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2022 Episodes

2022, Quarter 1

The Best, Worst, and Blandest Games of 2021

The Top 5 Best's sound is punctuated by a champagne bottle popping open its cork and pouring in a glass, the Top 5 Blandest's sound by bubbling water cooler, and the Top 5 Worst's sound... by a toilet flushing.
The 4th Best:
Yahtzee: I hope you'll forgive some self-indulgence...
Imp: Where are your hands?!
The #1 Worst Game:
Yahtzee: But our Worst Game of 2021 is a rather unique vintage that combines its mystifyingly bad design choices with an unflinching earnestness that makes it car-crash fascinating, like a chorus line dancer with a compound fracture, spraying blood from their exposed shinbone over the front row with every high kick and trying desperately to smile. Yes, it's Balan Thunderpants. This may very well be the sort of thing SWERY would make if he took a game design lesson, if it was a lesson given by a slug in a burning dumpster in the middle of a busy road who... doesn't know anything about game design.

2021 Roundup of Games I Didn't Review

(describing Unpacking) "Some indie games are like hamsters on viagra: doing a lot with very little."
Male Hamster: (boggle-eyed and sweating, sitting in front of a huge pile of used-up female hamsters) MORE WOMEN
While talking about the game Solar Ash and how it compares to the company's previous game Hyper Light Drifter:
Yahtzee: Still, it maintains Hyper Light Drifter's visual style, in that everyone's decked out in magenta and cyan, like they've all sworn fealty to The Order of the Mostly-Empty Color Printer.
Seeing the video's running long, Yahtzee decides to quick-fire the remainder of the list.
- F.I.S.T: Forged In Shadow Torch:
  Yahtzee: Another Metroidvania. It was alright.
- CHORVS (pronounced Chorvs):
  Yahtzee: Also alright.
- The Ascent:
  Yahtzee: Ehhhhh....
- Tales of Arise:
  Yahtzee: (shrugging) Animeeee.
- Doctor Who: The Edge of Reality:
  Yahtzee: (laughs) I did play that, didn't I? (continues laughing for an uncomfortably long time, sighs) ...Fucking sucked.

Praey for the Gods

The game's title provides ample fodder for mockery throughout the review—at different points Yahtzee calls it "Prairie for the Dogs," "Pogger for the Gogger," "Prolapse of the Gut," and "Pride Parade for the Gays."
When describing the difficulty levels that determine the harshness of the survival elements, Yahtzee recommends using the easiest setting (indicated by a picture of Gilligan, with the next two highest settings represented by pictures of Chuck Noland and Bear Grylls).
- The reason he recommends the easiest setting is because, on higher difficulties, the player drowns if the run out of stamina while swimming, and the second boss is surrounded by water that the player will fall in if they run out of stamina trying to climb it.
  Yahtzee: So that's as assuredly instant-death as if you'd fallen into a volcano full of sharks who were already very annoyed about the volcano thing.
  Shark: This seems poorly thought out.
Yahtzee gives Praey some backhanded praise for including a parachute to use for the many times you'll fall off the colossi, but then notes that since using the parachute consumes stamina, your 'chute is much more effective for writing your last will and testament on when you eventually fall to your death anyway.
The game's final colossus is represented by a buff shirtless guy with the head of W.G. Grace. It seems like an absurd non sequitur^note, unless you recognize him as also providing the face of God in Monty Python and the Holy Grail.

Five Nights at Freddy's: Security Breach

The intro:
Yahtzee: invoked If you're not familiar with Five Nights at Freddy's, it's this thing where somebody said, "Hey, you know those animatronic animals they used to have at a certain kind of family restaurant that had big terrifying eyes and really unnatural robotic movements? Those were a bit weird!" Hmm, interesting point. Hey, you know that Chuck Berry single "My Ding-A-Ling"? I think that song was actually about his penis. There, I can make banal observations about the patently fucking obvious too! Where's my multimedia franchise empire?!
This surprise Shout-Out when Yahtzee is giving some background on Five Nights at Freddy's:
invoked But anyway, speaking of things that are never getting old, Five Nights at Freddy's is about children getting murdered by pizza restaurant animatronics that go mad when night falls. Step 2: question mark. Step 3: profit.
The very sharp turn Yahtzee makes in the following lines wherein he makes his opinion of Five Nights at Freddy's: Security Breach abundantly clear.
In contrast to the original FNAFs, which were very low-tech games made from pre-rendered 2D art and wouldn't have looked out of place haunting a cracked CD-ROM jewel case in an EB Games bargain bin circa 1998, Security Breach is a full-on first-person stealth pseudo-Metroidvania reminiscent of Alien: Isolation... if Alien: Isolation had fucking sucked prehensile, slimy DICK!
Apparently, Yahtzee had originally intended to review Dying Light 2 Stay Human, but Security Breach was too appallingly - and appealingly - awful to escape his ire.
Yahtzee: I don't even have to review it. I only started playing it because my Dying Light 2 code didn't come in, and it did. But when it did, I said to myself, "Y'know what, Techland's new overproduced grind-a-thon can wait its fucking turn because Security Breach is very bad and I want to hurt it!" And if I don't get closure on this, I'm going to wake up one morning in the chicken coop with one fewer chickens and a priapism.
invoked Him getting his snark on regarding the bizarrely high Steam reviews for Security Breach.
invoked The really astonishing thing is how it's still rocking a "Very Positive" rating on Steam! But then, it is a cult series, and like all cults, its members presumably all live on a compound somewhere, feeding each other drugs and not playing any good video games. Or maybe the core target demographic only played long enough to confirm that it looks okay before getting bored and switching back over to PewDiePie, or whatever neon-haired dropout has the most amusing scream this week.
invoked The remark regarding how after getting the Fazerblaster mid-way through the game, the deadly animatronics that had just been constantly subjecting Yahtzee to annoying, unfair deaths "became about as threatening as a great white shark in a gravel pit".
The Running Gag of a cat animatronic going "REEEEEEEEEEEE".
This line after him finally Rage Quitting the game out of exasperation:
Yahtzee: To say Security Breach feels unfinished would be too charitable; I don't think they got as far as measuring the door to see if it'd fit!
After theorizing that the FNAF franchise is now trying to rely on just annoying the crap out of the streamers who play them for free press (instead of just giving them jump scares like before), Yahtzee fully admits that his anger over the horrible design, poor writing and numerous technical problems of Security Breach leading him to review it technically means that it "won".
Yahtzee: I hope the sweetness of that victory covers up the taste of my diiiiick!
The Stinger, which provides a Brick Joke to both his review of Epic Mickey and his review of the first Five Nights at Freddy's:
I'm now over my phobia of animal mascots but sadly I am still stricken by an acute fear of having "Happy Birthday" sung to me in a restaurant

Dying Light 2: Stay Human

Yahtzee's metaphors get away from him again:
Yahtzee: In the simmering system soup, where no one flavor can be permitted to stand out, the end result is going to need a fucking nice piece of bread to make up for it. And Dying Light 2 's is a little overproved and hardly upper-crust.
Viewer: Oh, stop trying to sound clever, Yahtz.
Yahtzee: [audibly exasperated] FINE. IT WAS COVERED IN SPUNK!

Pokémon Legends: Arceus

The Running Gag of Yahtzee insisting on pronouncing the last bit of the game's title as "ARSE-eus".
The intro where Yahtzee ruminates on the whole Trapped in Another World genre.
There's a genre of anime called "Isekai" that some fat nerd told me about while I was porking his mum, in which some regular dweeb from contemporary reality gets transported to a fantasy or video game world where their regular contemporary dweebiness makes them rare and special, and a hero to a bunch of polythene big-titty anime babes who all want him to accidentally perv on them in the bathhouse episode. And it's become weirdly popular among anime nerds— (smacks lips) Oh, sorry, I misread that. And it's become totally understandably popular among anime nerds in recent years, although the genre goes back all the way to 1889 with A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court by Mark Twain, who I never took for a massive weeb, but there you go. I bring this up because Pokémon Legends: Arceus is basically Pokémon as an Isekai; just the thing for all you Pokémon fans who were concerned that Pokémon GO had made the franchise marginally less embarrassing to talk about in grown-up conversations.
Yahtzee gets to the central plot hook of the game:
Soon, we get recruited by a, quote, "surveying" organization, who have tasked themselves to, quote, "survey" all the local Pokémon by capturing them and forcing them into either manual labor or gladiatorial combat; you know, the same way Columbus "surveyed" the Americas, or how one "surveys" an ant colony with a kettle of boiling water.

Not for Broadcast

The beginning of his review of Not for Broadcast:
Yahtzee: FMV games have gone through something of a redemption, haven't they?
Myst: [nailed to a cross] I died for your sins.
Yahtzee: I remember back in the 90's, when "FMV" stood for "Fuzzy Mammaries and Violence", and the gameplay of FMV games chiefly involved clicking on the bloodstained tits to look at some different bloodstained tits; also, the games either came on enough CD-ROMs to construct a functional soapbox derby racer, or the videos were so massively compressed, you'd have better luck masturbating to an image of a fully-dressed softcore porn actress holding up an embroidered picture of a fruit bowl.
Yahtzee's complaint about the game's politics starting to fall into Golden Mean Fallacy near the end, and how the result is a hefty dose of Mood Whiplash: "So the tone tends to wobble up and down like an erection in a unisex bathhouse, and the serious chin-stroking about government accountability shifts over to facetious song-and-dance routines about great it is to live in fascist autocracies."
His praise for the character writing regarding the main cast of news anchors:
The humor does land somewhat often enough, but more importantly, I got invested in the characters; as the government becomes stricter and stricter, and the news is forced to cover less actual events and more cats sitting on celebrities' heads, I really felt for the presenters, as they either disintegrate or become dead behind the eyes.
[A news anchor starts screaming and firing a gun into the air while another anchor sits patiently next to him with smiley faces pasted over their eyes]
- He does complain, though, that the Visual Novel segments revolving around the Player Character and their family fell flat for him due to the news anchors being far more interesting.
  I honestly couldn't give that much of a shit, probably because I and my family were purely hypothetical entities from the world of plain text, and the news readers have actual faces that make big sad eyes at me when the revolution is exploding outside, and they're only allowed to report on how a popular footballer helped an old lady down from a tree.
The ending, where he admits to the game that despite its impressive 14 different endings, he doesn't think Not for Broadcast is interesting enough to fuel that much replay value.
But hey, I might feel inclined to Google the other endings at some point, and that counts for something! Googling the endings of things is an underrated practice; certainly saves a lot of time. If Hitler had thought to Google the end of the Second World War, it probably wouldn't have been as much of a pisser!
Adolf Hitler: [at a computer monitor] Well, that's driven the wind from my sails a bit.

