Phil Rice 01:00
and welcome to a now for something completely machinima, the podcast about machinima, virtual production and related technologies. My name is Phil rice, and I'm here with my co hosts, Damien Valentine, hello. Ricky Grove, hey. And Tracy Harwood, hi. So I'm very excited about this pick. Because if you were to go through my Steam account and see which game has Phil invested the most time in in the last three years, it would be this game the least, the least likely one that I would have ever thought that I would be able to bring a machinima pick for because of all the games you know that we've ever run into out there, this one just seemed ill suited for it to me, because of it's a it's kind of a two and a half d isometric view the whole time. There's no camera controls. There it is, a moddable game, but there's no scripting, or any of the kinds of tools you'd expect to be able to make narrative machinima, which is what makes this, this little film, to me, that much more remarkable that he pulled it off. Because most, if not all, of what we will see here is game footage. Wow. I'm pretty sure near 100% I might have to go over it with a fine tooth comb to see if he augmented or anything. But I know this game really well, like embarrassingly well. No, no, I'm not. No, I'm not. If you're in my friends list on Steam, you might be able to take a peek. But no, I'm not Elden ring for not Elden ring levels, but, but for me, it's a lot. I don't get a lot of game gaming time at all. But this is the clear leader. So I'll start with a quick summary of the game, because there's going to be a lot of this is an indie game, and a lot of people have not heard of it, or have heard little about it, except for me, name dropping it once or twice over these years. But Project Zomboid is a zombie survival game. And it is a it is a hardcore and perma death, very detailed survival game that takes place in it's the game is set in the middle of Kentucky in the 90s, and a zombie apocalypse has just broken out, and you're waking up that first day, and everybody is a zombie except you. Basically, if you die in the game, it's game over, and you and you will die in the game. In fact, the developers are so confident of that, that the opening title, when you start up a new session and start up a new game, there's a few lines of text that appear, and the final of which is, this is how you died, past tense, yo, yeah. So it's a hard one, huh? It's a hard one, yeah, even on the lowest settings, it's, it's it, there's a learning curve. I love this game. I love it. It took me a long time to to get to where I could, you know, actually survive for a decent amount of time, but it's an unforgiving game, okay, so that's the context is, you know, zombie apocalypse has happened now there's, there's been some mods made to the game, which he does make use of in here, some mods made to the game that actually take the time back to, I think it's the week before the outbreak, and they've reprogrammed all the NP. All the zombies to be, and they've re graphic them and everything to be regular NPCs with behavior moving around and doing normal Sims, one like people things, right? And then the and then the outbreak happens and everything goes to shit. So he clearly used this because in the actual vanilla game. There are no people hanging out at gas stations and, you know, sitting down for dinner that that's not a thing. Everybody's undead and out to kill you. So, so yeah, the story that's told, which is all of his films, the filmmakers name is warlius, I think, is how it's pronounced, and all of his short films that I have seen that are made with Project Zomboid, which there's numerous ones, they're all told, pretty much all told in this same style, which is, there's no voiceover, there's no narration. I don't think there's even any On screen text on most of them. It's it's all told visually by shot selection and showing certain actions in a sequence. And given the limitations, the graphical limitations of the game, which, yeah, it evokes the era of Sims, one, 1.0 graphics quite, quite low end compared to what we would see today. You wouldn't expect much, but he manages to deliver a really touching, I think is maybe the best word I can come up with right now. Story, obviously sad, because there's not really going to be happy stories in the world of this game, that's for sure, but remarkably effective silent film techniques. Essentially, you know, there's music and there's action on the screen, and even silent films would have, you know, the pop up cards with dialog, and he doesn't use any of those cheats. It's just just visual. And yet, at the end of it, the narrative is clear, the message is clear, and it it connects, at least it did with me. Connected with me emotionally as as just, you know, I think when I think about zombie films, I don't think about like the the obsession seems to be with, well, gee, how much more realistic can we make it and and all of that aspect of it? Yes, not. What's interesting to me about zombie apocalypse movies, what's interesting to me about zombie apocalypse as a genre is what it is that we are trying to contend with as an idea when we're imagining a world that this has happened to and it's much broader than just I want flash that's that's secondary. It's completely secondary, even shows like The Walking Dead, which were on its surface, it's just a zombie show. No, it's not. It's about these people who are put in this horrible, impossible situation and have to deal with losses that we would hopefully not have to deal with in our lives. I mean, just horrible, gruesome losses and homelessness and running and I mean it's, it's the ultimate catastrophe. It's you're on the run. Everybody's out to get you. You can't even trust your other fellow humans and those elements. Because I think maybe particular to that, maybe this is a mostly post 20th century phenomenon where all of us, at some point in our lives during that century, grew up with this really weird, really real feeling that all of this may end. We may just be stupid enough to blow ourselves up, yeah, but, but the worst thing that could happen isn't that we would die in that, it's that we would survive that. And how would we get by without infrastructure? Yeah. What kind of a weak, fleshy being Are We Now, when we're so dependent on running water and electricity and food just being drop shipped to us? You know? How would we contend with that? And I think that in a lot of ways, zombie horror as a genre, whether we're talking about 28 years later, or walking dead, or even back to the old Romero stuff, it's all it's much more about the people that are facing that world than it is about the zombies. You know, the zombies aren't even really characters, really, you know, they don't have any types of things. Yeah, right, right. They are things really, yeah. So anyway, I thought that this was just wonderfully done. I don't know how he got the graphics to look as good as they did, because if you just zoom in on part of the screen of screen capture, it all pixelated. And he over. Came that somehow, I don't know how, but visually, it's, it's, it's just right. And then the fact that he never could choose another camera angle except the top down isometric view. You can't alter the camera at all in this game. And he pulled this off without being able to be a sophisticated camera operator. He just did it with cropping and shot selection and then enhancing and to tell a story that is this clear and frankly this emotional, was just really impressive to me. And yeah, you're right, Ricky, it contrasts a lot with the film that we talked about last week, where it was again primitive animation. But I know you didn't want to make ethical judgments on it, but I'm going to go ahead and say used for evil. And in some sense this, this is that same power maybe wielded. What did you guys think? I

