Playing Kafka – Voice-Only Review (Transcript)

Export note: This transcript was exported on Dec 11, 2025 — playing-kafka-review-voice-only (Completed 12/11/25). Transcript by Rev.com.

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Transcript

Edwin (00:01): Okay. Oh, what’s the date today? 8th of December, 2025. Yeah, I believe so. Someone will be hearing this now on Aplha Centauri in a hundred years or so.

Phil (00:16): Well, you always go for the big picture. That’s the frame that we start with.

Edwin (00:23): The closest star…

Phil (00:24): Exactly.

Edwin (00:25): … System. It’s actually Proxima Centauri. Is there anyone that might be it? Well Alpha Centauri. You can’t live on it. And they reckon that Proxima Centauri you might be able to live there. Anyway, we’re talking about, so one of the things we’re talking about is a game called Playing Kafka, which I played, I played over two weeks. It’s like a little triptych of games and it’s about Kafka’s work and I was only attracted to it because I’m a Kafka fan from way back.

Phil: Are you?

Edwin: Yeah, I read his stories. Well, the Metamorphos is the big one.

Phil (00:53): Why would you say you’re a Kafka fan? Share it with the people

Edwin (00:58): Because I like Metamorphosis and I liked, he wrote a book called Amerika with a K and I was laughing my head off because this guy, he went for a job interview or something, I’m probably misquoting, this is my memory of it. And he couldn’t get out of the building. The whole chapter dedicated him just trying to get out of the building. He talks about a government red tape and bureaucracy is a theme of his

Edwin (01:28): And the stupidity of large organisations trying to, and he gets stuck in a building. That’s why I like Kafka. And interestingly enough, while I played one, which was about the trial, a book he wrote called The Trial, he gets told he’s committed a crime, but they never tell him what crime it was and he ends up having to plead guilty just to get out of the system. That was quite good. The trial and so was letters to my father wasn’t too bad, although I felt like that was kind of more of a kid’s game, putting letters in order more for a 12-year-old, maybe sentenced.

Phil (02:07): Oh, we’ll get back to that in a moment. Keep going.

Edwin (02:09): And then the last one just annoyed me. The last one was

Phil (02:15): Based on the castle. This transcript was exported on Dec 11, 2025 – view latest version here. playing-kafka-review-voice-only (Completed 12/11/25) Transcript by Rev.com Page 2 of 19

Edwin (02:17): Yeah, the castle. And this castle is a big bureaucratic institution that he never gets to go in. He never gets to go there. There’s too much bureaucracy just even to get into the place. And the people who thinks who he thinks works at the cast, turns out they don’t even work there. I haven’t read the castle, the book, but I might like it. It’s the game though that bothered me. So they do the ragdoll thing. When you pick a character up, they ragdoll and you’ve got to move over to the other one. That was quite interesting came out. It came out as a, oh look in celebration of Kafka in 1924. So it came out in 2025. 2024,

Phil (02:56): Yeah, a hundred years after his death

Edwin (02:58): As a celebration of, I didn’t mind it. I just wondering what the impetus was. I mean, I didn’t do the research to find out how they made it, why they made it. It was made by Kafka experts, but the last game was so kafkaesque, I dunno if they did it on purpose. I literally couldn’t get out of the place. Couldn’t get out of the game. I had to just exit. I didn’t like the game at all. But it is Kafka and there’s lots of travelling around, like you’re walking from one place to another with somewhat with someone else and then they’re not following you.

Phil (03:26): But if you go forward and you travel and you make progress and you achieve your aims, isn’t that very non kafkaesque?

Edwin (03:38): Yeah, that’s right. But I don’t know. I dunno how, I mean, I picked the game because it was different. So you’re going to always get people like me who are going to pick something which, because everything’s just basically shoot ’em up or roguelike or whatever.

Phil (03:55): I was a bit disappointed when I was looking at bits of this that nothing blew up in orange fireballs or anything like that.

Edwin (04:04): That’s okay. I don’t mind that. But to be sitting down actually writing letters to his father if by just putting words in a sentence, I thought that was, I don’t know. I wasn’t convinced by that as a gameplay.