Elden Ring

"With the usual fussy bitch alteration of terminology, we collect Runes rather than Souls, Crimson Tears instead of Estus, and to upgrade our weapons, instead of Titanite Shards and Large Titanite Shards, we collect Smithing Stones and Smithing Stone [2]s. That's fucking weak, Elden Ring! What, is it the sequel to Smithing Stone [1]? This is a communication issue; the first time I picked up a Smithing Stone [2: This Time, It's Personal] , I assumed I'd picked up two Smithing Stones. That was an embarrassing moment to the blacksmith's shop."
Blacksmith Imp: Someone should've read the wiki.
"But generally, this isn't the laundry list of grindy busywork that Ubisoft calls a "sandbox" when it can get a word past the dicks in its mouth..."
Caption: YouTube has been weird about this kind of imagery lately.
- "See, when the game signposted the path to the first castle, and the bouncer at the door greeted me the way a starving chimp greets a satsuma, Elden Ring was trying to tell me something, I eventually realized; it was saying, "Don't follow the signs! Go off-road; explore! You'll get stronger; you'll get experienced; you'll get pounded into wet sand by a giant crab with anger issues." So, I explored; I took what paths I could find until I hit a difficulty wall, saved the spot for later, and then tried somewhere else. It was like that thing you do with choose your own adventure books, where you keep your fingers marking eight previous pages in case you're fucking things up."
The Running Gag of tiny Imps going "Mis mis mis mis..." whenever Yahtzee says the word "misgivings".
"spectacular backdrops and droptacular backstabs"

Babylon's Fall

The ending of the review:
Yahtzee: But I felt like I'd seen enough of Babylon's Fall; I was so bored and sick of it already, and both my middle fingers had reflexively extended so far, they started to mess with the ceiling fan. Fuck you, Babylon's Fall! I only reviewed you 'cos the alternative was Shadow Warrior 3, and that was too short to say much about.
Viewer: How short is it, Yahtz?
Yahtzee: Well, put it like this: it was—
[Smash Cut to the end credits]

Ghostwire: Tokyo

Yahtzee starts out by taking a look back at Shinji Mikami's previous games.
Yahtzee: So I just want to say that I appreciate you, Shinji Mikami, for all your years as a positive force for innovation in this ever stagnating industry. You're one of the good ones. Now, what's this new game about?
Shinji Mikami: Well, it's an open-world stealth-action game with collectibles and—
Yahtzee: OH, FOR FUCK'S SAKE!! [takes out a hammer and raises it threateningly against Mikami] I KNEW THEY'D GOTTEN TO YOU TOO, YOU POD PERSON HACK!
Shinji Mikami: Yahtzee, wait! I didn't say "crafting"! There's no crafting in it!
Yahtzee: [lowers the hammer] Oh, well, strike up the band. The usual instrument of my torture has had its anal distention feature deactivated. Halle-fucking-lujah.

Tiny Tina's Wonderlands

The opening demonstration of the "Borderlands method" of "comedy" writing.
Yahtzee: [to Borderlands 3 asking if their attempt of comedy was funny] No, it wasn't, not in the least, but it does have a sort of comedy vibe about it, and maybe that's all you need; you know, it's comedy in the sense that Owen Wilson is an actor.
Yahtzee admits that his review was considerably more gentle to this game than the previous Borderlands installments, but insists that this doesn't mean he's going soft.
Yahtzee: Maybe as I've aged, I've come to realise there are better things to waste your energy on than getting angry at things that never change. Like cleaning out the shower drains. Or harvesting transplantable retinas from the eyeballs of unwanted shelter animals.
(Loooong Beat)
Yahtzee: Or knitting.
(End credits)

2022, Quarter 2

Stranger of Paradise: Final Fantasy Origin

Yahtzee expressing his confusion at the game supposedly being a retelling of the original Final Fantasy, yet for some reason it throws the player some very strange curveballs. His tone of voice at the end really sells it, he sounds sincerely perplexed trying to puzzle out the plot:
...In the prologue of Final Fantasy 1, the four Light Warriors travel to a nearby castle to rescue the kidnapped Princess Sarah from the corrupted knight, Garland. And Stranger on Top of Paradise seems to be doing pretty much the same thing until you defeat Garland at the end of the first dungeon, at which point Garland transforms into a girl wearing nothing but a basketball jersey who explains that she was also on a quest to defeat Chaos but decided Chaos didn't exist, and so prayed to Chaos to become Chaos and get defeated, but now she's been defeated so she's failed somehow. And that specifically was the first moment that made me wonder what the fuck this game was driveling on about, by no means the last.
- And on the subject of said "girl wearing nothing but a basketball jersey":
  Yahtzee: She joins the party and it turns out her name's Neon. Aha, I said. "Jack, Ash, Jed and Neon", is this a clever riff on how the original game would only allow you to enter names a maximum of four letters long?
  Stranger of Paradise: Possibly. Anyway, here's your fifth party member, Sophia!
  Yahtzee: Well, fuck you, game!
Yahtzee notices that the game seems to cut conspicuously many corners:
Would I be right in assuming that Stranger in the Vicinity of Paradise got cut down a bit during development? I assume it was going to have a full-on overworld with towns you can explore full of NPCs that all drivel out one utterly banal sentence when you press on their heads. And all that got cut, because the final game is a linear sequence of combat dungeons and cutscenes that you pick from a fucking menu that they drew a map on so you can pretend it's an overworld. And I guess they'd already written the NPC dialogue, because rather than let it go to waste they stuck a submenu at the bottom of the map screen where you can click a name on a list to get subjected to one of the copy-pasted townsfolk making an insipid observation on the current state of the plot. Very useful feature if you happen to have breast cancer and will only survive by boring your own tits off.
- Yahtzee speculates where the budget was most spent:
  If you want to know where all the money did go, I'd bet on the weapons and armour department. You are constantly being showered with new equipment, every piece of which is lovingly designed and attached to your character model even in cutscenes, ensuring that the light warriors constantly look like they're going to a costume party as the donation bin in front of a second hand kitchenware shop. I wonder if the people doing the face animation for cutscenes knew that the cast would be wearing full face masks most of the time. I further wonder if the armour department's coffee machine ever didn't contain piss.

Tunic

Yahtzee starts with briefly discussing how he had briefly considered doing an episode on Kirby and the Forgotten Land, since he had played it, but he ultimately found that both the game's general kid-friendly style didn't provide him with much material to work off of and he wasn't too impressed with the premise:
Viewer: But it's the first ever fully-3D Kirby game, Yahtz!
Yahtzee: Oh, fuck off. Look, I'm wearing a Sooty puppet! It's the first ever real time Sooty performance in this room! Who cares? That doesn't lend it meaning. Oh my goodness, Sooty's hitting you with a tree branch! It's your first ever hand puppet foliage-based bodily assault! Mark the fucking calendar!
Speaking of Kirby: "...some people asked me to review it, and honestly, the prospect of doing so for my knob gag-infused video series fills me with depression. I mean, what do you want me to say, besides knob gags? It's a fucking Kirby game!"
[to the game] Most empathetically *not* an image of a penis
[to Yahtzee] Not this neither
[to Kirby] Or this
Kirby: Yaaaay!
And if YouTube still won't let us monetize this video then who the hell knows

Weird West

In his effort to catch up with recent releases, Yahtzee attempts to play Rune Factory 5 and LEGO Star Wars: The Skywalker Saga
Yahtzee: Tried a few things this week; had a go on that Rune Factory 5 'cos some people said I might like it if I like Stardew Valley-style games, and from that concluded that unless I find myself in urgent need of a T-shirt that would provoke awkward conversations at family events I should probably stop paying attention to weebs. Then I tried that new LEGO Star Wars 'cos I heard it was an all new open-world take on the LEGO Star Wars thing, got about ten minutes into the plot of A New Hope and then became overcome with depression. I mean, how many fucking times have I gone through these events in one film, game or Robot Chicken parody after another? I don't even like Star Wars much. Feels like going to a nativity play at this point; nobody actually wants to go to nativity plays unless their own kid's in it or there's decent odds of someone pissing themselves and crying in an amusing manner. And last I checked I wasn't Alec Guinness' dad and LEGO Star Wars isn't Metal Gear Solid.
He isn't impressed at all by the first Player Character of Weird West setting up a farm with her husband to escape from her Dark and Troubled Past, which rather predictably results in her still getting embroiled in the game's story.
Yahtzee: Oh, you built a farm; real fucking original! Look around, asshole! Everyone's building farms! Why couldn't you have retired to run a bowling alley or a middling-capacity convention space?!
Yahtzee joking that whenever an immersive "choices-matter" RPG offers character customization, he has to play the game as the closest possible facsimile he can make of Mr. Bean.
- Relatedly, Yahtzee then notes the bizarre way in which Weird West handles character customization — namely, that it replaces it wholesale with a revolving cast of five different Player Characters that the player switches between over the course of the storyline — he then snarks that this was likely implemented because the developers couldn't get the character customization to work properly "...and so they figured if they just gave you five random protagonists, at least one of them will be marginally more Mr. Bean-like than the others."
  Yahtzee's Avatar: [turns and "grins" at the "camera"] Oh, you know I'm just being facetious! [looks down sheepishly] ...At least, I hope you do; these last fifteen years would seem like a bit of a rollercoaster otherwise.
  Viewer: [while giving Yahtzee a disturbed look] Wow, you must genuinely hate women a lot.

13 Sentinels: Aegis Rim

Yahtzee goes a bit meta with his mistitling jokes.
I had a go on 13 Sentinels: Anus Rim. I mean Aegis Rim! Oh god, I swear you people are trying to make this easy for me now.
Yahtzee then tries to describe the game's premise:
Yahtzee: 13 Sentinels's premise is so blisteringly standard as anime goes it sounds like a joke. It centres around a bunch of high school students who have to pilot giant robots. And the method they use to summon their giant robots is to hike up their miniskirts and flash their juicy thighs like desperate hitchhikers. Like I said: it sounds like a joke. [Yahtzee gives a "cynical look" — consisting of him with an exaggerated frown and absurdly prominent Fascinating Eyebrow — while playing the game] I haven't even mentioned that there's a talking cat in it. Or the part where the teenagers can only pilot their giant robots by stripping completely naked and rubbing themselves on the equipment. Why's that, game?
13 Sentinels: Oh, because clothing might interrupt the cyber neural control interface or something.
Yahtzee: invoked So why are some of the characters still wearing spectacles and hair ornaments?
13 Sentinels: Oh, who cares?! Come and look at this anime teenage girl take all her clothes off, straddle a robot vaulting horse and arch her back like a cat being stepped on!
- And then, to get the rather obvious Fanservice of the game out of the way:
  Yahtzee: So, what did I like about this game?
  Viewer: [with extra thick sarcasm and Yahtzee's own "cynical look" from earlier] Oh, don't worry, Yahtzee. You've made that perfectly clear...
  Yahtzee: SHUT UP, YOU! Trust me, this isn't my sort of porn! And even if it was, there are plenty of places I could go to get it that wouldn't be so infuriatingly coy with the camera angles.
Yahtzee then mentions the third main aspect of 13 Sentinels that grabbed him (after its Magical Realism and unique way of storytelling): Namely, that its plot is a massive Mind Screw:
The story in question is completely fucking barmy. I mean, we start with a nice straightforward opening premise of thirteen high school kids who have to pilot giant robots to fight an alien invasion, and within a few hours it's turned out some of them are time travellers from the future, and some of them are time travellers from the past, and some of them are secretly robots, and one of them's secretly a man! That's not even getting into the talking cat!
- It somehow only gets funnier as Yahtzee continues to describe how utterly bizarre the game's story is.
  Yahtzee: The story chapters consist of a fairly typical visual novel experience: wandering around a paper puppet theater, clicking on stuff until either the dialogue starts repeating itself or we trigger the next plot flag. And generally, that flag can be relied upon to make something completely barmy happen, which is part of what kept me interested, because somehow, it was always something new and barmier.
  "Oh, I suppose we'd better deliver these papers to the staff room; tumpty-tum. Oh no! I'm about to be squashed by a giant robot containing my future self with unfeasibly large breasts! (Cliffhanger fade to black.)" But then, if we take on that character again, we're back in the staff room, and they're thinking, "Boy, it sure was hard getting away from my big-titty adult self! Anyway, about those papers."
  And now we have to find the other plot flag that can also be triggered in this room. "Oh, turns out, I can go to the vending machines now, where an assassin from another dimension holds me hostage with a phaser gun! Perhaps this is my opportunity to confess my undying love for him."