Ricky Grove 11:00
think, you know, he may have upscaled using AI to upscale, okay, I think as a solution to that kind of problem, right? Hey, Tracy, did you want to do about a little background? Rona,

Tracy Harwood 11:11
yeah, of course. Well, I didn't really do too much digging around on this because I did. I think I'm still stunned from what you picked, Ricky, actually, it won't be aI generated either, because it was released in 23 January, 23 so that I don't, don't believe there'll be any generative AIS working on the animation. So however, he's done it.

Phil Rice 11:35
No, it's not done. It's just the upscaling the resolution is, this is game footage

Tracy Harwood 11:42
for sure. Yes, yes. And to your point, Phil, you know, I was thinking about what you were talking about there in terms of this as a contemporary, contemporary sort of phenomenon. I don't think it is actually a contemporary phenomenon, because if you think about it, I mean, Victorians were fascinated by death and rebirth, that kind of stuff. And we've been okay. We've been, you know, I think throughout the ages of man, there's always been this kind of fascination with the undead. And how do you, you know, how can you preserve life in multiple ways? And what might that do for the human body and all of that kind of stories of the Golem and, you know, God like stories from Roman times. And, yeah, I bet you. I bet, if you go back to the very sort of earliest ages of man, these would not be uncommon stories, fair enough. Yeah, some kind of see that

Ricky Grove 12:36
the modern zombie was created by George Romero and idol living dead in the 50s, right? And he created the frame that everything up to the present day is used,