Phil (04:19): No, no,

Edwin (04:20): Because not even relevant to the kaka stories, even though I guess how do you gamify a book where someone’s writing to his father?

Phil (04:31): Yeah, well what they did was to give some flashbacks This transcript was exported on Dec 11, 2025 – view latest version here. playing-kafka-review-voice-only (Completed 12/11/25) Transcript by Rev.com Page 3 of 19

Edwin (04:37): To

Phil (04:38): The childhood and to give us an idea of why his relationship with his father was very

Edwin (04:46): Problematic and also very common, I think common sort of relationship with fathers and sons.

Phil (04:54): Well, his dad was never going to be happy with anything that he did, which I think quite a few people would know about that experience living today rather than a hundred years ago would still know what that feels like.

Phil (05:12): But look, I think it’s an interesting notion to take somebody’s work that is well known and goes under, I don’t know if under the word I’m looking for, but basically it affected a lot of literature that came afterwards, but also because he died in 24, there was a way in which that kind of bureaucratic strangulation and the idea of I guess following forms that achieved nothing. There’s a way in which that became even more true because it proceeds by quite some, the Second World War for instance. And some of that madness of Kafka was going to become even more real

Edwin (06:03): After the war where everyone’s being all safety, maybe similar to when we had to, no bags at the airport, no bins next to train stations kind of thing. And then that becomes bureaucratized further.

Phil (06:15): I mean, because really you can talk about life as in, you can talk about the idea of living in a small community in a village or whatever you want to call it, where people know everybody else and they’re connected either by family or to their neighbours. But one of the things that the Kafka material also talks about, I think is what it’s like to live in a city, to be anonymous and for working for a giant kind of organisational bureaucracy. And that was something that was happening more and more at the time.

Edwin (06:54): Yeah, yeah. I just thought also the interactivity of it, so I didn’t think it was very interactive, made me worry about the thing that we’re doing the game so that Repi games, you just keep pressing the space pirate at advances to the next part of their game. These are the voices who’s doing the voices? Expert consultants. Oh, actually they had expert consultants doing the story, the Gertha Institute. Oh my god. Check Voice, actually check

Phil (07:25): Version first, which makes

Edwin (07:27): Sense. Yeah, there’s a lot of versions of it. I mean it’s great to release something and I really love Friends Kafka. I just didn’t get any sense of that. Or rather maybe I got too much of a sense of it in the third game. I literally couldn’t play the third game, couldn’t get out, couldn’t see any way out of it. But maybe that’s the point. I’m not sure. Also, when I went back to the game, I’d saved it when I went back to the game. It just started from the beginning. It didn’t start from where I was, which was really infuriating. ER institute, who else is there? Minister of Culture. Okay, so I understand why next generation eu. Yeah, I guess Kafka’s old fashioned for an interactive game about Kafka and it felt old fashioned, but it made me wonder about these games which I’m actually making where you press the space button and it gives you the next line of dialogue or the next story point.

Edwin (08:25): And it made me think, okay, you need to interrupt. That was some choice. So I know the whole thing of a game is that you give the user an illusion of choice because you actually want ’em to get to the next level, which is go out the door at the end. Sure. They go out either with coins or with new weapons in a lot of games or renewed physically, usually with objects, options as they go. So Repi for example, has got a thing called menu. So you can actually, what did you think the character look at the break, the fourth wall look at you and say, what did you think? And then you presented with a menu of three as many items as you want to make them choose. But usually the number is three.

Speaker 3 (09:04): Yeah,

Edwin (09:05): I loved it, I hated it. I’m not sure what to think. And then depending on the button they press, that’s just text of a little different strand in the story, which often skirts around the main story but comes back to the main flow of the story in the second act if you like, or halfway through the game.

Phil (09:24): Yes. There’s no eternally tree of options.