Rogue Legacy 2

About the title:
Not to be confused with Rouge Legacy, which is the biopic of the man who had the idea to put tits in Sonic the Hedgehog...
And about the Roguelike genre:
Yahtzee: The definition of "roguelike" these days is about as much to do with the original Rogue as a pig holding a fish in its mouth has to do with Yoko Ono...
Fish in Pig's Mouth: This seems mean spirited.
A twist on two familiar Running Gags:
Yahtzee: [rolls his eyes] Although since the first game it's taken some influence from — go on, have a guess.
Viewer: Errr... Sex and the City?
Yahtzee: [incredulously] ...What?! No! Dark Souls! It's gone a bit Dark Souls-y on us like 90% of high profile indie games these days! [still baffled] Why the fuck would you say Sex and the C—
Viewer: [defensively] I don't know! You caught me on the spot!
- Amusingly, Yahtzee later admits that he isn't outright opposed to the idea:
  Yahtzee: Still, it'd be nice to take a break from the fucking Souls-y shit one of these days and play a game about, I dunno, deflecting nuggets of unsolicited information about the sex lives of four grotesquely wealthy middle-aged women.
  Sex and the City: invoked My vagina is like an inside-out dusty oven mitt!

Trek to Yomi & Ravenous Devils

Yahtzee's complaint about how he felt the parrying mechanics in Trek to Yomi were too easy:
Trek to Yomi, I am a professional YouTuber! I get condescended to quite enough in daily life!
Yahtzee's affectionate description of the Villain Protagonists of Ravenous Devils:
...Honestly, it was just nice to see! 'Mr. and Mrs. Muttonchop Murderer' completely devoted to each other and completely round-the-houses batshit banana-sandwich kill-crazy on all fours, and I'm fucking well-here for it!
- He also suggests that if the protagonists of Ravenous Devils ever decided to franchise out their cannibalism-based restaurant, they should call it "McDonner Party."
The end credits have a Bilingual Bonus that roughly translates from Japanese to:
Don't worry, boring people will probably translate this for you.

Salt and Sacrifice

Yahtzee's remark that his light-armored duelist-style fighter had "more dodgy rolls in them than an unsanitary sushi restaurant."
The numerous digs made at the American healthcare industry when Yahtzee is complaining about the Scrappy Mechanic regarding healing potions in Salt and Sacrifice.
- Of special note is how when Yahtzee's Avatar has to take a second job to pay for healthcare, he's shown working at the "McDonner Party" restaurant chain in a Call-Back to his Ravenous Devil review.

Hardspace: Shipbreaker

Yahtzee defining what he calls "post-dad games": Work simulators with stronger focuses on fantasy, skill challenge and narrative a la Papers, Please, Elite Dangerous, and Viscera Cleanup Detail. He then remarks that he's a big fan of this genre, "being a dad and having many of the qualities of a post."
Praise is given to how despite the seemingly "Zen" and monotonous nature of the gameplay in Hardspace: Shipbreaker, its surprise Difficulty Spikes related to moving around in zero gravity and having to use specific tools on certain ship parts help better motivate the player and ensure engagement.
Yahtzee: I'm all about this; finishing an entire room in Viscera: Cleanup Detail was nice, but I'd have felt even more of the satisfaction of a job well-done if there'd been a possibility of completely fucking up, like if there was a chance I could slip on a hitherto-unnoticed kidney and impale my eye socket on the mop handle!
" And now there's a new post-dad game off of Early Access: Hardspace (HRUUH) Shipbreaker. (Ooh, been a while since I brought the dry heave out.) What the fuck was wrong with "Shipbreaker" by itself as a title? It's a game about breaking ships; it's not a game about spacing hards. Anyway, Hardspace: Shipbrea— ugh. Look, I don't want to harp, but I feel like I could arrange all the elements of this title in random order, and it would have exactly the same effect." [cue Yahtzee pulling out scissors and rearranging the words as "Ship Hard: Breakspacer"]
- He also calls the game Breakhard: Spaceshipper, Hardship: Facebreaker, Shipshape: Cakeplatter, and Fartface: Breakwinder.
  - In the Best, Worst, and Blandest of 2022, he also calls the game Fartface: Shitcaker and Carkplace: Titshaker.
The Call-Back to the Death Stranding review, where Yahtzee goes on an extended enraged rant over the game having un-skippable and lengthy cutscenes/audio logs that aren't able to be played over the (relatively) unchallenging gameplay.
This is definitely one of those unwindy games for listening to podcasts to, but not for the first time, I'm disappointed by a podcast game not realizing it could easily have provided the podcast, at least for a while. Because there is a story; quite an engaging one, about a small group of characters who are trying to stay human despite being trapped by hyper-capitalist fuckery in their lives as dingleberries on the enthusiastically-used bog roll of the corporate structure, a story conveyed almost entirely through radio chatter. All the pieces were in place; all it had to do to get the big tick at the bottom of the page was just have these conversations play out exclusively over gameplay! You were so fucking close, Shipshape: Cakeplatter, but no! Half the time, while a conversation plays out, you're locked in a glorified menu screen, with your ability to do anything or start a new job disabled until everyone's done talking. You don't even have the option to skip. Christ's sake! I could've pitched three fuel tanks into the processing barge in the time it took for you to explain the concept of unionization, sassy colleague!
So close. Pulled the lever on the fruit machine; we got a seven, then another seven, then a great big piggy poo! Why is this such a fucking blind spot for video games?! You put all this effort into creating lore and audio logs, and then you won't let us absorb them unless we let you nail our feet to the ground! Just play the fucking audio logs over our earbuds while we're doing one of your dreary shootouts! Are you so afraid we might miss something?! What, is the school board going to rate you based on how we do on the comprehension test at the end?
- Said comprehension test reads:
  1. The central thesis of the game's plot was (circle one)
  
  A. Unions rule
  B. Corporations drool
  C. It's fun to smash things
  D. Don't forget to breathe
The ending Shout-Out to Office Space.

Sifu

Yahtzee acknowledges that it has been a while since Sifu was released, but he is it reviewing now because...
Yahtzee: ...Holy-Jesus-human-centipeding Christ, are new releases dead right now! They're so fucking dead they're planning to start their comeback tour in Sarajevo. It's not usually this bad this time of year. I think Elden Ring might've frightened everything off.
Elden Ring: (stands around defiantly with a Badass Arm-Fold) Keep walking, motherfuckers!
Yahtzee: It's like how it's easy to lose confidence in your stand-up set if the opening act was a gigantic golden dancing rhinoceros that spunked diamonds at ballistic velocity and killed eleven audience members.
The Running Gag of using the phrase "going flip-out spanky-wanky" to describe a Roaring Rampage of Revenge.

The Quarry

Yahtzee once again finds the cast of a Supermassive Games-penned game both utterly loathsome and major victims of the Unintentional Uncanny Valley:
I'll say this for Supermassive Games, they are world class experts at creating entire casts of characters that I instantly and completely despise. They should take a side gig making war propaganda. If they made one of these games starring a bunch of Russian military officers, I'd join the Ukrainian defense force before you can say "Pierre Kirillovich Bezukhov". A lot of that comes from the animation. There's still an awkwardness about the motion capture faces, because of course "Haunted Quarry" is a synonym for "Uncanny Valley". There's something very wrong with everyone's mouths and teeth, like they've been enlarged in post-production or something. The stock "sexy girl" character in particular looks like she's trying to talk through a bagel that's been hot glued to her face.
Yahtzee dives into the story's supposed "plot twist" regarding the dickish rednecks being Good All Along:
Yahtzee: So monsters show up in the woods, as I said, and weirdo redneck locals show up as well. And the game tries so fucking hard to get us to think the weirdo redneck locals are baddies and I didn't buy that for one second. Right from the start I assumed they were there to hunt the monsters and were trying to protect the teenagers but being slightly dickish about it. I mean, Until Dawn had the exact same twist! Yet The Quarry desperately tries to keep the pretense going for ages.
The Quarry: Oh no! You're caught in a trap and here comes a weirdo redneck with a knife! Quick, press the button to throw a rock at their head.
Yahtzee: (defiantly crosses his arms) No, I will not press the button. Because I think he's coming over to free me from the trap.
The Quarry: You don't know that! He's getting closer! Better press the button!
Yahtzee: Honestly, I'm a little insulted you assumed I'd be prejudiced against them just because they look like weirdo rednecks. You know, you're just feeding into conservative America's persecution complex. Frankly, I'm more prejudiced against that one sexy girl character with the weird mouth because I worry if I take my eyes off her for one second she's going to start biting the heads off of baby squirrels.
The Quarry: Too late! The redneck's here! Last chance!
Yahtzee: (completely deadpan) Oh. The timer ran out. What now, game?
The Quarry: Uhm... Uh... Uh... Oh! Your character got themselves free and ran away! Lucky them!
Yahtzee: For fuck's sake! Why can we never just do what would be sensible?!
The Quarry: 'Cos then the game would be over in two minutes, Yahtz.
Yahtzee: Works for me, The Quarry! Walked right into that one, didn't you? Press X to avoid verbal trap!

Neon White

Yahtzee starts off by stating upfront he isn't going to bother to review Diablo Immortal:
Viewer: Oh, Yahtzee, you should do Diablo Immortal. It's a bit boring and the camera zooms in too close and also it's the most insidious work of evil to ever be squeezed out from the black thorny anus of BeelzeBlizzard.
Yahtzee: Sounds like you already know how you feel about it, viewers. Why should I make myself miserable all week just to rephrase established general opinion through a lens of dick jokes and progressively changing the title into something irreverent? Tell you what, let's just list off all the things I would have called it right now: Diablo Immortal, Diablo Immoral, Diablo Impoverishing, Diablo Income Statement, Diablo In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida, Baby.
Yahtzee was almost instantly intrigued by the central premise of Neon White, which described itself as a "first-person speedrunning shooter".
Yahtzee: And I harbor a growing interest in speedrunners, mainly because I feel like someone needs to be keeping an eye on these people before there's an unexpected Mountain Dew shortage, and they burn down all our cities.
Yahtzee explaining the core gameplay of Neon White:
The unique gameplay mechanic is that you pick up gun cards that you either shoot in that usual boring way of guns or throw away to use some kind of traversal power unique to that gun — the pistol grants a double jump, the rifle a midair dash, the rocket launcher has a grappling hook, which means that if it also dispensed prawn cocktail flavour skips from its hilt then I would officially need nothing else in my life.
He then goes into how the story is delivered:
Yahtzee: And the final ingredient is a visual novel element. (audiably spits on the floor) No, it's fine, I suppose. It's good to space out the intense speedrunning challenges with a bit of downtime hanging out with some anime characters, or more accurately, characters from a webcomic drawn by a freshman college student who watches too much anime.
Nerd with a paintbrush: (stares longingly at his Cowboy Bebop poster) Soon we'll be together, Faye-chan...
Yahtzee: invoked I don't "hate" the story, it's just a little bit... juvenile, I suppose.
Nerd with a paintbrush: ...And then Harry Potter shows up!
Yahtzee: You play an edgy dude in a suit with too many belts, voiced by the great Steve Blum wearing his Cowboy Bebop hat, and he was once part of a CRIME GANG that operated more along the lines of a best friends treehouse club, and consisted of bog standard archetypes: slacker idiot friend, hot girl, loud girl. Loud girl displaying the usual slightly ill-advised student webcomic definition of insanity:...
Nerd with a paintbrush: I have read a lot of Jhonen Vasquez comics!
Yahtzee: ...liking violence, having starey eyes and generally acting like a manic twelve-year-old who recently got their head trapped in a Jelly Belly dispenser.
Wannime [won-uh-mey]