Tracy Harwood 12:49
right? Yeah, well, okay, but the idea of an undead thing, not necessarily so, so new, but yes, I see your point there. Well, clearly this film and Ricky's film are, you know, just they're on a theme, which is, we often sort of reflect on the fact we do not go out and collaborate on picking our films. And what's so strange is that we end up month after month, seemingly picking films on a on a similar theme, and you guys have picked very similar themes, although I do think they're quite different in what they're doing in many ways, indeed, excuse me. So the description of this, this really is about the lingering memories of a man succumb to a fate worse than death, as you, as you sort of said, Phil, it starts with what appears to be a normal, everyday working life of a man who leaves home, takes in his normal journey to the office and then takes a break, where everyone is also going about their everyday lives. And clearly, that's all just memories, because as he sits on this bench reflecting on his day, he's suddenly jerked back into his current lived reality and and he's left, or seemingly left, with this overwhelming sense that he needs to get home. However long that takes he's got to get home and immediately, that puts his film on an entirely different footing to the quality of what we were looking at with with Ricky's pick, which basically was just relentless blood and gore as a kind of primary focus as a, you know, for these Well, basically it's just a gag fest around gore. Um, evidently, what we've got here is a really interesting story, and as, as you said, it's really, I think it's beautifully told. I mean, I don't know much about this game, I can't really tell you. Much about this. Obviously, you know, you've played it for hours and hours, but it's what's what makes it so so beautiful. Is, is, is that it's such a dark and ultimate, ultimately morbid tale. There's just no humor in it whatsoever that I could, you know, crack a smile on. I could at least crack a smile in certain places in Ricky's pick, but definitely not in this. It's just so sad for for the situation that this character finds themselves in about which they can apparently do absolutely nothing at all. Um, I hmm, yeah. So you see the, you see, you see him, this character, doing this sort of return journey from the office, going through all these horrific scenes of zombies killing people and going about whatever it is the zombie things do. And you know, because it takes him so much longer to return, you're kind of left with thinking, Well, did he actually drive to work? I can't remember, you know, because you kind of got a sense of before and and after, but the after, it's just so drawn out. Um, there's a lot of humanity in the character that, in the way that it's portrayed. You don't see him partaking in every anything at all that's horrific himself, even though he clearly is a zombie. I mean, it's just the story of this relentless attempt to get home. You don't even realize until he's almost, you know, you get to almost the end of the film, and there is a shot of his hand that and you can see that he's wearing a wedding ring on it. You don't even know what he's doing until at that very moment when you realize that's where he's going, because you don't really know where he's going or why he's going anywhere. But when you see that ring, you know, actually, you know exactly where he's going, and then when he gets there, he can't get in, yeah,

Ricky Grove 17:06
which is, I mean, if that's, if that's a little bit of humor, though, that's a little bit

Tracy Harwood 17:10
of humor, but, but it not in the way that it was portrayed, because it's kind of scary, the way he tries to to get in. And then, of course, when he does get in, everybody's dead, and it's like, oh god. This is just, this is horrible. This is, this is just a really traumatizing kind of story. And what intrigued me about this kind of unlike, well, you know, I didn't really analyze my, um, distaste of your pick, Ricky, in the same way that this one led me to analyze my emotional response to it, but, but I sort of kept asking myself, well, why did this make me engage with it at that kind of emotional level? Because it's, it's low poly. It's not a nice story. It's, you know, it's a lot of death and whatnot in this as well. And it made me think about the films that we reviewed, that were made using. Do you remember those films that we looked at, the Minsky's films in made in source theories? And do you remember the wanderer as well? You know, an equally sort of horrifying tale, slightly more uplifting ending with that, I think. But you know, there's, there's a there's, there's a few ways, I think that this is, this is so effectively done. I think it has a lot to do with the soundscape, and that's the same with dominsky as well. It was all done through the soundscape. And there's particular songs in this that are quite interesting. So I looked, looked up how the song you know what the songs were. One is dancing star by Akash Gandhi, which is a piano piece, I'd say it's been inspired by the likes of Einaudi. So it's very kind of uplifting in its in its in the way that it's sort of, you know, taking you through a sort of a pattern of, you know, uplifting and lower moments. It's really, it's an interesting way that the piano was used in that in this story. And then the other one is they were once here by Zach beaver. And beaver was the guy that composed the music for Project envoy itself. Do you know how old this chap was when he created that music, the second piece of music? Do you feel who

Phil Rice 19:46
Zach Beaver, yeah. Do you know how old he is? No, I'm not sure what his age is.