Edwin (09:30): If you wanted to as a game developer, you could actually make 20 games for the one game basically with different things that happen at the end of each thing. But what the AAA usually do is they give you two options at the end of the game. You’ve trained the dragon and now the dragon’s yours or at the end of the game you are highly skilled at tracking animals in the bush rather than owning your own dragon. Or you might have a third choice, but it’s usually only three because otherwise it’s a crazy amount of work.

Phil (10:00): Yeah, absolutely.

Edwin (10:02): So three options, but playing Kafka didn’t have that. It was the same end for each game. And

Phil (10:10): So did you feel like you were very much being directed in a certain way?

Edwin (10:15): Oh, typing his father’s letter, I thought, yeah, I’m not really getting any caf esque from this really. I’m just dropping.

Phil (10:24): Maybe the repetition was the caf gas part of that?

Edwin (10:27): Well, for the final game, it was for the Castle and I’m sure the book is about that. He’s doing a lot of things again and again. Again

Phil (10:34): Different actors accordingly.

Edwin (10:36): So

Phil (10:37): Certainly it’s

Edwin (10:38): Quite a, as a game looking at it,

Phil (10:40): I would say it’s both. Keter is obviously an extremely popular name in terms of authors of the 20th century, but the game itself I would suggest is quite niche.

Edwin (10:57): Oh God. Yeah. I’m assuming it is. And I’m assuming they had to make it because they wanted to get on the game, not the game bandwagon, but they just wanted get the idea of Kafka out there playing a game. I mean his books are much better than the game, but the game was beautifully realised in a way with a low poly characters. And I didn’t mind the ragdoll effect where you had to drag the character through the air kicking and screaming to talk to another character. But I dunno, it kind of didn’t feel like a game it felt like, and that’s where the shoot mups are games. So you spawn each enemy into an environment and they’re randomly spawned all over the place. So you dunno where they are and then you’ve got to hunt them down so that game becomes how good is the ai, the game ai, not the modern term of the characters. Do they see you? Do they hear you?

Phil (11:49): But that stuff also jumps off, even though you’re talking about games that also jumps off the very storytelling idea that applies to say books and to movies, which is the idea of a character who is confronted by obstacles, sometimes internal ones and then has to make decisions and then act in order to move past those obstacles. Or if you’re not doing a tragedy, fail at moving past the obstacles and all of that is how that kind of storytelling works. I would say that that’s not really what a lot of Kafka is about. It’s not about Joseph K makes a whole bunch of decisions and brings petrol bombs to the trial and AK 47 and blows shit up out of everything and then somehow wins out at the end of the day, even though, okay, that’s crazy and violent. It certainly would be a shoot ’em up and that’s really not what the literature is about. And I’ve had a feeling as I was watching it

Edwin (13:00): That playing Kafka. Yeah.

Phil (13:02): Yeah. That as much as anything, if you had never read any Kafka, then maybe it would stir you to actually read the source material for the games.

Edwin (13:18): Maybe the trial’s a good little 150 pager. I haven’t read the Castle, but I know the Castle in America more Tomish two 50 pages and upwards of that, although America was never finished, so it’s got no end. It just trails off. And they talk about, then they’ve notes at the end saying what he was meant to do and all

Phil (13:43): That. Was that potentially his final work that he done?

Edwin (13:49): I think so. I think it was, yeah, it wasn’t finished. He died. But wait for that.

Phil (13:56): No, that’s the hard drive just ticking over, isn’t it?

Edwin (14:00): Yeah. Shouldn’t have bought such an old hard drive. I didn’t even know they made him in 1975. No, it’s a car leaving.

Phil (14:09): So if you were going to make, let’s just step away from KA for just a moment. If you’re going to do another kind of game, like say you wanted to do a, there probably is this, but if

Edwin (14:23): We’re doing Flush With Love

Phil (14:26): Oh yeah, I

Edwin (14:27): Know. Which is actually an interactive story. This one’s called a game and it is a game, but our ones actually an interactive story, which is a huge genre in Korea and other, although those interactive story tend to be

Phil (14:42): What romances with action, This transcript was exported on Dec 11, 2025 – view latest version here. playing-kafka-review-voice-only (Completed 12/11/25) Transcript by Rev.com Page 7 of 19

Edwin (14:43): Romance, lots of titillation, lots of big breasted maids and things and that whole Asian subculture thing to get the guys in. I guess I’m assuming,

Phil (14:54): I think you’re assuming correctly, what if for instance,

Edwin (15:00): Romance is like what we’re pretending that I,

Phil (15:03): We’ve got a little bit of romance in our thing, but it’s light.