noun Informal
1. A work of non-Japanese media that deliberately affects the style and/or cliches of Japanese anime

adj Informal
2. Having the qualities of the above
Yahtzee ends the review by trying to explain why he prefers games that focus on a single concept rather than trying to appeal to everyone.
Yahtzee: I might have appreciated a few slightly more freeform levels that focus more on stylish demon shooting than on following one highly-specific linear path to the end, but Neon White wants to be more speed-puzzle game than stylish-shooter, and that's fine with me. Would that more of us could be so certain of what they want! Plonk yourself down in my barber's chair and say "Numberthreebuzzcut!" and I'm like "Yes, sir!" Better than games that come in and go "Ooh, I don't know, make half my head short and the other half curly, and spray paint the top part green, and the bottom part the color of your choice so that you have a sense of personal ownership of my haircut." And then I'm like "BITCH, don't come in here with your complete lack of indecisiveness and then say it's for my benefit!" Don't shove half a pineapple up my pisshole and call it a juice cleanse!
Imp with half a pineapple: Okay sorry, I wasn't listening.

Card Shark and Postal: Brain Damaged

Since the actual card games being played in Card Shark are never spelled out, Yahtzee decides to pretend that everyone is playing Yu-Gi-Oh!.
invoked Yahtzee's complaints about Postal: Brain Damaged being a painfully dated period piece for the media and political landscapes of The New '10s and The New '20s, with him lampshading how poorly the jokes regarding the COVID-19 Pandemic and Elon Musk in particular will age.
Yahtzee: And who the fuck makes jokes about furry conventions anymore?! Why don't you take the piss out of Rebecca Black while you're at it?
[An Imp stares at Yahtzee in visible bafflement]
Yahtzee: [confused] What? [glares at the Imp] ...Oh, ask your mum!

2022, Quarter 3

The Weird History of Bob's Game

Yahtzee introducing the episode as yet another installment of "Zero Punctuation's occasional guide to whoops-we-don't-say-that-anymore moments in gaming history".
The very surprising reference Yahtzee namedrops during his opening spiel on the world of solo-developed indie games a la Papers, Please and the original first few builds of Minecraft:
It's a world of contrasts. For every Undertale or Stardew Valley, there's a Yandere Simulator standing behind them, breathing loudly through its mouth. But at least you can be ensured of a purity of vision! ...Suspect and weeb-ish and slightly humiliating to bring up in mixed company though it may be.
Yahtzee's description of how Robert Pelloni, despite some positive initial reactions, doggedly kept insisting that the only platform he would make an official release for was the Nintendo DS:
So he eschewed the small publishers that expressed interest and applied for an official Nintendo DS development kit. Now, Nintendo is a big company with a lot on their plate between making Mario pencilcases and removing Princess Peach panty shots from Smash Bros., so they did with Pelloni's application what they presumably do with any correspondence from wide-eyed random no-name twats: shunted it to the end of the priority list between trimming Donkey Kong's eyelashes and designing a controller that doesn't suck. And this is where the story of Bob's Game takes its whoops-we-don't-say-that-anymore turn. You might charitably say that Robert Pelloni was one of those people who had little time for the world outside his own mind. I might less charitably say he had his head so far up his arse he was getting teabagged by his own gallbladder.
- Eventually, Pelloni's attempt to get a Nintendo DS development kit, which included a "protest" where he locked himself inside his house for 100 days and streamed said protest with a webcam, rather predictably ended up as a "Shaggy Dog" Story:
  Not long afterwards, Nintendo glanced up from its money sandwich to rattle him off their standard form letter saying: "No, you can't have a dev kit, obviously, because you're clearly not a professional studio, you're a nutter with a broken desk."
The Running Gag in the episode where every time Robert Pelloni has some big news to announce, the announcement is always met with "a resounding 'Okay.'" At the end, when Pelloni announces that he is cancelling the successful Kickstarter for his game and refunding the backers, so much time has passed that the reaction is somewhat different:
The internet responded with a resounding "Sorry, who's 'Bob' again?"
Yahtzee noting that after the whole debacle was finished, Robert Pelloni's website is now only filled with nonsensical religious ramblings (i.e., telling people to "Get off the Internet Porn!"). This leads to Yahtzee deducing that at least one of the lessons of "the saga of 'Bob's Game'" is "Don't be a 'Cadbury's Fruit & Nutcase'" (accompanied by a picture of said chocolate bar with the "no" symbol through it).
The review itself then ends with Yahtzee delivering An Aesop over how an artist should never put too much of themselves into any one artwork: "[I]f you want to be a creative, but refuse to work within the established systems out of fear of compromising your perfect artistic vision, then there's only one thing to be said to you: 'Yes, I would like fries with that.'" Bonus points for how Yahtzee depicts his Burger Fool workplace as being "McDonner Party" as a Call-Back to the Ravenous Devils review.
Me: A Game About Me – By Me
- Shit: A Game About Shit

Revisiting No Man's Sky in 2022

The segments where Yahtzee flashes back to his original review: The scene is rendered in black-and-white, there is wear and tear on "the film", Yahtzee's voice is rendered through an old-timey radio filter, and everyone wears bowler hats — including Yahtzee's avatar who wears his over his normal hat. His avatar also wears a monocle and smokes a Distinguished Gentleman's Pipe, and the characters who talk on screen (the game, an imp) do so in posh old-school Queen's English ("You wound me, sir!").

Stray

The Running Gag of Yahtzee using increasingly weird Baby Talk to describe various aspects of the game related to the main character and its drone-friend.
When he gets to the ending, we get this:
WOO WOO, SPOILERS BEYOND THIS POINT! STOP WATCHING NOW OR RELINQUISH YOUR RIGHT TO CALL ME A DICK!

PowerWash Simulator & Endling: Extinction is Forever

The opening discussions regarding "dad games" and Yahtzee freely admitting that since he has a wife and two toddler-aged daughters in his house, he's now officially that genre of games' target audience.
Yahtzee: I couldn't help it; I'm a dad. [PowerWash Simulator] lured me in with its promise of simulating good, honest labor and the satisfaction of a job well done, the same way that Home Depot lures me over to the power tools sections by wafting in the smell of fresh sawdust.
Yahtzee admitting that he couldn't help but feel rather guilty playing PowerWash Simulator because of him having been living in California for the past few years^note.
Yahtzee: Like, after I've finished hosing off an entire two-story house, all I can think is, "Fuck, I probably used up half the state's annual rainfall doing that! The kids are going to be making their oatmeal with human spit for the next few weeks."
invoked Yahtzee noting that as Anvilicious as the Green Aesop delivered in the Downer Ending of Endling - Extinction is Forever is, it's also uncomfortably necessary and realistic (though he does go on to complain that its message seems to be aimed at working-class people rather than the actual policymakers who are primarily responsible for climate change).
Yahtzee: Some might accuse it of being preachy, but as I said, I live in California, and the only reason I'm not presently on fire is because I'm too damp from anxiety sweat. So perhaps a certain amount of heavy-handedness is justified, but then again, I don't know what the game expects me to do about anything. I've got three bins and a bicycle I still sometimes use; I'm not the fucking problem!
- He also calls the game Endling: Extinction Is for Losers and Kindling: Distinctly Furrier.
- And following this, his rumination of how the plot of Endling is ultimately a "Shaggy Dog" Story:
  Yahtzee: The final takeaway was that all the work I put in to get through the game didn't matter for shit, because everything was fucked from the start. Yeah, thanks, I know! Every morning, I wake up, realize I'm still alive, and think, "Well, that's put me in a bad mood for the day!"

Hell Pie

When Yahtzee mentions Donald Trump when describing the cherub on a string used by the Player Character as part of their traversal mechanics, an image of Jabba the Hutt with a blonde wig appears on screen.
- The image is later re-used when talking about Conker's Bad Fur Day, specifically when he mentions the boss fight against "a giant poo".
After spending a large part of the episode complaining about how Hell Pie is just really offputtingly crass without any real wit, he ends the video noting the devs could have named the third zone hub "Jizz Jungle" instead of just "Jungle".
Outro card: It's cute when he does it.

Cult of the Lamb

The micro-managing gameplay of Cult of the Lamb leads to several funny jabs from Yahtzee.
- The episode's running gag revolves around the need to constantly clean up the cultists' feces.
  Yahtzee: I guess socially well-adjusted people aren't the type to join cults, generally speaking, but I don't remember Jim Jones having to go around the compound every five minutes with a pooper scooper. ^note Something's very wrong here - you can't build a fucking outside loo until you're like three levels deep on the tech tree, but I think these people would at least know how to dig a fucking hole in the ground!
- Later, he compares it to running a kindergarten class.
  Yahtzee: 'MIIIIISS! Could you harvest the pumpkins?' 'MIIIISS! Penelope died of old age and the corpse is making us all sick and we still haven't figured out how holes in the ground work.' 'MIIIISS! Lionel blasphemed against our dark savior! Could you sacrifice him for his impudence?'

Fashion Police Squad

Yahtzee describing Stray and Multi Versus as "Annapurna's smash hit bumhole-licking simulator and that one Smash Bros knockoff where Shaggy from Scooby-Doo beats up the Muppet Babies or whatever" respectively.
The description of the Final Boss of Fashion Police Squad as being "basically just the Icon of Sin again, but wearing flared trousers and shutter shades."

Saints Row (2022)

The Running Gag of someone saying, "We're out of milk." Also the Running Gag of the Hamburglar and the seals owning the territory.
"I hate to say I told you so... constantly... with an air of smugness and perverse relish..."
Yahtzee calling the game Saints Row (open brackets) 2022 (close brackets), Saints Row (open brackets) The New One (close brackets) and finally Saints Row (open brackets) *pffft* (close brackets).

The Mortuary Assistant

The start of the review has Yahtzee complaining about how frustrating he finds it whenever anyone asks him and other creators how they get their ideas.
Yahtzee: I don't know if people are expecting some kind of trade secret. Oh, you found me out; at night, I plunge an obsidian dagger into the heart of a she-goat and use its blood to inscribe a prayer to Mother Hecate, and in her wisdom, I am blessed with the knowledge of how best to draw parallels between everyday objects and sexual organs.
Mother Hecate: [as depicted as an owl emerging from a rune painted in animal blood on the wall] If you put a washing-up glove between some sofa cushions, it looks like a vagina.
These two lines from The Stinger:
Getting freaked out by mysterious pale faces appearing at the window is why I don't use the McDonald's drive-thru anymore
My idea for an escape horror game: Being trapped in an elevator with Kevin Spacey

Soul Hackers 2

Yahtzee discusses how the Player Character is named "Ringo" and that the game is based around a four member party, and then makes the Obligatory Joke. Which he immediately lampshades.
Yahtzee: Ringo takes the lead and almost immediately forms a four man party with three humans named John, Paul and George... Has someone done that joke? Someone must have done that joke.
Following on from his declaration that Atlus just likes to tease and deny the release of the next Persona game, and that if that was the kind of action he wanted he would just squat over an automated lawn sprinkler, the stinger features a scowling Yahtzee still patiently waiting for the sprinkler to turn on...only for an imp to sneak up behind him and replace the water hose with a bottle of hot sauce, leading to a scene of Yahtzee sitting in a tub of Drapolene cream.

