Good evening. You are listening to Three Moves Ahead, and I'm your host, Rob Zakney.

Tonight I'm joined by two of our regular panel, freelance writer Julian Murdoch, and our very own Troy Goodfellow.

Hello. Hello, everyone. We also welcome, well, perhaps welcome is the wrong word. We allow out of his production cave, our pet wizard, Michael Hermes.

Thanks for letting me out of the basement and having me on the show.

So the reason Michael is here at last is because he and everyone else has been playing a game

and tweeting about it and dying a lot. The game, of course, is FTL.

And Michael, since you, I think, threatened to quit, unless we did a show on this game.

That sounds right.

Why don't you start us out?

What's FTL and why does it have such a hold on you?

So FTL is a game that recently came out.

It had a massively successful Kickstarter, and it kind of melds together a lot of different aspects of a lot of genres, and it has people wondering which one it really is.

But the thrust of it is that you're piloting a spaceship from one side of the galaxy to another and managing

your crew and resources along the way and generally trying to not die. And you mentioned dying

is doing something, is something that people do a lot because it features permadeath as one of the

main game mechanics, which means once you die, it's over.

And it seems to have grabbed everyone's collective attention,

and I can't be on Steam without the little window popping up all the time that says,

so-and-so is playing FDL, and it's just everyone just seems to be losing their minds over this game.

Well, it's nearly a rogu to be losing their minds over this game well it's nearly it's nearly a rogue like i mean it's not just that you die all the time i would say that the the expected outcome is death yeah uh it's certainly possible to finish

i actually have never experienced this end game uh because i at games, despite the, I don't know, 70 games I've played, 80 games I've played at this point.

And I can play for quite some time and I can sort of get to the last sector, you know, big battle thing and then just die.

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