, it was, like, if an enemy was attacked, like, five spaces away or something, it would energize my weapon. And then I could do, like, two damage with it. That's right. Like, in, like, a two-square radius. And that was always really helpful because sometimes you would end up to where, like, oh, man, I just did the best attack I could. I'm still one damage short. Or, like, oh, man, I was going to kill him, but I rolled a negative one in the fate card. And then you were able to use your weapon to finish it off. I got one toward the end, remember? That was, like, I can't remember what, I think it was, like, I had to be adjacent to someone that just got a kill. But then I just got, like, three extra moves, could do damage, and then heal someone. It was so powerful. Yeah, it's just the different things you could combine. So great. That was kind of the trade-off, right? A lot of these things were, like, you could do this really cool thing, but it's going to cost you. Like, I had a move that would deal, like, 15 damage, but I needed eight mana to use it. And it takes a lot to build up eight mana if you don't build your deck right. Yeah. Like, it's, almost everything has a trade-off. Like, the weapons have some cool effects, but getting them energized towards the end of the game gets harder. Because some of these bigger weapons... Some of these bigger weapons need very specific things to go right to energize them. So there's always this, like, balance of how easy and accessible do I want my character build to be? Or do I want to go for, like, max damage, but I have to really be methodical? So that was a really cool approach to each mission. Absolutely. And I think something the game did so well was just really paste out the stuff you got. Because it seemed like every time combat started to get a little bit stale, it's like, oh, here's your second trinket slot. Here's your weapon. Here's your ultimate. And it was just... It was so great about giving you new stuff. The ultimates in particular I thought were cool because they were shared. The cooldown was shared across the party. So you had to be really tactical about which character's ultimate are we going to use right now? And then we don't want to wait too long to use it because we want to be able to use more than one throughout this battle, right? So like you said, it's the trade-offs. There were so many decisions to be made at, like, every avenue. And I live for that shit, man. Well, yeah. And it was super cool because it does... It does force you into that collaborative spirit, right? Like, you can't... You know, we can play something like a Call of Duty Warzone or whatever. And like, yeah, you have to be collaborative. But like, really, if you're just good enough, like, you can kind of avoid that in spaces. But this, you couldn't really just be good enough to avoid the communication. Like, you had to be methodical. You had to talk with your allies and make sure that what you were doing made sense. Especially, like, in the boss fights. The boss fights would get so tricky because, like you were saying earlier, every single move you made, the boss would make a move to counter it. Like, they would do something immediately after your move. And this just... It forced you to make every move count because who knows what the boss is going to do to you as soon as you move. This really felt like the most thinking I've done in a game turn-to-turn since probably last year's Tactical Breach Wizards. I mean, just... Yeah. Wanting so badly to pull off, like, an awesome move. And sitting there for, like, 30 seconds, a minute at a time, counting hexagons as you guys are like, Adam, it's your turn. I'm like, hold on, hold on. Like, I got to make sure this is going to work. But it was just such a blast. You know, I wrote here in the notes, I was like, the exhilaration when a certain character gets in position to use that move, right? Which for you was the gravity nexus thing we talked about. Mine was the crowd surf. Or I had the one that was like, I could turn... Other objects on the board into health hearts. So maybe, like, there would be these mines on the ground that were supposed to blow up. But I would just go up to them and turn them all into health, which was super useful. Connor's Barbarian had a kind of berserk thing, you know, where it was... The more damage you took since your last turn, the more damage you would do on this attack, which we exploited greatly toward the end. I was about to say, like, and you could help with that by, like, you know, triggering mines or something near him or, like, putting him into a position where he would take more damage than... Then maybe you would normally want to, but then you just turn that back around into damage. Like, ah, so satisfying. And that's just the way to describe the combat in this game in my mind, is it's so satisfying. Like, there were a couple times we lost that was frustrating, for sure, because we were playing on hard. But for the most part, man, every victory felt like, oh, man, like, by the skin of our teeth, but not, like, too crazy difficult and just super satisfying to win and really felt like you came up with a plan, you executed. And there's just... Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. There's no better feeling in strategy games. Yeah. And, you know, you said we lost a couple of times, and we did, and those losses could definitely be frustrating, especially if we spent, like, 40 minutes on the mission. Right. And it was like, guess we got to do it again. But what was always so cool about that is the game lets you go back to town and rebuild your deck. Like, maybe you realized, okay, the skill cards I had in there, because I can only bring in four, and, you know, you have an option of, like, seven or eight by the end game. And it's like, okay, I just didn't have the right setup, so let me rebuild my deck. And then we would always go back in and almost instantly be, like, so much better at it. Because it was like, okay, we thought about it, we saw it, we strategized, and we came back with a better plan, and then crushed it. And it was like, that always felt so good to feel rewarded in that way. Yeah. And there were, you know, there were some missions that were multi-part. And I know the first time we went back to town, we were super nervous that it was going to make us do the first two. But it doesn't. So once you beat the first whatever stages of the multi-part missions, if you fail, you can pick back up at just the latest stage. And that was nice, because there was a couple that were really hard for us, and we had to go back a couple times. But like you said, you build, you know, we say deck, it's, you pick four or five out of eight skills by the end, right? So it's not a huge thing you have to manage. But which of those four or five you take is super important in some of these missions. And it met the difference between us failing miserably or beating it in, like, the fourth turn. Especially because they all, like, most of them function. So differently to like, they all have a different utility, like, gravity Nexus is good for crowd control. But I also had the like, the the thunder blast move that would bounce off of enemies and could hit like two. And then there was other ones that would like boost my mana more, but not do as much damage. So it was like, it was always thinking about, okay, what is appropriate for this situation? Do I need mobility? Because I have a move that lets me teleport across the map? Or is teleporting maybe not useful here? Because all the enemies are kind of in close proximity. Should I get rid of that, you know, so there's always this, this weighing out options that I thought was really satisfying. And the car to let you move with any excess move you had, you could use it to either swap with a teammate or push enemies away. And that was really fun. Because sometimes the most effective thing to do was just to use a move to push someone off a ledge. Right. And I always I thought your character was particularly interesting, because you had to deal with something that we didn't really you had teleport and move spells. And a lot of times there was a trade off of like, well, if I teleport, I can't then push something, or I can't, you know, use a move action to finish this objective over here. Like sometimes you'd have to interact with something, right? Or I can't loot this chest. So I mean, truly, just like every mechanic in this game, none of it is super complicated, but it's super deep. Almost all of the time. I mean, the possibilities were just endless. Great, great design. Yeah, I think one of the biggest drawbacks to this, unfortunately, is that because each character is like so interesting and unique, you want to be able to do a lot of things to try all of them, but the game like really doesn't want you to do that. My like addiction to alt characters was stifled here, for sure. Because you, you can't start over as one, the closest we could get is since we were a three person party, we managed to get a another character made that acted as the fourth player. But then it just basically was one that we could swap to if we wanted, but we never really did because they were under leveled and stuff. Right. Um, so we ended up staying with the same character. The whole game, which wasn't really bad. And we inadvertently picked what everyone online says is like the most powerful trio. Anyway, so that, that was handy considering we put it on hard on our first playthrough. So, and, and something else that I really liked about the accessibility of the game is we put it on hard. So it's like good that we had that great party, but almost immediately the hard mode has a like turns limit that you have to complete certain mission, but you have to complete every mission in a second. You have to complete a certain amount of turns and I immediately felt like this was like way too restrictive and it didn't feel like you could explore and like engage with the creativity of the game as much because you were, you were being rushed and I was like, can we turn just that off? And like, you sure enough, you could, which, which I thought was super nice because like, I think it would have been a lot more annoying to play this game with that turn limit. And I think I would have had a lot less fun with it. Yeah. I think we really found the perfect balance. Yeah. I think we really found the perfect balance. Yeah. I think we really found the perfect balance. Yeah. I think we really found the perfect balance for us because I think the turn limit would have made it too frustrating, but playing it on normal, it would just would have been too easy. Uh, and I really liked that you could customize that. So we got all of the HP and enemy numbers from hard, but without that extra rush of the turn counter. And yeah, I, I love that. That is how the industry is kind of heading where every game is starting to become more and more like granular settings for your difficulty was playing a freaking Pathfinder game the other day. And it's like, oh my God, there's like 37 things. You can adjust ranging from like, can you create, can the enemies crit, like, do you do more damage? Do you take more? I mean, just everything you could think of. And I just, I love it. That's where the industry is heading. And I think this did it as well as anything for its, its context. Definitely. Um, the MVP system, uh, in this game is really funny because, because every, every mission has like some arbitrary goal that you have to accomplish to, to, if you're the one who accomplishes the most of said goal. You get the MVP. And so like what we're on hard and, and, you know, we're, we're all trying to be very methodical and do things like, okay, how much damage can I do and, you know, knocking