Metal: Hellsinger

At one point, Yahtzee complains about how samey the levels of the Fire and Brimstone Hell seen in Metal: Hellsinger are.
Yahtzee: Come on, Hell; where's the creativity?! Put in a shrubbery or a koi pond; there must be some people whose idea of eternal suffering is being trapped in an episode of BBC Gardeners' World.
While he appreciates the additional content, Yahtzee isn't entirely convinced that the Sigils you unlock by beating the Torment stages actually have any real effect whatsoever:
Yahtzee: Well, there's extra challenges that unlock after every level that you can do to unlock a few gameplay buffs that are mostly so inconsequential in their effect, I'm not entirely convinced they're not a "Dumbo's Magic Feather" effect. Boy, that slight boost in the combo increase range really made a difference, Metal: Hellsinger.
Metal Hellsinger: Ah, don't you realize, Yahtzee? There was no slight boost! <posing flamboyantly and speaking in a airy, whimsical voice> The combo increase ranger was inside you all along!
Yahtzee: <mimicking the game's pose and whimsical voice> I was being sarcastic, Metal: Hellsinger!
Yahtzee's impressively atrocious attempt at an American Southern accent after praising both Troy Baker's performance and his Southern drawl in his role as The Narrator of the game:
Yahtzee: [while doing said atrocious Southern accent] "Boy howdy, that Yahtzee done got himself in a locker room full 'a horny cowpokes, not havin' one last joke to end his comedy YouTube review. Well, my ol' man used to say, 'Don't serve me a bowl of sidewinders and call it cream gravy', so I guess we shouldn't 'a waited so long to take him to the Alzheimer's specialist."
- The Stinger then adds even more Self-Deprecation and a Call-Back to his Far Cry 2 review:
  You thought that was bad, you should hear my South African accent

2022, Quarter 4

Return to Monkey Island

The Running Gag of buttocks strikes again. Especially in the ending to the review and him explaining exactly why he isn't recommending the game:
It's the ending, again; history runs in fucking cycles. Not that it's as one-sixteenth bottomed as everything else; they're clearly making a deliberate statement with it. It's just that I interpret that statement as follows: "Oh! Have you actually invested mental energy into all these intrigues and relationships we've spent the last few hours building up, and are expecting a payoff to all that? Pah! Talk about missing the point! What a sad lame-o you must be! The end." And then, just to grind the heel in a bit, there's a personal message from the creators. "Ah, when you think about it, Monkey Island 1 was about a wide-eyed naif discovering themselves, Monkey Island 2 was about trying to recreate the success that the wider world didn't care that much about. Haven't these games always been about where we were as creators?" Oh, okay; so you're saying the final message of Return to Monkey Island is, "We've stopped giving a shit, and so should you." Message received! How about next time, you just tweet that and not charge me twenty bucks?

Scorn

Noting the amount of Freudian imagery in the game's setting (which is represented by greyed, pixelated images of two bananas and half an apple) as well as the protagonist's lack of a mouth, Yahtzee speculates that the game might take place in "an Ironic Hell for people who really like oral sex."

A Plague Tale: Requiem

invoked The episode's surprisingly heartwarming intro where Yahtzee happily talks about him being a father of two toddlers transitions very quickly into Yahtzee venting his irritation at the game's annoying kid character.
Yahtzee: I've got kids now. Yeah, that makes you feel old; yeah, you are put into a constant state of stupefaction by the existence of entropy; can we please stop banging on about it? "Didn't you once say you'd rather go at your joy department with cheese wire and a sewing machine than have kids, Yahtz?" Well, people change! Having a kid changes you! It did something to my brain — I've started seeing babies as cute, rather than overgrown tardigrades with money vacuums on one end and McDonald's chocolate milkshake dispensers on the other. I can't even enjoy dead baby jokes anymore 'cause inevitably I picture my own baby, and the imagined grief ultimately outweighs getting to sleep in again.
I tell you all of this to add a necessary context to the following statement: the little boy in the Plague Tale games is a shitbag and I hope he dies. Every time the camera lingers on his glimmering, uncomprehending eyes like the light reflected off two buckets of stale cum, I want to grab his jug ears and twist until his neck cracks like the many party poppers I will subsequently employ. That should immediately bring across the root of my main issue with A Plague Tale: Requiem (no dry heave anymore, it's a franchise now): that the protagonist's sole driving motivation is to appease invoked a little cockgoblin that any sane person would yeet out the back of the donkey cart at the first bend of a rocky mountain path.
Yahtzee then goes on about Amicia being written as basically an Expy of Lara Croft from the Tomb Raider reboot trilogy:
Yahtzee: See, also like reboot Lara Croft, an attempt to frame a character as strong and determined instead brings them across as psychotically hyperfixated beyond all rational sense or self-preservation instinct; her motivation basically always comes down to "because question mark". "We must ignore doctor's orders and take Hugo to the island he's been dreaming of, which I know exists and will help him, because question mark. Now we're on the island; we must follow in the footsteps of a previous historical plague rat whisperer, because question mark. My pet canned apocalypse deserves a happy life, because question mark. I have not power-bombed him down a concrete stairwell, because question mark."

Gotham Knights

Yahtzee deliberating on whether or not to coin a new term for types of games a la Spunkgargleweewee and Jimminy Cockthroat, in this case for Live Service games. He succinctly sums up his opinions on said game thus:
So what else should we call games where you repeatedly grind up infinite amounts of copy-pasted random combats in order to acquire nineteen different currencies with which to construct new equipment, color-coded for alleged rarity, that are basically identical to every other, but have higher numbers to compensate for ever-increasing enemy damage sponginess? Hmmm, let me think. How about "cunts"? "Games made by cunts". Evil, money-grubbing cunts who make overpriced, emotion-deadening, culturally bankrupt Skinner boxes deliberately designed to foster addictive behavior, who don't even feed their dog until they've run long enough on a treadmill generator to offset the cost for a bag of Eukanuba; that kind of cunt. Demonetize me, YouTube; I don't care, and neither does my editor! ...Probably.
- A caricature of Editor in Chief Nick Calandra can be seen with his face in his hands after the rant, but the disembodied nature of limbs in Zero Punctuation also makes it look like Nick has a wide-eyed, harrowed expression, in a "Oh Jesus what has Yahtzee gotten us into" manner.
- Rounded out by a Freeze-Frame Bonus where Yahtzee asks the editor if this joke will land when censored, followed by "PS. LAY US AN EGG YOU BIG CHICKEN!"
- Goes into Tempting Fate a week later, when in the YouTube version mentions of the word "cunt" are replaced with a Cluster Bleep-Bomb, with the high-pitched bleeps. Guess Yahtzee got his wish of being demonetized after all.
After lamenting how the Penguin tells your character to "piss off" without repercussions, Yahtzee points out that the Batman from the Arkham games wouldn't have stood for it. Even Adam West's Batman would have hit him with the Bat-Swear Jar.

Mario + Rabbids Sparks of Hope

Yahtzee interrupts one of his trademark long, cynicism- and metaphor-ridden sentences to very begrudgingly admit that — actually — he did genuinely enjoy the game to some degree:
Well, guess it wasn't a one-night stand after all. Mario and Rabbids sitting in a tree, paying an exorbitant licensing fee. So we're going through this little dance again, are we, in which Ubisoft's proto-Minions, mainly distinguished by their resemblance to a half-melted SpongeBob SquarePants ice cream, attempt to sustain their long redundant existence by clinging to the coattails of one of the few video game franchises with an even more overdone shtick, making the combined tiredness of this hacked-out sequel somewhere on the level of a truckstop whore the morning after the Viagra shipment passed through— ALRIGHT, I ADMIT IT! I kinda of liked Mario + Rabbids Sparks of Hope! You dragged it out of me, you bastards; I hope you're happy. I liked a mainstream thing; now, when I go to the snarky impossible-to-please YouTuber meetup, I have to wear the silly hat and sit in the wheelie bin of shame!
Yahtzee, as usual, calls the game Mario + Rabbids Snarks of Hope, Mario + Rabbids Bars of Soap, and Mario + Rabbids Farts Aplenty.

Sonic Frontiers

invoked Yahtzee's immensely exasperated reaction to seeing the game's unintentionally silly opening sequence due to it falling into a hefty amount of Mood Dissonance:
Yahtzee: And when Sonic wakes up alone in the pouring rain in a washed-out landscape surrounded by the imposing ruins of a once-vibrant civilization, as haunting music plays, I felt, not for the first time, a strong urge to grab the Sonic franchise by the lapels, shake it back and forth, and yell, FIGURE OUT YOUR FUCKING TONE! YOU ARE A FUCKING CARTOON MOUSE IN SNEAKERS! YOU ARE A CONCEPT FOR BABBIES! You are not Death Stranding, you are not Attack on Titan, you are not... whatever the fuck Sonic 2006 was trying to be; possibly Final Fantasy X, if it was mashed up with some staggeringly uncomfortable slash-fiction. You are also not Shadow of the Colossus, and isn't it astonishing that I even needed to say that to you, Sonic the Hedgehog? I feel like I'm trying to explain to a sofa cushion with a toilet roll tube stuck to it that it will never be a real boy.
Sofa Cushion With Toilet Roll Tube: Where the fine bitches at?
The remark that the Fatal Flaw of Sonic Team is that they never know when to quit while they're ahead.
Yahtzee: They're like a magnet demonstration in a nail factory: the longer you let them go on, the more likely something will horribly fuck up.
The Running Gag of whenever Yahtzee says that someone or something "sucks balls" (i.e., Sonic Frontiers), he depicts this as said person/thing sucking on a pacifier like a baby while holding two soccer balls.

God of War: Ragnarök

Right away, the review starts with Yahtzee tearing into the game's overuse of Dynamic Loading:
Yahtzee: Tell you what, Sony, let's make a deal. I'll stop telling everyone you're a bunch of prissy corpo scum who stopped giving us review codes because we had too much self-respect to gargle your nads, and in return, you stop making me squeeze through narrow caves. Yeah, I know, you're using it to hide loading. But surely the fact that we all know that means you can drop the pretence. Just use a fucking loading screen. Maybe with a map. Little moving red line like in Indiana Jones. Have fun with it. Every time you make me squeeze through a narrow cave now I feel like you're insulting my intelligence. "Tee hee, he'll never suspect we're zooming right up on Kratos' acne scars to hide the fact that we're swapping in another pointlessly overdetailed environment for the seventeen millionth time." What's with this obsession with never cutting away? Cutting away is fine. Remember in Taxi Driver when Robert De Niro decides to shoot up a pimp's house and they just cut to him doing that? Remember how they didn't show him buying a subway ticket to the pimp's house and sitting on a train for half an hour muttering about how much fun he's going to have shooting it up. That's basically my core issue with God of War: Ragnarök. It forgot to cut out the train rides. Frequently literally.
Odin is depicted as a PNG of George Carlin with an eyepatch drawn on.
The ending, demonstrating how, according to Yahtzee, the constant NPC conversations during the walking bits cause jarring Mood Whiplash:
Atreus: Kratos, how are you feeling about that last sixteenth of an inch of story development that happened?
Kratos: I feel stoic and grunty, grrrr.
Atreus: Yeah, figured you might. OH SHIT, AN AMBUSH! STAB STAB KILL KILL END THEIR LIVES MANGLE THEIR FLESH DRINK THEIR BLOOD- oh, they're all dead. So anyway, what were you thinking about for dinner tonight?
Kratos: Grrr, nyeem... tacos.

