Describing The Skybox

I’m as podcast as you are. Welcome back! For our final episode of Halloween, we’re talking about Dredge, the fishing game that takes its aesthetic inspiration from cosmic horror, and of course, H.P. Lovecraft. In Dredge you play as a fisherman and you catch fish to pay for upgrades to your ship, repairs, etc., all while working toward the goal of collecting several relics for a mysterious man who...

Welcome home. Welcome back to the podcast! Today, we’re talking about Midnight Manor, a late entry suggestion for Pocket this Halloween that ended up probably saving our schedule. Midnight Manor is a short horror-themed platformer from a solo developer that encourages players to play the game multiple times in different ways to see all the narrative possibilities it has to offer. Mechanically spea...

Dismember their podcast. Welcome back to NOCLIP! Today, we’re going to be talking about our first horror title for the Halloween season with Dead Space. Specifically, we’re talking about the 2023 remake of the game with only a limited understanding of the original. That said, this is a game that makes a pretty brutal impression very quickly, so we did pick it up quickly. Dead Space is an action su...

I’m sorry. I couldn’t keep my podcast. Welcome to Halloween! Our favorite month of year for being our birthday month, it’s also time for us to play just so many, many horror games, starting today with Signalis. Signalis is an indie survival horror game, set in a dystopian sci-fi world in which you play as a “Replika,” a robotic servant, assigned to a pilot of a spacecraft. When laid out like that,...

We are celebrating our eighth birthday here at NOCLIP, but I can’t help but feel like something is off. In computer memory, there are eight bits in a byte, and memory is necessary to run video games. Video games are like stories, but the players can do things. They have verbs. Eight represents the verb in the classic joke about how seven ate nine. An eight looks like two donuts, which are things y...

Oooh, banana. Welcome back to the podcast! Today, for Simian September, we’re going to be talking about Donkey Kong 64, the only 3D Donkey Kong collectathon platformer that’s fit to print. This game certainly has a reputation, it’s almost infamous, so we thought it would be interesting to see if that reputation is warranted coming back to it after all this time. DK 64 is a platformer, as mentioned...

That’s the stupidest podcast I’ve ever heard! Welcome back to NOCLIP Pocket! Today, we’re going to be talking about one of the all time classic point and click adventure games, The Secret of Monkey Island as our pocket episode for Simian September, the month that’s like Ape-ril, but in September. Monkey Island is notable for a number of reasons, but it releasing in 1990 means that it was one of th...

A scattered dream that’s like a far off podcast. Welcome back to the podcast this week! Today we’re doing an episode that was a long time coming and talking about Kingdom Hearts II. The only numbered entry in the series we hadn’t talked about yet and probably the simultaneously most loved and most controversial Kingdom Hearts game. KH2 is an action RPG like its predecessor, but amps up a lot of th...

Podcast go, Sora go, go! Welcome back to NOCLIP Epilogue! Today we’re going back to one of our first ten episodes and talking about Kingdom Hearts. Kingdom Hearts is an action RPG with a dash of platforming on the side, as exploring the different worlds is a big part of both the goal of the game’s design and the appeal. That being said, the real notable thing about Kingdom Hearts, particularly at...

A Warg is hunting the podcast for food! Welcome back to the podcast! Today, we’re going to be talking about Rimworld, a colony sim strategy game. Rimworld is one of those games that you probably either already love or have never heard of, which is to say, it is exactly what its audience wants it to be, but appears absolutely inscrutable from the outside looking in. In Rimworld, your goal is predom...

Oh no! They podcasted the building down! Welcome back to the podcast! Today, we’re going to be talking about Chop Goblins, a surprising-in-many-ways FPS by David Szymanski. Chop Goblins is short, with only five levels and five weapons, and can be beaten for the first time in two hours or less, but because of this it never overstays its welcome and keeps introducing new things over the course of th...

Next time we meet, I’ll have lived a good full podcast. Welcome back to the finale of Spooktember in July! Today, we’re going to be talking about Ghostwire: Tokyo, a first person shooter game from Tango Gameworks, the developer of The Evil Within. Ghostwire is a sort of a horror game, but with an emphasis on magical first-person combat and Japanese culture, which makes it sort of an odd experience...