out these enemies. And then at the end of the mission, it's like MVP goes to Cotter because he like pet the most bugs or something one time I killed like four people and I was like, I have to be MVP. And then it was like, Connor got MVP for most spaces moved or something. And I was just like, what are, what are we talking about? So it just became this joke. This joke that the game was conspiring against me because no matter how well I performed, Connor got the MVP for just some random nonsense, but it was, it was funny. Yeah. And, and, but like, that's the kind of like fun and joyous experience that you only get from this kind of game where like everyone's forced to interact in a really like close way. Right. Like you can't get away with just playing this game without being on chat or like kind of mindlessly doing your own thing. Like you all have to be engaged in the same way. So then when this thing happens, it's like, why, how, and it just gets a fun rise out of everybody. I think. Yeah. And you know, in regards to the MVP thing, we talked about the town upgrade mechanics a little bit. Uh, there's basically like the trinkets we talked about, you could sort of combine those together and upgrade them like a sort of almost like a crafting system might seem like a mobile game or something. And that was, you would get those trinkets together, you would upgrade them and you would use that to upgrade them. You would upgrade various buildings in your town that would give you different bonuses. And one of them was that the MVP got extra gold. And that is, I think it ended up making it so infuriating slash hilarious is because it wasn't just that he was getting some reward or award, but every game it was like, here's a hundred gold for Connor because he walked the most spaces and I was like, God damn it. I love that we, we purposefully push that town upgrade to be like the last thing that we did just because you were like, I'm never going to benefit from this. So I don't want it. Yeah. You know, we should have done it earlier because you, you don't share gold, but you can like kind of swap items and you're working toward the town upgrades together. So it would have made more sense to pick that earlier, but I was way too stubborn and I was like, no, no, we are not rewarding Connor for this bullshit. It was, it was a lot of fun to kind of, um, engage with all those systems because I didn't find them overwhelming and a lot of games of this type, like, oh, here's this really in-depth crafting system. Like 400 options and you have seven different, like, I always think about witcher, which is the one I always go to where it's just like, there's too many potion types and too many things to craft together. And I just, I always got overwhelmed with, with the crafting and witcher. But this game is the crafting. Everything is so approachable because it's so like limited in scope. It's like, there's only a handful of trinkets. Only a couple of them are combinable. You only need a certain few types to actually upgrade the town. A lot of times you've got it as a mission reward anyway, like it was all really limited in scope. So it felt so much more approachable and manageable and it made me want to engage with the system more. Yeah. And it's often just in the right context. Like you don't have to worry about any of this shit in combat, in a mission, you know? Yeah. It's all during the process of you like having that downtime between two missions where you're upgrading stuff anyway. So that's the kind of thing that you're looking for. And that's where all the conversations take place too. Um, I know. One day we'll probably publish our, our old Anthem episode on this podcast. But one of the things when, when we played Anthem back the day that we complained about is like, I'm on comms with my friends and in the middle of a mission, your stupid character is talking to me and I don't care and I can't hear them and I don't want to. What was nice about this is the individual conversations were just on your phone and those weren't voiced, right? The in-between mission ones. You would have a little voiced intro right before a mission and then after a mission and everyone saw that. It was on the main screen, uh, great voice acting, not very long. I had no issue with that. And then the longer conversations that you would have in town were just on your phone with the character you were talking to. So it kept all of that out of the way of the actual multiplayer gameplay. So much better than a game like Anthem did. Like I didn't find any of the narrative and the story and the voice acting felt like it was in my way where it's like, that is all it did in Anthem was just in the way of the three fun parts of that game. Right. And the story here is, is very similar. It's very simple. I mean, it's, it's a pretty simple, like good versus evil framework. There's, you know, you're this town with these anthropomorphic animals and there's like the tree of life that, that like exists in your town and it's what gives you the light and, and it's like this like sacred entity in your town and it starts to, I guess like wither and die by the shadow stone and there's like ogres and these like mushroom people and like these. There's like different evil entities that are at play. Copyright friendly murlocs all over the place. Yeah. Oh my God. They literally look exactly like murlocs. I was like, oh yeah, this is a Mike Warham. He, he had some influence here. Like this is literally, this is just a murloc. Um, but what I liked about this, all that is very simple and it's easy to follow for the most part. Like there's no big dramatic twist and the character names are pretty easy to remember. A lot of them you can actually make yourself, which is one of the like most hilarious parts of this game is random moments. It lets you name the things and it just gives no restrictions on