Marvel's Midnight Suns

The entirety of the opening paragraph:
Yahtzee: Did you know you can get Marvel superhero branded reusable diapers? If you needed holiday gift giving advice. Perfect for the person in your life who worries that the time they spend rinsing infant diarrhoea out of cloth takes them away from thinking about the Incredible Hulk. I’m not saying superheroes are overexposed, or that top level entertainment media is so perversely fixated on them that you can't even make a Scorsese-inspired gritty character piece unless you say it's about the Joker, or that future civilizations will probably regard the Funko Pop! industry the same way we regard the extinct Easter Islanders who cut down all their trees to make more stone heads, or that I bet Benedict Cumberbatch insists on kissing with his eyes open — sorry, lost my train of thought there. Anyway, if you’re not quite satisfied with your superhero branded dinnerware and your superhero branded poo bags and your superhero branded gritty character pieces, now you can also enjoy superhero branded Fire Emblem: Three Houses, in the form of Marvel Midnight Suns. It's not quite as deep or pretty as Fire Emblem: Three Houses, but maybe if you promise to buy it for your four year old they'll agree to start shitting in the fucking toilet again. Well, that opening paragraph was all over the fucking place, but hey, I learned it from you, Marvel Midnight Suns.
invoked The Running Gag of Yahtzee treating the Friendship system in a... different light.
invoked Yahtzee's description of the game's not-so-stellar graphics, especially outside of the main combat:
Yahtzee: invoked Blimey, I thought Gotham Knights had bland art; guess Marvel wasn't about to be shown up by their old rival, because Mid-Shite Bums looks like the fucking Sims! Everyone has unblemished skin and plasticine hairdos, Tony Stark looks like a haunted action figure of Freddie Mercury, which I could have gotten past if the characters had a bit more life to them, but when I took Blade on a fishing trip and we spent the whole time posing on the riverbank, ineffectually dangling a rod like we're at the urinal together, all I could think was "If I go in for the snog, I'm gonna create some kind of awkwardness singularity."
The Ableist Slur skill card.
Spider-Man mocks the target's disability, mental illness or speech impediment for 4-6 psychic damage

Evil West

The "chonk" Running Gag.
Yahtzee mentioning (in an increasingly frantic tone) all of the different options Evil West goes about letting you achieve combat, which must be seen to be believed:
Yahtzee: If there was ever a game crying out for some kind of spectacle fighter mechanic that rewards the player for varying their approach, it's this one, because by the end, your available variety of attacks would shame a battleship crewed by poisonous hedgehogs. Standard punch, uppercut, electric punch, clearing electric punch, sneaky interrupt kick in the bollocks, parry shield, electric lasso, six-shooters, shotgun, rifle, crossbow, flamethrower, glory-kills, super-attack with two-minute cooldown — I haven't even gotten to the facetious, made-up examples yet! — grenade launcher, minigun, hedge trimmer, angry cat in a bag — And there we go.
Yahtzee ends the review by admitting to feeling nostalgic for the Seventh Console Generation when the game straight up offers an old-school multiplayer mode on the main menu:
Yahtzee: And as I say, it did feel like stepping momentarily back to the late 2000s era for a week; there's even a multiplayer option on the title screen. I can't remember the last time I saw that: a single player game with an included entirely separate multiplayer mode, that doesn't try to awkwardly smash them together into a live service grindathon. That certainly does evoke a bygone age; thanks for the memories, Evil West!
Evil West: ...You... going to... try out the multiplayer mode, the—?
Yahtzee: [Flipping the Bird] NOPE!

The Callisto Protocol

Yahtzee laconically describes the game's main setting of a Hellhole Prison colony on the Jovian moon of Callisto as "an evil space prison", and shows the Walt Disney World logo on an actual photo of the moon Callisto to "visualize" his point.
invoked His complaint against the Player Character's stiff facial animations:
Yahtzee: But be realistic, Jacob Lee! You're hardly Silent Hill material, you'd need to learn more than two facial expressions besides Stupid Confused and Stupid Neutral!
[Jacob Lee's Avatar stands depressed in front of an alignment chart of facial expressions split between an X-axis of "Inquiring", "Neutral", and "Confused", and a Y-axis of "Evil", "Neutral", and "Stupid"]
It turns out that Yahtzee hates unavoidable surprise enemy attacks almost as much as he hates being jump scared, but at least the surprise enemy attacks are funnier to describe.
Yahtzee: Semi-regularly you walk into a room or open a cupboard and the game goes "Think fast!" and a little face hugger will rocket towards you like the fucking Killer Rabbit from Monty Python and go "Hee hee hee! Free damage for me! Omnomnomnomnomnomnom," and you have to mash a button to rip it off. [said "facehugger" is depicted as a slug going ':3' before latching onto Jacob Lee's face]
- "There is never a fucking way to see it coming, so what am I supposed to do here, game? Not go into rooms? Not search every single cupboard?"
  Health
  Ammo
  Squirt Gun Filled with Piss
invoked The sheer frustration over the game's Scrappy Mechanics regarding the terrible combat animations and Artificial Stupidity:
Yahtzee: If you run out of ammo during a fight, then you're fucked, because the painfully slow reload and switch weapon animations don't count if they're interrupted, and they will be, because these furious reject seasonal McDonalds burgers on legs are very aggressive and very keen to get their washing-up done. If you need to heal up in combat, then you're double fucked, because Jacob can't just man up and jam the glowing green needle in his neck; he's got to slowly crouch and carefully lay down a little picnic blanket to sit on first. Also also, we can't swing our melee weapon straight away if it's currently holstered, so I'd take it out and try to keep it ready while creeping through the hallways, looking for the inevitable next ambush, and Dumbo-tits here [accompanied by an image of Yahtzee with an angry look pointing accusingly at Jacob] keeps fucking holstering it again without me asking! You need both hands to pick your fucking nose or something?!
His final point on the difference between bad horror games like The Callisto Protocol and actually good horror games, in how the former merely frustrates him instead of horrifying him.
Yahtzee: As I say, frustration and horror are not the same thing. Horror is discovering what your overweight grandma did to the toilet...
Grandma Imp: I'd give it ten minutes, dear. [Yahtzee's Avatar looks on in shock at the unseen bathroom]
Yahtzee: ...frustration is trying to get an emergency plumber around on Thanksgiving weekend.
Yahtzee's Avatar: [shouting into a phone] BRING A GUN!

2023 Episodes

2023, Quarter 1

The Best, Worst, and Blandest of 2022

The very start of the video has Yahtzee lampshading how much Elden Ring overshadowed virtually every other game that was released in 2022.
Yahtzee: You know when they reboot a franchise and use the same name, they always end up having to stick the year it came out in on the end, as with Sonic the Hedgehog (open brackets) 2006 and Doom (open brackets) 2016? This is going to be the opposite of that; the year 2022 will forever be known as 2022 (open brackets) When Elden Ring Come Out.
- And then, after all that, he gives it the second-best game of the year spot. And as if he knows this might provoke some ire, his entry begins with him sighing and saying, "Okay, hear me out..."
- The Elden Ring entry has another funny moment where, after explaining he stopped just before the end and never felt motivated to finish the game, he starts talking like he's narrating a cross between an erectile dysfunction medicine ad and a donation drive bit:
  Yahtzee: Like many men my age, I struggle with Souls-like Fatigue. But if you give generously, perhaps hope can be found for those who suffer from this deblitating social illness.^note
Shortly after the above, Yahtzee comments that "neither God of War Ragnarok nor Sonic Frontiers appear in any of the following lists. Hopefully, this time, the YouTube video won't have to sit upon its comments like a squirrel being dangled over a sack of under-stimulated pit bulls." Crosses over into Tempting Fate and Brick Joke at the very end of the Honorable Mentions end credits... when both games jump in and interrupt Evil West for fun.
+ Pretty good - oh what the fuck get out of here you guys
- When Metal: Hellsinger appears in said honorable mentions list, Yahtzee's turn-off is that he hates "music that sounds like I disappointed the Cookie Monster." He also complains that he's not putting Fashion Police Squad on his Best 5 list since he feels like "it's judging me for only wearing black shirts".
The Top 5 Best's sound is punctuated by a drumroll followed by a cymbal crash, the Top 5 Blandest's sound by riffling through office paperwork and two coins hitting the ground, and the Top 5 Worst's sound by a turd being shat out followed by a toilet flushing.
invoked Yahtzee gets so grumpy over his second worst game of the year — Babylons Fall — that he ends up retroactively hating Babylon 5 simply because they have similar titles.
Yahtzee: [on Babylon 5] It's just fucking Deep Space Nine, but set on a bicycle pump!
Yahtzee's glee at the title of the upcoming game Bomb Rush Cyberfunk, declaring it "[T]he most abuseable name of any video game in history."
Yahtzee: My mind reels at the possibilities; I can get three swears in there, easy!
When talking about his fourth blandest game of the year (Dying Light 2), he says it's so bland that "Its zombies probably get bullied by the zombies from Left 4 Dead." It's the accompanying image that sells it though - a ZP-style zombie with nerdy glasses and buckteeth, behind which the Tank from Left 4 Dead pops up and says "OI, TWAT!"
During the runners-up list in the credits, he admits that while he did genuinely enjoy Fashion Police Squad, he couldn't put it on the list because he felt like the game was judging him for wearing mostly black.

