Jamie and Marsh reel from Microsoft’s latest layoffs, mismanage time in Hades 2, paddle in the uncanny, chlorinated waters of Pools, devour the bite-sized city-building triumphs of Against the Storm, and indulge their flaws in The Thaumaturge.

• The last lay offs of 2024. Thankfully there won’t be any more of those! Phew!!
• Nathan Brown’s Hit Points newsletter which I incorrectly namechecked as Bullet Points. Look, there are only so many pithy game-related analogies to go around, ok?
• Hades 2, the much anticipated ARPG sequel – perhaps not ideal for the time-poor?
• Destiny 2 is unintelligible at this point, but the guns still go bang.
• Animal Well is a pixelart indie Metroidvania with notes of Fez and Cocoon.
• Knytt and Within a Deep Forest are two excellent pixelart indie Metroidvania’s from yesteryear. You can find them in Nifflas’s archive here.
• POOLS is about vibing in weird swimming pools.
• Dreamcore is about vibing in weird swimming pools, and then being jump-scared.
• Against the Storm is a city-builder for people who don’t have the mental capacity for city-builders.
• The Thaumaturge could be the best 7/10 RPG of the year. Terrific character.
• The Royal Mob – Jamie’s TV show about orgies and dying of exposure.
• Judas is a roguelike shooter from Ken Levine’s studio, Ghost Story Games.

You can hang out with us and our community on our Discord channel. If you have a question for a future episode, send it to us at [email protected] or tweet us @crateandcrowbar. You can also listen to it on YouTube, and subscribe to our YouTube channel, if you like.

The Crate and Crowbar is kindly funded by our Patreon backers. If you’d like to know more about supporting our podcast and its spinoffs, click here.

Our intro music is by The Mandibles from their track Clambake. Many of the band members now tour as Count Bobo And The Bullion.

Jamie and Alex show their cards in deck-builders Balatro and Cobalt Core (poker- and space-flavoured respectively), before descending into the chaotic, cavernous depths of Deep Rock Galactic: Survivor and finally wrangling Dead Red Redemption 2 into completion.

• Balatro
• Cobalt Core
• Deep Rock Galactic: Survivor
• Red Dead Redemption 2

You can hang out with us and our community on our Discord channel. If you have a question for a future episode, send it to us at [email protected] or tweet us @crateandcrowbar. You can also listen to it on YouTube, and subscribe to our YouTube channel, if you like.

The Crate and Crowbar is kindly funded by our Patreon backers. If you’d like to know more about supporting our podcast and its spinoffs, click here.

Our intro music is by The Mandibles from their track Clambake. Many of the band members now tour as Count Bobo And The Bullion.

Chris and Marsh discuss disappointing children’s entertainment, disappointing sales figures, anti-mnemonic naming choices, the rulebreaking delight of card game Balatro, the dishonourable cheeses of Honor Mode in Baldur’s Gate 3, and return once more to Night Country.

• AI wrote cheques that Willy Wonker simply could not cash.
• Immortals of Aveum may not have sold well, but it really opens up your pores.
• Banishers: Ghosts of New Eden is fine, probably, but it isn’t Balatro.
• Balatro is Balatro, and Balatro is all.
• Apart from the large part of all which is made up of repeated, ever stranger playthroughs of Baldur’s Gate 3.
• 20 Small Mazes and Sheepy: A Short Adventure are free and good.
• True Detective: Night Country is on HBO Max or whatever it’s calling itself now for tax reasons.
• “The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas” by Ursula K. LeGuin.
• “Why Don’t We Just Kill the Kid in the Omelas Hole” by Isabel J. Kim.

You can hang out with us and our community on our Discord channel. If you have a question for a future episode, send it to us at [email protected] or tweet us @crateandcrowbar. You can also listen to it on YouTube, and subscribe to our YouTube channel, if you like.

The Crate and Crowbar is kindly funded by our Patreon backers. If you’d like to know more about supporting our podcast and its spinoffs, click here.

Our intro music is by The Mandibles from their track Clambake. Many of the band members now tour as Count Bobo And The Bullion.

