The Besties
Russ Frushtick, Chris Plante, Griffin McElroy, Justin McElroy
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Everything We Loved from Summer Game Fest
We watched all of the Summer Game Festival events and curated the upcoming releases that we think you’ll enjoy! Plus, Frushtick and Plante attended SGF Play Days in Los Angeles and went hands-on with…
007 First Light Is Like a Great James Bond TV Series
007 First Light is the new game from IO Interactive, the developers of the beloved stealth series Hitman. So you’d be forgiven for assuming this entry in the Bond canon would emphasize sleuthy…
Mina the Hollower Is GOTY Quality
Mina the Hollower is a delicious 7-layer dip of beloved video games. It looks and feels like a gothic Zelda, but its influences stretch far beyond Nintendo’s action-adventure series. The Besties are…
Forza Horizon 6 Wants You to Love It
Forza Horizon 6 wants you to be happy forever. It features a colossal open world that reimagines Japan, stuffed with more free cars than you’ll ever have time to drive – let alone upgrade. You can…
Mixtape Is a Musical Magic Trick
Mixtape arrived alongside a flood of euphoric reviews and a variety of discourses across various social media platforms and gaming groups. With a tiny bit of distance, we talk through what does and…
Saros is More Bullet Heaven Than Bullet Hell
Saros is the continuation of decades of bullet-dodging action games from Housemarque. But it has most in common with the team’s previous game, Returnal. Is this game welcoming enough to bring…
Vampire Crawlers and a Big Besties Update
This is a big week of change at The Besties. But before we get to the news, we all want to chat about one of the strangest spinoffs in indie games. Vampire Crawlers adapts the iconic Vampire…
Tomodatchi Life and the Magic and Wonder of Super Nintendo World
This week we're diving into Nintendo's bizarre life sim, Tomodatchi Life: Living the Dream, which allows a bunch of Miis to eat cigarettes for breakfast. Griffin also regales us on his experience…
Pragmata Is Like Dead Space with Optimism
Announced in 2020, Pragamata has finally arrived. Capcom’s new third-person shooter puts you in the boots of a space marine-type who must overcome evil robots on a moon covered in 3D-printed…
For Super Mario Galaxy The Movie, We Get Help from Get Played
How do you talk about a film as strange as The Super Mario Galaxy Movie? You call in backup. Get Played’s Matt Apodaca joins us to talk about the blockbuster sequel. Does a film need a story? What’s…
Creature Kitchen Is an Alternative to Expensive Gaming
This week, the Besties chat about two relatively low-priced games that have won over huge audiences: Creature Kitchen and Scritchy Scratchy. In the back half, we talk through the recent PlayStation…
Marathon Is Both a Miracle and a Monster
Frushtick and Griffin were Destiny dudes, and yet it's Plante who has fallen in love with Bungie's new extraction shooter. What's so appealing about Marathon? Is the extraction genre's difficulty a…
Slay the Spire 2, a Big Hole, and a Resident Evil 9 Spoiler Chat!
Welcome to The Besties March grab bag. There are simply too many new games, so to cover as much as possible, we split up the workload. Griffin talks about the surprisingly complete Early Access…
Pokopia Will Teach You to Love Pokémon Again
Plenty of companies have torched their fortunes trying to smelt together a collection of hit games and genres, hoping to recreate others’ success. Understandably, many folks (ourselves included)…
Scott Pilgrim vs. Millennial Nostalgia
Scott Pilgrim EX is a spiritual sequel to a Netflix animated series from 2024, a Scott Pilgrim movie tie-in game from 15 years ago, and an underrated beat ‘em up series that debuted on the NES. Or to…
Resident Evil: Requiem is Two Games in One!
Resident Evil Requiem has the misfortune of following Resident Evil: Village, one of our favorite games of all time. How does a game live up to that high bar? It becomes more than just one game. This…
Reanimal Is Like Limbo with Friends
16 years ago, Limbo launched on Xbox Live. It wasn’t the first puzzle-platformer, but its molasses-thick layer of fairy tale horror inspired a generation of grim, mostly wordless contemporaries.…
Mewgenics is a Meow-sterpiece
How do we celebrate a new release from one of the most acclaimed indie game designers of all time? With Ron Funches, of course! The fifth Besty joins us to chat about Mewgenics, a tactics-RPG about…
Is Dragon Quest VII Too Easy? Is Nioh 3 Too Hard?
Dragon Quest 7 Reimagined makes one of the longest, most ambitious RPGs into something more manageable: a swashbuckling sprint through a book of fractured fairy tales. Whether or not you like that…
Cairn Is a Climbing Game for the Real Ones
Climbing games have become a trend over the past few years, ranging from the AAA mountains of Death Stranding to the indie polygonal crags of Peak. But no climbing game has been as loyal to the…
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The Besties has published 505 episodes since February 2012, covering topics in Leisure, Video Games.
The Besties is currently highly active with new episodes weekly. Average episode length is 53m.
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