The 2022 Games I Didn't Review

Yahtzee's ultimate praise for Citizen Sleeper: "...an absorbing and ultimately very human story about space-people with egg whisks for feet."
Yahtzee feels depressed at being beaten at Thymesia due to its excessively hard difficulty that he laments: "Why can't I play a game about being a friendly bear who makes pancakes?" Then comes Bear & Breakfast, a delightfully cozy game where he plays a bear who actually likes human encroachment on the forest.
"I want Bear and Breakfast to get together with Endling - Extinction is Forever; they'll probably end up fistfighting in a car park. Anyway, it was providing the cozy life sim experience I wanted until about the two-thirds mark, when I realized that since furniture has different stats and there's no real shortage of materials, optimal play is to just furnish every single room with the same shit, and I wanted to play a game about a bear who makes pancakes, not one who has to single-handedly construct a chain of budget motels where the staff spend three hours every morning cleaning out the suicide victims."
In response to Sunday Gold calling some guy a "twot", the episode ends on The Stinger:
Get out of here with that "twot" bullshit

Sailing Era

The review is kicked off with Yahtzee musing over his own Author Appeal for nautical settings and snarking at how a lot of people seem to foolishly believe that this means any game featuring a boat will automatically get a positive review from him.
Yahtzee: A few of the regular commenters that orbit my magnificence like a roomful of Comic-Con attendees around an unaccompanied attractive woman have noticed a curious pattern emerging in my list of favorite games, in that many of them in some way prominently feature a boat. Think about it: Return Of The Obra Dinn, Spiritfarer, Silent Hill 2 has that one bit where James Sunderland goes to a boating lake on "World's Most Attentive Husbands Get it Free" Day, Dark Souls 1... um... has a couple of swords that could conceivably be repurposed as a mizzenmast? "And look at all the other clues! He likes Horatio Hornblower books, he owns a bath, he's physically dependent on water to continue living! Clearly, we have stumbled upon the secret cheat code that will ensure a positive review from Yahtzee Croshaw!" Well, I had to get to the bottom of this. I'd hate to think any aspect of my behavior had become in any way reliable; if my wife found out, she'd make me start unloading the dishwasher again.
Yahtzee explains that the game just might have a boarding mechanic. Might.
Yahtzee: I mean, I'm pretty sure there is. It happened in a tutorial, and that was the last time I saw it. It is entirely possible that I was halluciating from dodgy grog. Couldn't for the life of me figure out how to make it happen afterward, should probably have paid more attention to the tutorial I suppose. But with the localization issues...
Game Manual: ARGLE BURGA BLURG! THEY SWAM UP MY PISS STREAM!
Yahtzee: ...that was like trying to ask directions from a disheveled person on a street corner screaming about the government listening devices in his urethra.
Goverment Agent in Diving Gear: (hurriedly closes the manual) You heard nothing.
Yahtzee finds a plot hole in one of the bounty side missions that takes place in the Ligurian Sea:
Yahtzee: Now be honest with me, viewers: who, off the top of their heads, knows where the Ligurian Sea is? ^note Just you? Alright clever clogs, now YOU explain why the bounty office in Antwerp gave a shit about it! ^note
The Running Gag about sandwiches, culminating in the particularly hilarious "FORSOOTH THOU HAST EXHAUSTED THY SANDWICH INVENTORY AGAIN" background gag.

Forspoken

Yahtzee's complaint that the fantasy world the protagonist has been whisked away to save only seems to consist of one city in the middle of a barren wasteland, "like a piercing on a singularly unimpressive nipple."
The ending lines of the review:
Yahtzee: [in a genuinely annoyed tone of voice] I am absolutely speaking without hyperbole when I say that Fuckshitcunt represents everything that is wrong with gameplay design and story-writing in high-level game development today, and if you buy it, then you represent everything that's wrong with human genetics today! [Beat; sheepishly] ...Okay, that was hyperbole.
The Stinger where a lion comes out of Frey's wardrobe, whom the latter decides to ride around on followed by a picture of the lion, who's later seen licking its lips beside a pile of human bones, clearly having eaten Frey for lunch.

Hi-Fi Rush

Yahtzee really likes grappling hooks. How much? "I'd've defected to the Nazi party if they'd let me use a grappling hook to climb the concentration camp towers! Oh, boy, I should've kept that to myself."
- Becomes a Brick Joke in The Stinger when Yahtzee grapples onto a passing plane. Turns out the plane is a bomber, and it just dropped the atomic bomb he's grappled onto. He obviously hadn't planned this out well, as even the caption admits.
  "Yeah I'm just sort of making up this ending sequence as I go to be honest, I haven't even figured out what that bomb's going to land on yet."
  (Yahtzee's Avatar ends up Riding the Bomb towards an Adolf Hitler imp who's mad he's dropped his ice cream)
  "FUCK IT THAT'LL DO."

Dead Space (2023)

The visual Running Gag of depicting people going crazy as them suddenly getting an arrow through their skulls and spirals being put over their eyes.

Hogwarts Legacy

Yahtzee starts out his review in being careful not to swear in the case of J. K. Rowling or repeat the same incident as in Gotham Knights despite making his negative opinion of Rowling's rather infamous transphobia abundantly clear:
Yes, Nick, I promised not to get us demonetized in the first thirty seconds. So, as I'm sure you know, Hogwarts Legacy is based on the work of J. K. Rowling, who is a massive TERF-y C-word; as such, reviewing it puts one in an awkward position online, as the feeling in some circles is that even acknowledging it is giving oxygen to her and her horrible C-word opinions. But damnit, I have a job to do, and I feel bad for the no-doubt hundreds of ground-level people on the dev team who probably think she's a C-word as much as any of us at this point. So how about this? I'll review the game strictly on its own merits, but start out by affirming as clearly as possible that I think J. K. Rowling is a... we're past thirty seconds now, right? Cunt. Does that offset things enough?^note
- Goes into a Brick Joke when he advises against buying the game, both on an ethical level due to its creator and the game itself being dreadfully boring and generic:
  I can advise against giving it money even on its own merits, because it is, by the definition laid out in my Gotham Knights review, a game made by cunts, as well as being, in a slightly more literal sense, a game made by a cunt. Yes, Nick, I'll add bleeps to the YouTube version; just don't blame me if we give everyone tinnitus.
Railing on the game's player character for his dweeby voice.
I can only speak for the male protagonist, whose voice has such an eager-beaver twattishness about it that as a British person who went to a grammar school, I feel personally attacked. "Oh yes, I did all my homework, teacher! May I sit on the lawn for ginger beer and buns?"
- In the accompanying clip, even the teacher calls him a twat.
Describing the open world of the game, which Yahtzee considers pointless, as akin to "an astroturf lawn nailed to the side of a toybox". Cut to an illustration of Yahtzee doing that very thing, with a very confused child staring at him.
Yahtzee: I'M MAKING A POINT ON THE INTERNET
Yahtzee calling the game Hogfarts Dregacy and Dogshits Smegmawee.
His final conclusion?
Dogshits Smegmawee starts well but in the back half turns into the pieces for three boring board games jumbled up in a single uninteresting box, and as such I don't recommend. Thank Christ for that.

Atomic Heart

After the Hogwarts Legacy review, Yahtzee was apparently trying so hard to avoid politics this week^note, but, well...
"...So let's crack off with this assuredly completely politics-free review. Atomic Heart is set in an alternative mid-20th century where Russia is the greatest, most powerful country ever and communism rules and capitalism drools—Well, fucking so much for that!"
Yahtzee's summary of Atomic Heart: "Russian bootleg knock-off BioShock."
- There's also the visual Running Gag of portraying Jack — the Player Character of BioShock 1 — as a furiously scowling guy wearing a sweater while having both comically exaggerated angry eyebrows and two Band-Aids over his mouth.
- Sergey, the protagonist of Atomic Heart, is depicted with the head of Zangief from Street Fighter.
Yatzhee calls the game "Atomic Fart", only to state that that's beneath him...then he immediately turns around and calls it "Ass-bum-sick Tart".

Metroid Prime Remastered

Even by the standards of his usual creative interpretations of non-standard character designs, Yahtzee's version of Samus has to be seen to be believed. Eschewing his usual depiction of her as basically an accurate cartoon version of herself in his normal art style, here she has a Cornish pasty for a helmet with a pair of holographic wrap-around shades for the visor, a basketball on each shoulder to represent the massive pauldrons of the Varia Suit, and a thermos flask standing in for her arm canon.

Resident Evil 4 Remake

Yahtzee manages to start with the punchline to a Brick Joke and his avatar making a hilarious face with a rare visible mouth.
"—OOOUUU!"
Yahtzee is unimpressed by the addition of pointless sidequests to the Resident Evil formula:
"'Tell us about those new side-quests we were hearing so much about!' Oh yeah; I finished an early-game area, and as I was leaving, I found a blue note scotch taped to the door saying, 'Hey! Why not go through that area again and kill three rats?', and it took me about three hours before I was finally able to get my mouth to stop forming the "ou" at the end of "fuck you!""
- Followed immediately by his displeased discovery of the addition of Breakable Weapons:
  "I merrily stealth knifed my way through the four or five of the dudes in the starting village assault, when suddenly, me knife broke. 'Oh, we forgot to mention; your knife has degradation now,' said the game, and this time, the "ou" on the end of "fuck you" lasted until the beginning of this video!"
- A throwaway panel in the overly long "Yooouuu" gag implies he went to bed, slept the night, and woke up still swearing at the game.

Yahtzee Goes to GDC 2023

Yahtzee is asked to leave the house to cover the GDC event. He tries to decline.
"Oh you want me to cover GDC, do you? (...) Sorry but I have misanthropic shut-in things to do, so if you don't mind I'm going to walk out of shot to the left."
* Yahtzee steps into a live camera shot overlooking San Francisco's Moscone Center.*
"...ah, fuck. Hi, we're at GDC. I guess."
Yahtzee is annoyed at how long he has to wait in line to get his vaccination card checked.
"GDC, I feel like you're forgetting about the essential con experience: members of the press like me being able to flash a badge and walk past all the queues. floating a little air biscuit as I go. Well just so you know, once I finally got in, I went straight to the media lounge and ate seven complimentary bagels, so I win."
Despite having moved to California a few years ago, Yahtzee remains unimpressed by San Francisco (and gleefully takes the opportunity to make life difficult for his editor).
"I can certainly recommend the experience if you're really really interested in seeing lots of different hotel rooms. Maybe not if you don't like sprinting back and forth across downtown San Francisco to meet appointments at different hotels. Fortunately San Francisco said 'Oh you poor harrassed journalists, here's some lovely sunny weather to ease your burden' on the first day. On the second day, it pissed down, so Nick the editor was forced to call an Uber to cross three blocks and I was subsequently forced to call him a great big sook.^note

2023, Quarter 2

The Murder of Sonic the Hedgehog

Thanks to Youtube demonetization rules, this episode is titled The Youtube of Sonic the Hedgehog.
Yahtzee is disappointed to learn that the "murder" in question is just part of a murder mystery party for Amy's birthday.
Yahtzee: Fuck you, Sega! I wanted blood!

Shadows of Doubt

Yahtzee stressing that the game very much is a work-in-progress:
It might be worth restating that this is an early-access game, and as such at time of writing it's more bugged than a foreign embassy in Moscow. Half the menu interface doesn't know if it's coming or going, I clipped through elevator floors more than once, important mission details occasionally fuck up so sometimes you don't know if your finely honed detective instincts are failing you or if the evidence you're looking for has spawned inside the fucking wall again. And if there's any area I'd recommend the developers give particular attention to in the course of polishing the game, it's NPC interactions. "Oh my god, I think there's someone in my house," declared one homeowner, alert flashing over their head to indicate awareness of my presence. Said individual was, at the time, handcuffed and kneeling on the kitchen floor while I searched all his cabinets, having already beaten him to unconsciousness twice.

Darkest Dungeon II

One of Yahtzee's more elaborate complains about the game:
Things have become a little more abstract and it's hard to tell what's real and what's a metaphor for your decaying sanity and all of that bollocks, but the fingernail-shaped divots in my cheeks were real enough when my whole party got wiped by some half-melted fat bloke too stupid to realise he'd run out of HP. You know what, let's start there 'cos I just brought it up. Death saving throws when you’re out of health? I'm all in favour. Creates suspense, helps you claw things back from the brink. The same courtesy extended to the AI-controlled enemy? Call me a hypocritical elitist who's prejudiced against the non-sentient, but that I could do without. I brought this fucking boss down to zero health and then he polished off my entire battered party in his next two turns because he just wouldn't fucking die! And I'm like: "Game, what the fuck else could I have possibly done to win the day in this scenario?! Was I not crossing my fingers hard enough?"
- What really sells is that during the "prejudiced against the non-sentient" part, Yahtzee's avatar stands over a toaster lying in a hospital bed, and then uses a pillow to choke the life out of said toaster, while never breaking eye-contact with the viewer.
Yahtzee mixes up the name of the game he's reviewing with another dungeon-crawler:
Yahtzee: I got along a lot better with Deathtrap D- oh, fuck I knew I was gonna do that at some point!
Deathtrap Dungeon: (as it trudges away) I don't know why I let myself get excited anymore.
- Followed a few seconds later by Yahtzee being informed that Deathtrap Dungeon is keying his car.