Tracy Harwood 19:49
He was 16 when he composed Wow music for Project zumboid.

Phil Rice 19:56
Wow. I knew the devs on this game were were mostly. Anger. But I didn't realize, yeah, composer was that young. That's amazing,

Tracy Harwood 20:03
yeah. Well, he, he, yeah. So when they were making this, he, he was just starting out making a bit of music, I think he's, he's a science grad, or getting, getting into, into science, chemistry and all that sort of stuff. But liked tinkering with with music as well. And he was looking for places or areas where his music could be used. And one of his mates said, Oh, try these guys. They're just releasing something that's a bit odd. Maybe, maybe you'll be a fit in there. And they, they took him on almost immediately. And it's that music, I think, that makes this such a compelling piece, that is probably the overwhelming. I think you know, with with the music, with certain key things that you see in this story, and the way the character is portrayed in context of what's going on are basically the things that drive it. There's only really one final observation I'll make, because I couldn't actually find anything out about verleas, or, well, yes, or whatever you want to call him, but I do believe he's joined the Project Zomboid team, or at least was creating and providing assets built with the project on board models and the three day items to help the creators actually, actually expand on its law. Plus the guy hasn't posted anything for about a year, so I hope he's not actually lost to just becoming a game dev, because I think he's pretty good at the storytelling side of things as well. I think so too. But that's all I've got on it, really. That's not too much to go on, I think. But the music is very compelling for me. I think. Great

Ricky Grove 21:56
comments. Yeah, I agree. Damien, before you get overwhelmed with all the rest of us talking. Why don't we share your thoughts?

Damien Valentine 22:03
Okay, I want to build on something Tracy was talking about, when the zombie gets to his house and his family are inside, but he's obviously a zombie, but they're skeletons, so we don't know how they died, but they didn't share his fate. They maybe they were zombies at some point and then they just died again, like they stopped being zombies and just decomposed as left of skeletons. Or maybe something else happened to them and they died together. Or maybe they, you know, they, maybe they killed themselves to avoid the zombie apocalypse because they knew it was happening around them. You don't know. You don't get an answer to that. It's just something I noticed. He's he made this trip all the way back home as a zombie compels to do it. But his family weren't waiting for him. As zombies, they were dead, properly dead, laying on the floor of their house. And I thought I wanted to mention that, because it is a contrast of what his own fate was. Phil, you actually answered one of my questions was, how did they do the pre Apocalypse scenes? Because I haven't played the game, but I didn't expect it to begin before the apocalypse. I thought it would start afterwards. So that that's been answered. And it also mentioned lots of mods were used. And then something I noticed was in the credits, is I've got extensive lists every single mod and who created that, that mod, some of those mods that was a nice that was a classic move. Yeah, I was to mention that because it's it's important to do that when you're making a machinima. If you're using lots of mods or content from creators, do credit them in your credits, because you know they went to the trouble of making whatever it is you're using. It doesn't hurt to show some respect and to thank them for it. Yep, and you know someone else watching your film might want to use their mod to play the game, or they're making their own machine or projects, they may want to be able to look up that mod. So yeah, these do credit everyone that's involved, even if it's a mod you found online, you've never spoken to the person who created it, or if it's a photo or whatever, give the proper credit where it's due. I really enjoyed this film. It did have some strong Walking Dead vibes to it, which is to be expected from something that has about the zombie apocalypse. I did notice the Sims one limitations of the camera, and I think that actually works well for this film because you've got a limitation of the game, you're still working around it to create a compelling story. And we've talked before about how some of films have don't have a single word of dialog, and yet they can still convey a story. But. It's interesting to watch. Can completely understand what's happening and the meaning behind it and the character motivation, even if they don't see a word, and this is one example of that. So a lot of credit must go to the Creator this film for having that talent to do this. Yeah, yep. Skills. I highly, uh, respect and admire me too.