this at all. Yeah. This was almost like a mistake in my mind, but boy, did we have fun with it? Uh, so you know, you got to name the first weapon you got or one of the best weapons, right? And you know, there's that expression, um, rock out with your cock out, which basically just means to like do something over the top. So of course I named, cause I have a guitar as the part, so I named it my cock. Cause I thought it would be funny to rock out with my cock out. But then of course, like all that would happen is I would just end up saying things like, hold on, I have to empower my cock. And we just felt like 12 years old the entire time we were playing this. I think I, I think like one of the earliest things you could do at this is like, you have to rescue this beetle and you can name the beetle. And you said something like this bitch ass beetle. And I was like, that's what I'm going to name her. And for the rest of this game, like you get to name the beetle. Like you can talk to this beetle throughout the game and it'll like give you little like, you know, gold piles or different little trinkets. And every time it's like, bitch ass beetle gives you a game. And I just, I'm like dying the entire time playing this game. So I think one of the first ones in the game it gives you is, um, the shrines, right? So there'll occasionally be these shrines that you can interact with, with a move action and it'll heal you or a party member. And for some reason, Connor just named it Bob Steve. No, I didn't. I have no idea why. And then at first I was like, I'm never going to call it that. By the fourth mission though, that's all we called the shrines were Bob Steve's because that's what it says on screen. So like naturally that's what you're going to call it. Like, ah, go get to the Bob's screen. Steve, you're about to die. It's, it's so, and the funniest part about this is like, it will, it will give the name assignment to a random player. Like it's like everybody gets to collaborate and decide, like if you just want to like do it on your own in the corner and just name stuff. Like weird shit. You can. And often we did. And going back to what you said, like the mission statement, create collaborative social experiences that are deeply connective. It's these little things as silly as they sound, that just creates such a fun social dynamic amongst the party. Because every time a new thing would be introduced, we're like, Oh God, who's he going to give it to? Who gets to name it? And then what are they going to name it? And then how often do we have to see this on screen for the rest of the game? And it's just those, those little things. And it's just those, those little things were so fun. You know, we had a character whose name I have no idea what it is because she sounded kind of like tiny Tina. So we named her tiny Tina and that's who she was the rest of the game. And I don't, I couldn't tell anyone like, you know, if I'm talking to someone else who's played this game, it'd be hard to communicate some of the characters because we would have named them wildly different things. Right. Which, which makes the, right. It does make it a little hard to talk about, but it makes your own personal journey with the game so much more fun. Yeah. Like, cause, cause now amongst your friends that have played it with you, you can talk about these things and be like, oh, remember when I named that beetle bitch ass beetle? Like, and then you, you laugh about it and we've had so many different conversations as we're playing this game and just like throwing all these names out that are like, this is not what this, what this thing is called, but we have no idea what it's called anymore. Yeah. And, and, you know, the way the missions kind of play out, I thought was great because you, you essentially get them in batches of like, it's like, there'll be three side missions to pick from and then you do two of them and then it brings you to a story mission and you'll never get to do that third one. So, you know, there's some consequence there, but it's not like it's that big a deal, right? It's really about variety because there'll be, I guess like oriented in different types. So you have a defense mission, an explore mission, a puzzle mission. A battle or whatever. Yeah. A battle. Right. And so, and some of the puzzles were pretty interesting. We, we tended to avoid them toward the end. We felt that on hard, it was hard to like do the puzzle and kill the stuff. But some of them were, were pretty interesting having to like maneuver people into certain locations or whatever it was. Just huge mission variety. I think a pretty fun enemy variety, not necessarily a ton, but each thing worked very differently and you knew exactly like how that guy was going to mess your day up if you didn't account for them properly. Yeah. I just could go on all day. Every, I loved everything about this game, man. It's, it's, it's incredible. Yeah. It's, it's really cool. I think mission, I think enemy variety is a really like good point to bring up because I, I'm with you. There wasn't a ton of it, but each one did feel very unique, especially towards the end game. They start throwing in enemies that can like, that will pull your character closer to them before they're attacked. So like you have to be very careful not to position yourself near a pit or else you're going to walk right into a pit and instantly die. Like that was, that, that became a thing that we were always wary of when this enemy would pop up. Cause it was like, Oh God. All right. Where's the, where's the nearest pit? We need to make sure we're not near it. And that, that was a fun moment for me because as the Bard, I had a skill that was kind of similar, where I could enchant enemies off of cliffs. And so, you know, toward the beginning of the game, I was having a ton of fun with that. Like, ah, I am God. And then eventually