The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom

Yahtzee uses a Cold Opening, where he reveals that his review is actually going to be mostly sincere praise for Tears of the Kingdom. That said he has a single caveat.
Viewer 1: Oh, here he comes. Here comes old gloomy trousers to crash the storybook romance between Zelda and all of gaming media and widdle all over the wedding breakfast.
Viewer 2: Well go on then, Yahtzee, tell us how Tears of the Kingdom is actually bad and we're bad for liking it 'cos you're such a massive cont... Rarian. Contrarian. Calm down, YouTube!
Yahtzee: No. I was not going to say that. I think Tears of the Kingdom holds up to the highest possible standard.
Viewer 2: Right... and now you're going to say: "Because standard is exactly what it is. Bog standard! Grouse grouse, ha ha ha"?
Yahtzee: No, I wasn't going to say that either...
Viewer 1: (sounding geniunely concerned) ...You alright, Yahtz?
Yahtzee: Look, I'm sorry you find it so difficult to tell when I'm being sincere! But I genuinely think Tears of the Kingdom sets a new, extremely high bar... For expansion packs.
Viewer 2: AHA!
Yahtzee: (indignant) Oh, fuck you, viewer! That's what it is.
After complimenting the game's machine building mechanic, Yahtzee addresses his equine companion.
Yahtzee: Yeah, you should be looking nervous, Mr. Horse, starting to really question the point of keeping you around ‘cos my soapbox stealth bomber doesn’t get all prima donna on me about navigating a 45 degree slope. Admittedly it has a tendency to explode over the mountains but don’t think having to carve off my own buttocks for nourishment to sustain me for the trudge to the nearest stable is making you any more endearing!
Yahtzee talks about the game's three new abilities; Ultrahand, Fuse, and Ascend, and how the latter doesn't quite fit in with the theme of building.
Yahtzee: First you go around the tutorial island and learn your new powers - glue thing to thing, fuse thing with thing, and teleport through a ceiling. That last one's a bit random and only tentatively gels with the established theme of putting things on top of other things, probably why I kept forgetting I had it and getting trapped down wells like Little Timmy.
Link: Oh hang on

The Lord of the Rings: Gollum

The intro contains a lesson in hyperbole:
So, you've probably already heard that a game came out that's, like, the video game equivalent of the Yersinia Pestis bacterium. And it's the worst thing ever conceived by the hands of man and will usher in the brown apocalypse that will bury our civilization 'neath a faecal blizzard. But enough about Redfall— I mean, but enough about Atomic Heart— I mean, but enough about Forspoken. Blimey, my calendar's filling up! Four shit-apocalypses? Gonna have to dry clean the scythe.
Yahtzee makes it seem like he's about to defend the game, only for it to wind up being a Bait-and-Switch:
In all seriousness, you people should be ashamed of yourselves. Have you worked up so much frustration having to plaster on a smile for all your cookie cutter triple-A garbage that when a not quite so big developer without the clout to whip the media into line comes along and has a little stumble while trying to realize their big dream of sitting at the cool kids table, your first instinct is to kick them to death? It's fun to dogpile, isn't it, and it's the only way to get proxy revenge on your school bully who saw your Toy Story underpants and asked you every sodding week til the end of term if you've gotten a Woody today. One review said Gollum crashed on them a hundred times. Well, for the record, I finished it without a single crash or game-breaking bug. So I can offer a fully untainted and hyperbole-free review of this extraordinarily shit game.
How does Yahtzee depict Gollum/Smeagol throughout the review? Why, as one of his imp characters with Andy Serkis' head of course!
The insults aimed at Gollum, especially the more creative ones like twat-badger and shit-muncher.

Amnesia: The Bunker

Yahtzee describing the general synopsis of games in the Amnesia series:
The basic formula for the games has never changed - you're a twat who wakes up with no memory and no face, you embark upon a journey through horror mainly leading in a downward direction - or "dark descent" if you will - before finding out the horror was you the whole time, why do you suck so much you gormless no-faced bellend.
When noting that the game is trying a slightly different approach than other games in the franchise:
While you are a gormless no-faced bellend and you do have to make dark descents, you then have to repeatedly un-descend back to the starting room, slam the door and go "For Christ's sake, why do I never sodding learn?!" Or more accurately "Mon dieu, pourquoi est-ce que je n'apprends sodding jamais," because you're a French soldier in the first World War.
The running gag of Yahtzee keeping score of how many amnesia/memory gags he makes in the video.
A bit of dark comedy sees an imp's maimed corpse with blood spray that spells out a message on the wall saying 'well shit'.

Street Fighter 6

"Fighting games are like six year olds in a playground. They're full of energy and fun to watch but the moment you try getting your hands on them everyone beats the shit out of you."
Yahtzee describes Luke as looking "like if Ken and Guile had an off-the-books bum sex baby".
Luke: Had a what?
While describing the gameplay of World Tour, training with the rest of the cast is depicted by Yahtzee meeting Blanka, who gives him a car battery and tells him to "strap this to your nuts".

Diablo IV

Yahtzee makes a note of Lilith's summoning ritual while sympathizing for her. He wastes no time taking the specifics of that ordeal and turning it into an analogy for childbirth.
"Yes, she was summoned in a nightmarish ritual of blood and tearing flesh, but... <scoffs> ...aren't we all?"

2023, Quarter 3

Chrono Trigger

The show's Running Gag about using animals strapped to heads to illustrade Anime Hair is, of course, used again. In this case, a crab is used as a short-hand for Crono's red, Goku-esque hair.
Yahtzee makes a quick summary of the game's plot (which "initially comes across like that of a knockoff Goosebumps book being described over the phone by an editor who just got off the Back to the Future ride at Universal Studios"), and uses it as a Take That! towards overly-long Anime titles:
"I was just an ordinary kid 'til I went to the fair, where my friend, who's good with a wrench, and therefore has the ability to build a fully functional teleporter, accidentally sent me back to medieval times, and now I need to rescue a princess, or my girlfriend will be erased from history, and also, there's a frog." That's good stuff, Robert, but we might need to work on cutting the title down.
The Steam version of the game has a "speed setting" available, which Yahtzee set to the most challenging level without realizing what it did. This is represented as a giant hand with a Glock firing out of the screen, and Yahtzee's avatar ragdolling into what looks suspiciously like the "Family Guy fall pose."
Yahtzee describes the active time battle system as Squaresoft's "opening salvo in the afore-discussed decades long effort to slowly transition to Final Fantasy XVI's real time combat."
Square Enix: (creepily observing Devil May Cry from a bush alongside Final Fantasy XVI) Soon, my pet...
At the beginning of the episode, Yahtzee reveals that this episode was voted on in a poll for members of their Patreon, and that Chrono Trigger just barely beat out the first Danganronpa game in the last round of voting.
Yahtzee: Yeah, sorry, weebs; The last generation of weebs beat you to the punch. But don't let it get you down, just cope by saying the same thing you tell yourself after every American political election: "Maybe next year, enough old people will have died."

Remnant 2

The story starts, and Yahtzee is asked to pick a class:
Remnant 2: Slow down, Yahtz, you need to pick a character class first. Do you want to be a gunslinger—?
Yahtzee: Yes.
Remnant 2: Uh. There's actually some other classes as well...
Yahtzee: I'd assume as much, Remnant 2, but you said something about letting me be a badass dimension hopping cowboy like the protagonist of a Stephen King pet project and frankly I'm a little confused as to why you feel the need to continue.
Remnant 2: One of them has a dog...
Yahtzee: There's such a thing as talking past the sale, you know?!

Starfield

Yahtzee decides to start off on a pun.
Starfield, or to give it its full title, Starfield and Friends! (lets out a short, but very self-satisfied laugh)
At a random point in the game, Yahtzee's player character is accused of committing a crime, his NPC companion gets really angry about it, but the game refuses to tell him what it is he actually did, and just puts a bounty on him.
So then I thought I'd just dodge bounty hunters until I could reach a police station and pay the fine, but as I tried to do so the police kidnapped me and I woke up in a cell with a bloke saying "We're recruiting you as an undercover agent, because the horrible crime you committed shows you're the perfect candidate to infiltrate the pirates".
Yahtzee: (totally exasperated) Could someone please explain what I knobbing well did?!
The review closes with one of the most gloriously overly-elaborate similes that Yahtzee has ever come up with:
As the frustrated removals man said while attempting to fit the contents of an observatory through the front door, "This is what happens when your scope gets too broad."

Bomb Rush Cyberfunk

Yahtzee notes that the music in the game ranges from "decent" to "someone's beating me to death with a malfunctioning drum machine". Also:
Yahtzee: I kept hearing the same songs over and over again, so either there aren't enough tracks or that was when the concussion set in (as the game stands over him with the malfunctioning drum machine now broken in half)
Yahtzee says that his enjoyment of the game isn't due to nostalgia, because he's never played Jet Set Radio (the game it was evoking in its design and play style) and never owned a Dreamcast:
Yahtzee: Because, well, one hardly needs to justify that statement. I've also never put my bellend in a hole punch.

2023, Quarter 4

El Paso, Elsewhere and ?

Because of the second game's review embargo moving, and Yahtzee having no time to make a backup review, he instead opts to censor out the entire game and all identifying information. And it's a complete laugh riot, especially as the review goes on and more and more tangential things get censored.
- In his closing thoughts on it, Yahtzee admits to being paranoid that he missed something that could have turned the whole thing around, unwilling to believe that the game went through it's entire development cycle without anyone, least of all the IP holders, realising how awful the finished product would be.

Yahtzee: I don't know if I want to live in that world; I mean, what if I have a medical emergency around such people? They'd probably get confused and stick chewable vitamins up my arse.

Assassin's Creed Mirage

After criticizing the game and noting that the series hasn't really brought anything new to the table, Yahtzee is asked what the franchise needs to do to please him.
Viewer: And don't say "piss off and die".
(Yahtzee is silent for a few seconds)
Viewer: Yahtz?
Yahtzee: What?! You told me not to say it!

Sonic Superstars

When mentioning that the game has a Battle Royale mode:
At that point my curiosity was so morbid it was selling miniature coffins outside an American elementary school.

Marvel's Spider-Man 2

The main villain of the game, Kraven the Hunter, is depicted as Zangief with a pink feather boa.
When mentioning the wing suit, Yahtzee mentions that it helps the player when they run out of buildings to web-sling from and want to avoid "taking a great big mouthful of Pavement Panini".

Funny / Zero Punctuation 7

2022 Episodes

2022, Quarter 1

2022, Quarter 2

2022, Quarter 3

2022, Quarter 4

2023 Episodes

2023, Quarter 1

2023, Quarter 2

2023, Quarter 3

2023, Quarter 4

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Funny / Zero Punctuation 7

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2022 Episodes

2022, Quarter 1

2022, Quarter 2

2022, Quarter 3

2022, Quarter 4

2023 Episodes

2023, Quarter 1

2023, Quarter 2

2023, Quarter 3

2023, Quarter 4

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