Let's Drown Out

Gabriel and I make good on our threat to play a whole game, picking one close to our hearts that I know quite well but he doesn't: Dark Souls 2, switching player duties with every death. In the premier episode, Gabriel takes revenge for my choice of our character's surname by making him look like a bellend.

Douglas Uppity crowns himself the king of the Forest of Fallen Giants while blatantly missing as many things as he can get away with, but can he prevail against the mighty Dennis?

Douglas Uppity makes his way through Heide's Tower of Flame, while I continue my concerted efforts to get Gabriel killed as often and as spectacularly as possible. Although he doesn't need much help with that in this one.

Douglas Uppity explores No Man's Wharf as he reminisces about the events that left him a fugitive from justice. Meanwhile, we tackle the questions from the /letsdrownout subreddit and try not to fall out over Gabriel's three second attention span.

As Douglas battles the Flexile Sentry and discovers the not-lost-anymore Bastille, Gabriel and I manage to move past our earlier squabbling by focussing on the things that bring us together, such as massive amounts of barely-repressed homoeroticism.

We (eventually) give the Pursuer what for and then take it to his extended family in the Lost Bastille. Meanwhile, Douglas Uppity's backstory goes increasingly off the rails.

We tie up the Lost Bastille, have a run-in with the Lost Sinner - blimey, there are a lot of lost things around here - and realise we don't really have a clear idea on which way we're going to go next.

We're back! Just in time to break the seal of freshness on Huntsman's Copse, as we struggle with remembering how to play the game, me being jet lagged, and Gabriel being Gabriel.

Fair warning: we spend this entire episode failing to defeat the Executioner's Chariot. In our defense, though, I was still jetlagged and Gabriel was still Gabriel. We focus rather more on answering questions in the meantime, so do remember to submit more questions to the /letsdrownout subreddit.

We very swiftly deal with that bloody chariot and then, while we're on a roll, give the Skeleton Lords a damn good seeing to as well. Man, this place has so many skeletons I'd call it the Bone Zone if I hadn't already called my bedroom that.

Douglas makes his way through Harvest Valley and Earthen Peak, while Gabriel and I start giving the subtle impression that one or both of us are getting a trifle bored with this whole backstory concept.

Douglas Uppity polishes off the Earthen Peak and gets started on Bowser's castle, as we hear the final instalment of his tortured backstory and move onto a hopefully less played out gimmick.

We bang our heads against the Smelter Demon a few times and overall make a good solid room's worth of forward progress.

We eventually wrap up the Iron Keep by smashing up the Old Iron King's delicate little handsies, and Gabriel tells a very funny joke about Kurt Vonnegut.

Flush with success from murdering the Old Iron King, we try out a new wardrobe and actually make some half decent progress without fucking up too much. Relatively speaking.

We make a quite surprisingly large amount of progress, although rest assured I'm sure we'll screech promptly to a halt once we get into Brightstone Cove.

Okay, so apparently I was wrong when I said Brightstone Cove Tseldora would be a sticking point. In fact, once we wrap that up we spend the rest of the episode searching in vain for something that can put up a decent challenge to my unstoppable roll.

Sod it, let's just go to Drangleic Castle. I hear they have a nice gift shop.

We blow the popsicle stand that is Drangleic Castle and begin our ill-fated descent through the Shrine of Arse-mana. We tried to record another thing for midweek but it turned into a massive trainwreck so this is all you're getting.

The arsey part of the game continues to arse up a storm. Hey, did I forget to mention that the Steam holiday sale is on and Consuming Shadow is 50% off? Well it is.

We've got a lot of sneaky assholes and big fat ogres to kill, but Douglas continues to put his best face forward.

We conquer Aldia's Keep and Dragon Aerie largely by ignoring most of it. Fair warning, we have one of our trademark tiffs from around the 22nd to the 26th minute, so be warned if you're one of those people who find them upsetting 'cos you don't understand how a rollicking manly friendship works. If it helps, think of it like we're in a relationship, except we use arguing in place of sex.

With our pledge to steadfastly ignore the DLC and within spittin' distance of the end of the game, can a ragtag handful of boss fights stop Douglas Uppity from wrapping this shit up in one episode?

So after finally freeing ourselves of Dark Souls 2, we resolve to follow it up with a sumptuous pudding of a game that's considerably shorter and that hopefully I know more about.

Gordon makes it to the surface and almost immediately regrets it, so he goes back underground to kill a couple of giant monsters. Meanwhile, we encounter a few more bugs to add to Half-Life: Source's catalogue.

Gordon gets off those sodding railway tracks and finds that the soldiers on the surface have laid on a surprise party.

The military bring out their big hardware and Gordon is repeatedly driven to suicide by helicopters that just don't have the basic common decency to explode properly.

Gordon makes it to Xen and brings an end to the alien threat, except going by Half-Life 2, not really. This is an extra long episode to finish things up. I was gonna split it up but the final boss fight turned into rather an adventure in failure.

After fucking everything up at Black Mesa and letting aliens invade, Gabriel and I get some false passports and endeavour to redeem ourselves by signing up with X-COM. Not sure how much of the game we'll get through but almost certainly more if it continues to go as swimmingly as it did here.

It's Gabriel's turn to play all of a game he knows, and he goes for the remake of the "classic" "survival" "horror" game. In this first episode, a big-titted geologist embarrasses herself for an hour.

The struggle against the alien threat continues as our heroes, both cast as Support losers, are now forced to take it in turns to hold the other soldiers' coats. On the bright side, we found the Officer Training School.

We continue bumming around the house, and momentarily get caught up on a stupid suits of armour puzzle. Also, I think I make a menstruation joke at one point.

New monsters are introduced and a couple of hairy moments cause me to lose faith in my own abilities. Also, someone dies and nobody cares.

I pay as little attention to the game as possible as Gabriel continues to do a load of puzzle bullshit and we hammer through more questions than usual, covering such diverse topics as Dark Souls 3 and Rik Mayall's bottom.

One buggered up save file puts a rather abrupt end to the series, but that doesn't mean we can't enjoy a glimpse of what might have been by playing a bit of my old save file that's near the end of the game when nothing short of a tactical nuclear strike can so much as dent me feckin' shinguards.

Plenty of thrills and spills this week: fiery dragons, suits of armour, descending ceilings, the bit where you control Ashley and Luis getting a big pulsating one right up his arse.

I take the helm for the last bit of the castle section of the game to plot us a course that's sure and steady, if slightly marred by chainsaw decapitations.

Gabriel gets us started on the island area and proceeds to get blown up a lot. Also, some information on my eventual buggering off and consequent end of Drown Out.

Circumstances left us with only more chance to record, so we did a great big long session of Portal 2 co-op and split it into two videos just to draw out your separation anxiety.

We continue playing Portal 2 until our brains get tired, then round things off with the mammoth Q&A session you didn't know you wanted.