Jamie and Marsh discuss the latest seasons of Fargo and True Detective, two anthology shows about troubling crimes and the yet more troubled cops who investigate them.

• Fargo was originally a film by the Coen Brothers, and was adapted to TV by Noah Hawley, who is also known for the show Legion.
• Also mentioned: Happy Valley, a superb crime show of a similar form, set in Yorkshire.
• The first season of True Detective was written by Nic Pizzolatto and directed by Cary Joji Fukunaga. The latest is written and directed by Issa López.
• Fargo Season 5 cast:
  Juno Temple – Dot
  Richa Moorjani – Indira Olmstead
  Jennifer Jason leigh – Lorraine Lyon
  Jon Hamm – Roy Tillman
  Lamorne Morris – Witt Farr
  Joe Keery – Gator
  Sam Spruell – Ole Munch
  Sienna King – Scotty
  David Foley – Danish Graves
  David Rysdahl – Wayne Lyons
• True Detective Season 4 cast:
  Jodie Foster – Liz Danvers
  Kali Reis – Evangeline Navarro
  Fiona Shaw – Rose Aguineau
  Finn Bennett – Peter Prior
  John Hawkes – Hank Prior
  Isabella LaBlanc – Leah Danvers
  Chris Eccleston – Ted Connelly

You can hang out with us and our community on our Discord channel. If you have a question for a future episode, send it to us at [email protected] or tweet us @crateandcrowbar. You can also listen to it on YouTube, and subscribe to our YouTube channel, if you like.

The Crate and Crowbar is kindly funded by our Patreon backers. If you’d like to know more about supporting our podcast and its spinoffs, click here.

Our intro music is by The Mandibles from their track Clambake. Many of the band members now tour as Count Bobo And The Bullion.

Join Jamie and Chris as they join Past Jamie for a solo pod about train-sets and low-key terror in the demo deluge of Steam Next Fest. Then they return to the present, which is also now the past, to discuss smushing bugs in the name of Super Earth in Helldivers 2.

• All aboard the Jamie solo-pod! Choo choo!
• Brio Train Sets
• Rolling Line
• Tracks – The Train Set Game
• Steam Next Fest is a periodic event that brings a deluge of time-limited demos.
• Mouthwashing is a weird horror game. The Steam synopsis asserts that “God is not watching.” Promising stuff!
• How Fish Is Made is another disturbing game from the same developer as Mouthwashing. Unnerving and hilarious, says Jamie.
• The horrible tongue fish thing is Cymothoa exigua, and is just one of several horrible tripophobia triggers in the game.
• The Last One And Then Another is playable within How Fish Is Made
• Dreamcore is an unsettling game set in an impossible swimming centre, viewed as if from a body-cam and keying into the “liminal spaces” aesthetic.
• Kitty Horrorshow makes amazing indie horror.
• Stalker-esque Pacific Northwest survival car game Pacific Drive is namechecked – we’ll surely talk about it more when it releases!
• Star Trucker takes the haulage sim genre to space.
• Cryptmaster is a bit like Legend Of Grimrock meets Scrabble.
• Atmosfear is the VHS game Jamie was the master of.
• Knightmare is the legendary kids tv show that only two people ever won. SPELLCAST D I S M I S S etc etc.
• Bing bong. We will shortly be arriving at Thurstown.
• Jean-Michel Jarre makes a bop.
• It is a bit busy, isn’t it?
• Helldivers 2 is a coop thirdperson shooter about summoning airstrikes on Icleand own-brand Tyranids and frequently your friends.
• This service terminates here. All change, please. All change.

You can hang out with us and our community on our Discord channel. If you have a question for a future episode, send it to us at [email protected] or tweet us @crateandcrowbar. You can also listen to it on YouTube, and subscribe to our YouTube channel, if you like.

The Crate and Crowbar is kindly funded by our Patreon backers. If you’d like to know more about supporting our podcast and its spinoffs, click here.

Our intro music is by The Mandibles from their track Clambake. Many of the band members now tour as Count Bobo And The Bullion.

Tom F joins Marsh to make the biggest sticks in Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom, become the stick in Pacific island adventure Tchia, stick to walls in Jusant and stick it to space pirates in timeloop deckbuilder Cobalt Core.