they start to throw enemies at me that were doing the same thing to me. And I was like, no, wait, Hey, that's, that's my thing. I don't like this anymore. It just, yeah. Great enemy variety, man. The bosses had some really, uh, just powerful moves that like, I'm trying to think of the one, it was like the lady with all the mushrooms that would blow up and heal her. That took us a couple of attempts because we were trying to figure out like, how do we detonate these explosive mushrooms in a way where we do it before they get to us and hurt us, but don't heal her so much. And that were just required a lot of strategy and planning. And that was one of my favorite fights, I think. Yeah. It was definitely one that when we first approached it, we're like, Oh my God, we're never going to beat this thing. It just immediately felt so overwhelming. But again, like you said, you go back to town, you think about it, you bring in certain skills and a lot, and a lot of the cases for the bosses, it was like, okay, how quickly can we output massive amounts of damage? Because once you kill the boss, usually the mission's over. So it's like, how do we maximize our damage? You know, eliminate the threat of ads, but maybe don't kill the ads, right? Let's just focus on the boss as much as we can. And how do we outplay the boss? How do we output as much damage as possible while staying alive? And I mean, that last boss fight was really intense. Yeah. We took like four attempts on that one, maybe? Three or four. Yeah. That one was tough. And we like barely scraped by at the end. Oh yeah. I remember I like had to go do something and I was like, this is over. I'll be right back. And I come back to you and Connor having figured out something to just do like 40 damage in one turn. And if we had gone one more turn, we probably wouldn't have done it. If we had gone one more turn, we probably all would have died. Yeah. Great, great ending. Like the perfect ending to our gameplay, just how skin of the teeth it was. But we ultimately pulled through because of a great plan we executed. And I mean, and that's just what this game is about. Yeah. I mean, I was, I was like a jumping out of my chair. Like let's go after, after, because I was the one who managed to pull off the final blow using like my super high cost mana move and then like pulling the right card to do like damage. Damage based on how much mana I had. So it was like high cost mana move, but it factored in my mana first and like just decimated it. And I was like, let's go. Yeah. The, sometimes the dominoes would just fall into place perfectly. And it was just so much fun to see it happen. Do you remember in the last fight there was like the, the boss would spawn these two things every turn. And once you destroy, if you destroyed them both or eventually it was more than two, it would stun him from around. Right. But around on the boss, there's only one turn in between the two characters turns. Right. So we started to get very, very good at having one person managed to blow up like three of these things by themselves. And that would stun them. And that would allow us to then kill one because he summons these like shadow versions of each character that's in the game, each player character. And they're all just the most annoying version of your character possible. Mine in particular was awful because it would do this thing that made us like attack each other if we were too close. And if we were all grouped up, it would be like, they would retaliate too. So it'd be like, we all hit each other six times or something. And it was like almost impossible to be far enough away to not have this trigger. Especially with your shadow guys basically doing a gravity nexus and pulling us all together. So this was really frustrating for a minute, but I was, but it just felt that much better to outsmart these guys and really put together a plan that worked. And yeah, that, that last boss fight was great. I really enjoyed that. Yeah. Just a lot of really good design. And there's like everything. Yeah. Everything from the character designs to the art style, the mission design, like everything, it feels like a really cohesive vision and it's, you know, a small team really putting their heart into this idea that I think that we're really passionate about and it is executed very, very well, in my opinion. Oh, totally agree. The, the art style actually reminds me a lot of some of the like early Blizzard days where there was just an emphasis on like making something timeless and unique. And not worrying about graphical fidelity, right? Like if you compare something like World of Warcraft to any of these other imposter MMOs that came out the next two or three years, they all thought that the way they were going to get a one-up on WoW was to have like as close to photorealistic graphics as an MMO could. No one wanted that. First off, it just, it just meant it was really hard for most people to run your game. But two, I think that's, it's part of why WoW has maintained popularity for so long is that their art style is just so distinct. Like if you've played that game and you're like, I don't know, I don't know what to do. I don't know what to do. I don't know what to do. I don't know what to do. I don't know what to do. If you've played that game for any amount of time, you can pick out so many things just from a screenshot, right? And I just really felt that same thing with this game. I just really liked the art style and everything. The music and sound was great. I'm not really one to find this type of music like super catchy and remember it. So it's not like there's anything stuck in my head, but there was never a moment where I was like, oh, yeah, I want to play that. Yeah. Yeah. like this music is inappropriate or anything right it all fits so well right like none of it was annoying i i wouldn't i'm with you that i don't think