Ricky Grove 25:25
Thanks. Okay, so let's assume that this creator was hired by machinima, and he's bringing in the first episode to show to Philip devoise.

Ricky Grove 25:39
And devoise, a starts to watch it, and he's he though He's enthusiastic. But then about 60 seconds into it, he starts tapping his fingers, and he's a little bored. And at the end he says, Okay, I think we got something here, but we got to have some changes. First off, we got to get rid of this music. We need to have much happier, more funny music, you know, for it, and then cut out all of this stuff where he's just wandering around and shots of the wedding. And we need to have more death, okay,

Ricky Grove 26:10
more guns. We need to have more people dying and more zombies attacking people, okay? And he can end up at his home. He's got to end up at some place where there's more people to kill. So that'll be the climax, and then so other episodes, these zombies are killing all these people in these very funny ways. If you could do that, I think we'll make a lot of money off of them. This film is a perfect contrast to the film we had last week, because the film we had last week was targeted toward a certain audience who wanted to use cruelty and death or a gag fest around Gore, which I thought was a wonderful phrase that you said Tracy to make people laugh. And it was highly successful. Millions, billions of views, levels done, I don't think you'd have the same success with this film, because it does something fundamentally different, and I maintain more mature than the I suppose that's a value, but what the hell I have it? Because what it does is it produced empathy in the viewer, which is why we reacted to it. The music sets the elegiac tone, and you feel for what the character has lost. And that makes you realize that not only has this character lost his family, he's lost his humanity, but all of the zombies have lost their humanity and lost their pasts. So it makes you feel for the characters the story gives you a sense of of empathy with them in a way that our previous film doesn't, because it doesn't care about empathy. It's only cares about the Lawnmower Man is a kind of zombie, in a sense that all that, all these this Lawnmower Man does is kill people, that's it, and make funny quips. Okay, so in this film is such a great contrast, because it shows you what really, really good machinima made from a place of wanting to tell stories about human beings and their sense of loss, their sense of of sadness. And in another way, it's tragic, because as a zombie, he can't grieve. He can't grieve over his losses. Who grieves the viewer, the watcher of the movie, is the one who grieves. So I am so glad you picked this film. It's not technically sophisticated, but that doesn't mean make a difference. It has such a great sense of a passion and of skill in telling a story that evokes a feeling of sadness and of loss in what you really lose

Ricky Grove 29:23
in a zombie film. The rest of us, that great zombie series does the similar kind of thing, which is one reason why it won so many awards. We happy. Wheels would not win any awards, but it would get massive amounts of popularity amongst the people, because there are, there are literally millions of young men playing video games that would just laugh themselves silly and then go to their school and say, Hey, have you seen this guy? You got to watch this. Suddenly, everybody's making mods, and it's just funny. And that's great. That's fun. But I think this is a more sophisticated i. More mature way of telling a similar kind of story that produces an effect that that what great literature, what great art does? It allows us to be empathetic to other people, and to do it with a zombie theme, is even harder to do. So kudos to you, Phil. I think this is a marvelous film. And go fuck Philip devoise, a he can make all the money he wants from it, but what's going to last is this film, and what's going to make a difference to people watching it? Is this film? So great choice and great discussion.