• Just forbidden enough: Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom is Tom’s game of 2023.
• Tactical Breach Wizards is Tom’s forthcoming game about wizards who breach tactically. It’s very good!
• Tchia is a joyous open world adventure in which you can possess any object.
• Jusant is a very beautiful game about climbing a massive abandoned tower.
• Cobalt Core is a very funny roguelike deckbuilder about pixelart animals murdering each other in the cold void of space, again and again and again.
• Stealth makes no sense in shooty-heist game Payday 3.
• Stealth makes no sense in purported stealth game Monaco. Maybe they’ll fix this in Monaco 2, if it’s actually still in development.

You can hang out with us and our community on our Discord channel. If you have a question for a future episode, send it to us at [email protected] or tweet us @crateandcrowbar. You can also listen to it on YouTube, and subscribe to our YouTube channel, if you like.

The Crate and Crowbar is kindly funded by our Patreon backers. If you’d like to know more about supporting our podcast and its spinoffs, click here.

Our intro music is by The Mandibles from their track Clambake. Many of the band members now tour as Count Bobo And The Bullion.

Marsh and Chris celebrate the new year by poking the wound in our psychic gestalt. Also: are AI tools ethical? Yeah, we solve that one. 100%. Bosh. Done. Also also: space whale visual novel South Scrimshaw, team shooter The Finals, Robocop: Rogue City, mystery game This Bed We Made, Pentiment and Cocoon.

• Alex’s COVID-recovery blogpost. He wouldn’t need to oxygenate his blood if he was a real man.
• South Scrimshaw Part One: a sci-fi visual novel written in the style of a nature documentary about alien whales. It’s excellent!
• The Finals is a very sweaty place for dinguses and a thrillingly dynamic shooter.
• Robocop: Rogue City is a 6.5/10 shooter which is a huge credit to its producers.
• This Bed We Made is a mystery game in which you play a cleaner in a hotel.
• Pentiment is a superb medieval murder mystery.
• Cocoon is a puzzle game in which you are a bug with magic balls.

You can hang out with us and our community on our Discord channel. If you have a question for a future episode, send it to us at [email protected] or tweet us @crateandcrowbar. You can also listen to it on YouTube, and subscribe to our YouTube channel, if you like.

The Crate and Crowbar is kindly funded by our Patreon backers. If you’d like to know more about supporting our podcast and its spinoffs, click here.

Our intro music is by The Mandibles from their track Clambake. Many of the band members now tour as Count Bobo And The Bullion.

Chris, Jamie and Marsh reminisce on the year that was, the teeth they lost, oceans they regret leaving, algorithms that have failed them and, very eventually, the games they played. Bold takes on Baldur’s Gate, Dave the Diver, Cult of the Lamb [sexy], Witchfire and Chants of Sennaar.

• Games of the year we give barely more than a namecheck to: Cocoon, Destiny 2, Jedi Survivor, Vampire Survivors, Hunt: Showdown
• Baldur’s Gate 3: game of the year or… game of the decade?!
• Cult of the Lamb, a cartoon action roguelike soon to feature sex, by popular demand.
• Dave the Diver, a multi-genre sushi experience.
• Witchfire, an early access spooky shooter set in the witch era, but with more ACOG sights.
• Tallboys making a game about a tall boy: Militsioner
• The historical triumphs and ellisions of Assassin’s Creed Odyssey VS a short holiday to off-season Athens.
• Chants of Sennaar, a terrific linguistic puzzle game.

You can hang out with us and our community on our Discord channel. If you have a question for a future episode, send it to us at [email protected] or tweet us @crateandcrowbar. You can also listen to it on YouTube, and subscribe to our YouTube channel, if you like.

The Crate and Crowbar is kindly funded by our Patreon backers. If you’d like to know more about supporting our podcast and its spinoffs, click here.

Our intro music is by The Mandibles from their track Clambake. Many of the band members now tour as Count Bobo And The Bullion.

Jamie and Marsh voyage into their deepest nightmare – a metatextual commentary on the subjective nature of storytelling – and shine a light on Alan Wake 2, then decide to incarcerate their dying, plaque-filled brains in the philosophical puzzle islands of The Talos Principle 2.