any of it is like particularly super memorable i'm not like humming any any sunderfolk songs right at work or anything but i do think that it it captures the vibe and the spirit of the game especially the town music and stuff it's just very like relaxing and it feels like you're kind of wandering around town and and generally chilling out and that's kind of the the vibe that you're supposed to have in the town when you're talking to the to the other characters in the game all the characters which i thought were like pretty interesting i'd say by the end of the game i was like all right we'll just skip through some of this conversation stuff like i don't necessarily care anymore but at least there were certain characters that i was always like oh i'm interested to hear what you have to say like like tiny tina the the mushroom girl you know yeah uh you I did mention earlier that there were a couple things i would complain about there's really not very many but i do think one of them would be that there does come a point where it feels like the only reason the conversations exist is for you to level up this relationship system that then gives you rewards and it's not complicated you literally just have to talk to them and you can even skip it like there's dialogue choices but they don't really matter and if you want you can skip it and still get like the relationship credit so it's it's kind of optional in that way but i was trying to engage with it at first and it really just got to a point where i thought i don't actually care about what any of these characters are going to say these people are saying i just want the reward um it's it's it's part of the problem that we kind of talked about with anthem it's obviously not as in your face here but it's like when you're on comms with all your friends it's like i just want to talk to them so it's like taking that time out to sit there and like read text while we're all trying to like talk about the next mission or talk about the last mission or like joke about the bob steve or whatever right like when you're kind of in that zone it's hard to take yourself out and be like okay let me read this conversation and i'm like okay i'm gonna read this conversation and i'm gonna read this conversation real quick like yeah and the game is fairly light-hearted most of the time but it isn't necessarily goofy so when you're looking at the bob steves and the mike hawks and the bitch-ass beatles it does it would clash a little bit but i don't think it manages to be a problem because it's like you said it's just it stays out of the way for the most part right and nothing in this story is so like twisty or dramatic that it's like that stuff is really gonna pull you out in a major way like oh it's the story stays pretty simple it's it's not really like memorable in any way but it's also not like oh my god i have to listen to this person talk again like yeah the cut scenes in between each mission are fine the the bosses that you fight as you go through are like okay yeah that was a that was a reasonable revelation or whatever right it's again nothing groundbreaking but it's also nothing like offensive either yeah and i mean you know the only voice that lines are like kind of the the stuff right before and after the missions and i thought those were good like the voice acting is well done you know even though it's not necessarily like a huge huge part of it what is there i mean it's quality yeah definitely uh before we get to our final thoughts i did want to go back to what we were mentioning earlier with how this game is performing so it's gotten very good reviews and everyone who's played it seems to really enjoy it but i think that just it hasn't necessarily blown up the way a game that had this kind of um backing behind it probably should have and on top of that you have a lot of groups of four to five to six people who are only spending forty dollars on it instead of two hundred and forty dollars right and i worry about that business model for them especially because like their other games wild gate pretty well reviewed not necessarily flying off the shelves um the two games that they've published from other studios banner of the spark and mecha bellum i believe same sort of situation like all of these games are reviewing fine all of these games seem to be enjoyed overwhelmingly by the people who play them and i think that's a really good point and i think that's a really good point and i think that's a really good point and i think that's a really good point and i think that's a really good point it just doesn't seem like they're getting a ton of traction and it's kind of sad because i love i love my blizzard stuff i love my horn i love this game and i'm worried that we're just not going to see a whole lot more from dreamhaven but you know i don't know what we'll see where it goes yeah it really is a shame because it feels like they're they're trying to do unique stuff i mean not to go too much into wild game but like we haven't played a ton of it but like when we did play it especially during the during like the open beta stuff like we had a lot of fun with that game too like there's some interesting and good ideas coming out of dreamhaven and it's a shame to see that it's not particularly doing very well for them financially and i don't know if it's a problem due to like marketing or if it's just not getting caught up in the the cultural zeitgeist enough or what it is but yeah it is a bummer to see a lot of this stuff seemingly not selling very well and then not being super satisfied with the numbers and there's not a ton of information out there but i did at least see that like morhaime basically said that expenses were outpacing revenue and that they were looking to aggressively cut costs and this was in like june or july so it doesn't it doesn't necessarily seem like they're they're you know