Phil Rice 30:40
Yeah, thank you. I'm glad you brought up the literature reference, because if I, if I had to characterize how this, how watching this short film made me feel, it's the way that I would have felt after reading a very good, sad short story like Of Mice and Men without a single word, but it gave that same it's, it's built of that same stuff, you're right. And it's, and I think it's, it's, it's not only more mature, I think, I think it's also has the potential be more lasting, more universal, because, again, it doesn't really have anything to do with no one's going to find this in 10 years. And go, huh? Look at the graphics. If they do, guess what? Dude, go find a Happy Wheels film. Because this wasn't made for you, you know. So couple things I'll close with. Thank you all for your comments. I was so happy when I found this, and have been looking forward to sharing with you for a while. So Tracy, I'll put your mind at ease about the door that he couldn't get in at the end, if it makes feel any better. There's no such thing as a door that a zombie can't eventually get through in Project Zomboid, oh, just give it. Give it some time. All doors will break down. All of them feel wood, whatever. So he would have got it eventually. As far as the skeletons on the floor. Damien, yeah, you're right, those are unusual to encounter in the game. This, this, I can't remember which of the zombie worlds from TV and film, besides walking dead, have the thing where everybody's going to turn into a zombie when they die, right? I think that might be pretty specific to the walking dead world, if I'm not mistaken. And yeah, so one of the things that you can encounter in the game is you can go into a house and you'll find someone there that is truly dead, and usually they're there with there's a bottle of pills or a gun laying on the floor, or whatever, to explain why. Now turning into skeletons is a little different. The zombies will eventually turn into skeletons after they've been killed by you, because you can't kill them. It's not easy, but you can, and over the course of time, they will decompose and a skeleton will be left behind. So yeah, that's the skeletons. Is actually a thing in the game. It's just not, not terribly common to have encountered a scene like that. So I just thought I'd

Tracy Harwood 33:18
mention it. Oh, so you think that they were, they were zombies. And

Phil Rice 33:24
that's one possibility. Okay, yeah, one possibility is they were zombies, but then the question would be, the way that they're laying who? Who would have killed them like the zombies don't tend to, you know, just hang out together and wait somewhere they're always that'd be respond to any sights or sounds or even smells. I think in certain I don't know if they've implemented smell yet, but they plan to ridiculously realistic game, okay, the dead before, or there's

Tracy Harwood 33:52
no such thing as zombies mate. There isn't. Oh, no, I know.

Ricky Grove 33:56
I don't know. I've seen some people that I would categorize as zombies, right, literally, but figuratively.

Phil Rice 34:04
Yeah. So, speaking of zombies, I've had a, I actually had a pitch meeting experience with Philip.

Damien Valentine 34:12
They approached me as well. Brenda, I released the very first episode of Chronicles humanity, okay, a big space battle, yeah. She days in it. And they, I think she may have had something to do, I don't know, but they, they emailed me, said, we've seen this. We love it. Got this big action thing, and fish stays in it. So we know she's very popular on the internet. So we'd like you to bring the show onto, onto the show.com so I thought I already know their reputation, right? I know what's coming. My God,

Phil Rice 34:42
we had communication. We had that old community, but well I did, who knows how many of us would have gotten taken in if we hadn't had each other. And frankly, Ricky, I give most of the credit to that to you, because you smelled that a mile away, and you you kept, kept. Repeating. I've seen these Hollywood types before. I've seen them. And we all knew you had and you kept warning us, man, I'm telling you, you can't trust these guys. It's, it's something is bad here. There's a rat, you know, and, and you, you probably saved quite a few of us from, I hope, so. I hope, disastrous route, yeah.

Damien Valentine 35:21
So I had no intention of ever signing up to them, but just to see what their reaction would be to the rest of the series, I sent them the next three or four episodes. There's no action it. It's all dialog, because it's the important thing for me. Was the story, and it's made with The Sims two, right? Which is not on the big, sexy action games that they obviously wanted. I never heard of them after that, yeah, but I never would have agreed to it, but I thought I just want to