• Alan Wake 2
• Twin Peaks: The Return
• The Simpson’s Steamed Hams sketch.
• The Talos Principle 2
• It’s “Roboterhaus”. Thanks, Germans.
• Free on the Epic Game Store if you’re an Amazon Prime customer: Invincible Presents: Atom Eve.
• Lovely Mike Cook’s lovely talk at the Roguelike Celebration, encouraging people to experiment with making the very rules of games themselves procedural.
• In his Roguelike Celebration talk, the also lovely Tom Francis picks apart the procedural considerations and the many teleporters of Heat Signature, lovely-ly.

You can hang out with us and our community on our Discord channel. If you have a question for a future episode, send it to us at [email protected] or tweet us @crateandcrowbar. You can also listen to it on YouTube, and subscribe to our YouTube channel, if you like.

The Crate and Crowbar is kindly funded by our Patreon backers. If you’d like to know more about supporting our podcast and its spinoffs, click here.

Our intro music is by The Mandibles from their track Clambake. Many of the band members now tour as Count Bobo And The Bullion.

Tom S and Jamie don spandex and fling themselves into the uncynical optimism of Spider-Man 2, recall Tom Hardy’s come-hither Mr Tumble, return to both an up-res’d and a remade Resident Evil 4, and finish with a snifter of Super Mario Bros. Wonder.

• You don’t want to find yourself in that kind of posse.
• It took every fibre of maturity and decency I possess not to title this episode “The Pussy Posse”.
• BE EXCITED about the forthcoming Shiren the Wanderer: The Mystery Dungeon of Serpentcoil Island, a “back to basics” instalment of the classic roguelike that nonetheless moves the series into 3D.
• Spider-Man 2. Spider-Mans? Spiders-Man? A tour deforce of tech, traversal mechanics and symbiote-led therapy.
• Venom 2 sounds very odd.
• Resi 4’s remake doesn’t replace the original but is a success in its own right.
• The Resi HD project.
• Please don’t remake the racist Resi!
• Invention abounds in Super Mario Bros. Wonder, a generous and sumptuous return to 2D.

You can hang out with us and our community on our Discord channel. If you have a question for a future episode, send it to us at [email protected] or tweet us @crateandcrowbar. You can also listen to it on YouTube, and subscribe to our YouTube channel, if you like.

The Crate and Crowbar is kindly funded by our Patreon backers. If you’d like to know more about supporting our podcast and its spinoffs, click here.

Our intro music is by The Mandibles from their track Clambake. Many of the band members now tour as Count Bobo And The Bullion.

Tom S and Marsh switch their feet for tank tracks, and every other part of their body for bazookas, in Armored Core VI, suffer orb separation anxiety in Cocoon, enjoy to the janky return to Night City in Cyberpunk 2077: Phantom Liberty, and stab through Baghdad in Assassin’s Creed: Mirage.

• It’s the rockets you don’t shoot that matter in robot xenoplanet hell, Armored Core VI: Fires of Rubicon.
• Put an orb in your orb (inside your orb) in brilliantly chitinous puzzle game, Cocoon.
• Referenced: exploratory puzzle-platformer, Fez, weird insect open-world racing game, Vangers, and recursive Sokoban brain-breaker, Patrick’s Parabox.
• Potential GOTYs: Marvel’s Midnight Suns and Shadow Gambit: The Cursed Crew.
• Crate and Crowbar crimes detected in The Lamplighters League.
• Beep beep, motherfucker! It’s Cyberpunk 2077: Phantom Liberty.
• Return to roof-hopping murder basics in Assassin’s Creed: Mirage.

You can hang out with us and our community on our Discord channel. If you have a question for a future episode, send it to us at [email protected] or tweet us @crateandcrowbar. You can also listen to it on YouTube, and subscribe to our YouTube channel, if you like.

The Crate and Crowbar is kindly funded by our Patreon backers. If you’d like to know more about supporting our podcast and its spinoffs, click here.

Our intro music is by The Mandibles from their track Clambake. Many of the band members now tour as Count Bobo And The Bullion.