selling like hot cakes but i you know provided they can get someone interested in continuing to fund them uh i think it's clear that they've demonstrated they can make great games they still have that in them all of these guys that came from blizzard have not let that company drain their soul completely like so i i really do hope they get a couple more chances to make some things because i just i really do find everything they've made so far super unique and just really fun and i uh i want them to keep making it and it and it does definitely highlight why there's so many studios that don't take risks because sometimes this is what happens it's it's such a shame and it really just takes that one game if they can get that one thing that flies off the shelf that they're like you know they're shovel knight or like super meat boy equivalent they're a smaller project just sets up a genre that moves forward you know like if they can find their one thing if they can get the right you know internet hype around one game if they could do some great stuff it's just a shame that it hasn't happened yet and i wonder with a game like this um i don't know what it takes to like keep this app online and keep all of that connectivity going so if dream haven goes is thunderbolt gonna be playable it might still be maybe it's not hard to just make that permanently set up i don't know but i think it's going to be a good idea i think it's going to be a good idea i don't know that tech there but uh that's definitely a concern i have yeah i didn't even think about that until you mentioned it it's kind of like with the uh you know the keep games alive or whatever stop killing games movement or whatever it is like it all kind of goes into that is like is it going to even be possible to play this game if if uh dream haven unfortunately you know can't sustain their studio or their publishing like did will other people not get to play center folk because of it like that would be a big problem i think yeah this this is a game that i think i'm going to you know maybe if i even never go back to it it's just gonna be one of those games i think i think about a lot over the years because it just was so unlike anything i'd played uh it was so well done and you know one of these reviews i was reading was talking about how like the just literally just the act of looking back and forth between your phone and the screen simulates looking back and forth between like your character sheet in the battle map or like a rule book in a tabletop game and so i mean it's just i i don't know how much of this was intentional but it really is as if every aspect of this game's design feeds into that social experience that couch co-op experience even despite us playing it you know through a discord screen share but i mean i think i think that's a testament to it though right like the fact that we were playing it through a discord screen share and we can still feel that same level of collaboration and you know cooperativeness and like that that experience of tabletop sitting around a couch or sitting around the tv or whatever at home the fact that we could all get that experience even though we're you know thousands of miles away yeah is is a testament to how well it delivers on that that idea and that premise so final thoughts on this i i thoroughly enjoyed this game as i think i've made it quite clear and uh i highly recommend anyone that has anything resembling a gaming group to check this out i don't think you'll regret it because it's a lot of fun and it's very unique and it's a lot of fun and it's a lot of fun and it's a lot of fun and it will be forty dollars uh even for six people it'll be forty dollars only one person has to buy it the rest of you download a free phone app or a tablet you can do it on that too um yeah i i just really think this is a fantastic game uh i i would recommend anyone play it especially if you have a gaming group like i i really do wish honestly that i could have played this with you know three other people in the same room that would have been ideal couldn't make it happen obviously but i do think if you're one of those people that's lucky enough to have that kind of group go play thunder folk go get it today right right like if if you're going if like if you're doing like weekly dnd nights just like take take like a month and change those to thunder folk nights and you'll you'll have a great time with it too like it's it's an awesome collaborative experience uh i didn't have to buy it because i played it from adam but you know i might even buy my own copy just to have it so that you know support this developer right like it's a it's a great experience with friends maybe not a great experience without friends but if you have some friends to play it with it is an experience that i think you'll remember for a long time and i i just forgot to bring this up earlier but i think it's a testament to how just normal this game is um there's no mtx there's no skins there's no dlc there's no cosmetics you buy the game you get the game there's truly nothing like that i can even think of out there right now that you pay 40 bucks six people can four people can play it and there's a lot of people that can play it and there's a lot of there's nothing else you could possibly spend money on what more do you need to hear one more it's that is that is a glowing recommendation for sure well that about wraps up our discussion on dream havens thunder folk you can find this episode as well as all of our other episodes on spotify apple podcasts or your favorite podcasting platform and you can follow us on youtube and blue sky at the games gone by podcast and of course you can find everything we do at our brand new website games gone by podcast.com signing off for games gone by i'm adam i'm austin thanks for listening everyone 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