If this is podcast, we never should have climbed down from the trees. Welcome back to Spooktember in July, the month where we barely even know what’s going on anymore. Today, we’re talking about Ghostrunner, a first person platformer action game where you have to execute difficult platforming while avoiding bullets and doing cool cyberpunk sword tricks. It is a categorically awesome concept in all...

How dare you talk about saving your podcast when you’ve murdered mine? Welcome back to the podcast, and to our delightfully themed Spooktember in July. We’re concluding our first set of games with Resident Evil: Village, currently the latest main series, non-remake Resident Evil game, and one that received a lot of hype prior to release thanks to a marketing strategy that involved a nine foot tall...

“Fun” rhymes with “podcast” for a reason, stranger. Welcome back to the podcast! Today, we’re going to be talking about the Resident Evil 4 Remake that was released this year. Why are we talking about this game on Pocket? Well, we wanted to squeeze it in closer to its release date and the focus of the episode is mainly going to be on the way the remake differs from the original, rather than our ty...

Expand-a-band-band, podcast stash! Welcome back to the podcast! We took a bit of an extra long time with this one, but if you’ve played this game, I imagine you’ll understand why. The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom is a massive open world game and the sequel to Breath of the Wild, the game that some people said redefined what open world games should be. To an extent that is true, and we hav...

One whiff of this and you’ll have your throat slit over the last tin of podcasts. Welcome back to NOCLIP Pocket! Today, we’re going to be talking about The Bunker, an FMV adventure game with a surprising level of production value. We chose to cover this game partly because we had played it before, and there are several other things coming up that are going to take up a lot of our time, and also pa...

It is decreed that one shall pound the podcast. Welcome to the 150th episode of NOCLIP! Today, we’re celebrating, in a way, by finally talking about Super Mario 64, one of the single most defining video games of all time. Platformers, and probably games generally, were changed forever following the success of Mario 64, and that influence is impossible to deny. We’re going to be looking at that inf...

Why is every podcast fish? Welcome back to NOCLIP Pocket, and our final episode from Mystery May! Today, we’re talking about Octodad: Dadliest Catch, a game about an octopus doing his best to blend in with human society. The game is straight out of the Goat Simulator era of physics-based games, and owes a lot to all the QWOP-inspired physics hell games that came before it, but what makes Octodad s...

What is love known by? When it hurts to say “Welcome to NOCLIP.” Welcome back to the podcast! Today, we are doing as the dice instructed per the rules of Mystery May and playing Child of Light. Another game that’s been on our list for a while, Child of Light is an Ubisoft developed RPG that showcases the studio’s “UbiArt Framework” engine that was designed with the intention of being able to devel...

Take out the reptile, first of all. Welcome back to the podcast! For our first Mystery May title for Pocket, we managed to roll a critical miss, forcing us to do an epilogue episode on Rascal, probably the worst game we’ve covered for the podcast. What started as a joke episode based on a history with the game became probably the podcast’s most enduring reference point for things being done badly...

All those years ago, Tim had left the podcast behind. Welcome back to the podcast! For our first episode in Mystery May (but with rolling dice instead of solving mysteries), we’re going to be talking about Braid! Braid, as honestly you’re probably already aware, is a puzzle platformer that received a massive amount of recognition and acclaim when it launched on the Xbox Live Arcade way back in 200...

Podcasts that are once lost cannot be reclaimed. Welcome to the very first (kind of) NOCLIP Epilogue! On this series, that we’ll come back to every once in a while, we’re going to be revising some of our earliest episodes to rehash our discussions but with more media literacy and higher quality audio. For our first formal entry in the series (not counting Undertale, which we did as a primer to the...

Not bad for a dead podcast, huh? Welcome back to the podcast! Today, we’re going to be talking about Neon White, a first person platformer with a little bit of shooting in it. First person platformers aren’t exactly rare, per se, but they’re less common than the majority of other types of games in the genre, and so it’s worth considering the intentionality of its choice when a game comes out that...

At least I’m not ugly and annoying! Welcome back to NOCLIP Pocket! Today, we’re talking about Perfect Tides, a point and click adventure game in true throwback fashion. With a pixel art style and several ways to interact with your environment, you explore the island of Perfect Tides solving puzzles and picking up inventory items. Yet, this isn’t really the draw of the game. It can be, if you’re lo...