Phil Rice 35:52
see what they do, right, right? All right. So a couple more quick closing comments, and this is more, not just answering some of the stuff that came up with details, but about the feeling of this film, because I've been thinking about that a lot since I first watched it, and then listened to you guys comments. And yeah, I think, to me this, there's two major things that that this film evokes, that gives that sense of relatable emotion to it. One of them is, have you ever gone back to your hometown many years after you were last there? Ricky, I think you're aren't you originally from, like Arizona or something, Glendale, Arizona, yeah, so you grew up in Glendale? I grew up in a little town in central Illinois. You go back after you've been there, and it feels like, unless you're fortunate enough to be from like, one of these little towns, that just really doesn't change over the generations, right? That, to me, that would be a blessing for most places, especially here in the States, you go back and everything's changed. None of the businesses that were open are open anymore. None of the people you knew lived there anymore. Yep, it just feels like a ghost town, even though it's thriving and there's plenty of people around, but it just feels dead to you. It's like this isn't the place I came from. What is this that wasn't there before? What's that doing? And it's a very haunting feeling, disorienting. Yeah, I had an experience like that about four years ago. Went to the funeral of a friend on the other coast of Florida, to a town that I went to high school in and grew up in, and had that experience. And actually called my wife while I was there and just says, I feel like I'm in I don't feel like I'm in the place I thought I was like, I don't recognize anything. It just, it was very, very unnerving. And I kind of got a little sense of that vibe here, because he, he goes away from home, he comes back, everything's different. Nothing's where he expects it to be, and the people that he came to see are not there anymore, right? So there's that sense. Because I think, I think, to some degree or another, many people have experienced that sense of the place changed when I wasn't there, you know? And there's this almost sense of indignation that that rises up like it wasn't supposed to do that it's supposed to stay exactly how it is here, and it doesn't ever the second one would be, and this is almost in the category of a trope, I think, and that is how many times you've heard someone say hey. This could be the last time that you get to say goodbye to Person X. And it said as a method of encouraging you to hey, you know, be kind. You know, be be thoughtful. Because you don't know. You don't life, right is uncertain for all of us, and you never know if this will be the last time you get to say goodbye. You never know last time you get to kiss your wife goodbye for the day and go to work, whatever. So there's really a sense there of that, of is that what's at the core of this zombies feeling as he's returning home and finding them like that, assuming he has enough cognitive ability to process that is it a sense of what was the last conversation I had? What was the last thing I said to my daughter? And I didn't know it was going to be the last thing, you know? So there's a lot of that, and it's just amazing to me that in such a tiny, little film with no dialog, with no narration, that it succeeds in evoking all those things from some very simple visuals. Yes, so yeah, I'm just really impressed by it. And like you, Tracy, I hope, I hope this isn't the end of warlias storytelling career, or if you will, right because, because his others are good too, like it was not easy to pick this as the one. There are others in there that are quite good, same, same, overall approach to making the films. Mm. And they're, they're little gems. They really are. So they sure, if you enjoyed this one at all, I'd recommend taking a look through the collection of stuff he's published on his channel. It's, it's, it's quite good. I mean, it's, they're probably all going to make you sad, but if you have a tolerance for that, or even enjoy that. You'll, you'll, you'll, like what he does. So projects on board is available on Steam, if anyone interest got piqued by my description of it, it is in early access. It's been in early access for like, eight or nine years now, but it's in very, very active development. Is there any mods

Ricky Grove 40:42
to it? There are, well, there's that, yeah, the real

Phil Rice 40:46
hundreds, hundreds of mods, yeah. Because it's in active development, you got to be a little bit cautious with the mods, because they are designed to work with a specific version of the game, and it's iterating through those regularly, but there's great support. There's a great community, very active community, that helps each other with those issues on a regular basis. So the game itself is, when it's not on sale, it's about 20 bucks one time. They're not selling DLC, they're not doing anything like that. It's just a one time purchase. So it's a hard game. It's a very frustrating game. There's there's a learning curve, but if it interests you, that's where it's at. So yeah, you bet audience, what do you think about this little film? Drop us a comment on the video below, or drop us an email at talk at completely shima.com, I'm Phil and on behalf of my co hosts, Ricky, Tracy and Damian, we'll see you next time you.