Edwin (15:08): Yeah,

Phil (15:08): But what I was going to say, I don’t know. I mean is there an Allwell game out there? If there is, what would it be like? And for instance, if you were going to play as

Edwin (15:20): I just have a quick check, it probably is,

Phil (15:22): If you’re going to play, you’re going to 1984,

Edwin (15:27): How would that go

Phil (15:28): An animal farm then what are you doing? Because in some ways, neither game would, if you were being faithful to those two novels, neither game would have a positive conclusion. You wouldn’t be aiming for a positive conclusion or could you do Animal House? Sorry, apologies to the lovers of the film Animal House, but I got that wrong. If you’re doing Animal Farm, then is there a sort of wind condition whereby rather than the tyranny of animals ending up that way, would one way for it to win for you to win playing that is that you come in with the police, for instance, and you just mow down all these animals once again with an AK 47. I dunno why I keep going there today and all the animals are dead and the humans maintain their supremacy.

Edwin (16:38): There is, it’s almost like an interactive story of Animal Farm.

Edwin (16:43): And there’s another game which I haven’t got, which we’ll get because these games are quite cheap as well. They’re under $10 always. Yeah. So they’re worth kind of looking at just for the uniqueness. There’s another one, keeping An Eye On You by an Orwellian game called Keeping an Eye. Yeah, looks really good. Quite like that. There’s actually another one called, there’s three All World Games up there. They’ll have a look at, some of ’em are free in fact. And the other game is Ignorance is Strength. Wellm a bit buoyed by the fact that there are three games about George Orwell. But when I looked at the gameplay, similar is Words on the screen kind

Phil (17:17): Of thing,

Edwin (17:18): Rather than you taking action. They never wear games.

Phil (17:21): But you are talking about in terms of say Kafka and Orwell, you are talking about people known for their written work. And despite the fact that I think there’s at least 2 19 84 films,

Edwin (17:34): Papers Please is a, so Papers Please is a game. It’s a good game. It’s very interesting. I haven’t played it, but I would like to watch Gameplay for papers. Please. An icon in the game. Why do you say that? Well, it’s about, and they’ve made a short film, but there’s actually quite a good short film about it. They

Phil (17:57): Made a short film about something that started life

Edwin (17:59): As a game. A game. Yeah. Okay, so papers, please, you are in a booth and you’ve got to let people across the border and they put you in such a situation if the person has got, so you get a message, a memo from the government saying to you, all people from Canada aren’t allowed into the country today. They don’t explain why it’s, and it’s very Orwellian. And

Speaker 3 (18:22): You

Edwin (18:22): Go out and you just got to check, make sure the person’s not from Canada because you let a Canadian person through, they audit you and if you let someone through, you get fined and your aim is to make money so that you can actually pay for your brother’s food or something. You’ve got a genuine aim being there, but the game goes further. You can let some people through and other people through, but when your family starts appearing in the line, you’ve got the choice to do favours, personal favours for your family and maybe get busted for that or let them through the gates and let them into the country.

Phil (18:50): Yeah, I see. So they’re actually taking some of the stuff that actually happens.

Edwin (18:54): Yes, but they do it really well.

Phil (18:56): Weaving it through,

Edwin (18:57): That was a 2014 game, I think 2016 and it, it’s eight bits. So it’s all very, and the music in the background is big Russian type music scape going on in the background, but it started as a game. It’s not based on a novel, but you could say it would be perfect for a Kafka or an Orwellian type novel.

Phil (19:23): Well, what I’m saying, I think we’re talking about two things. One is that the idea of taking certain types of authors who, I mean, okay, I think we’re talking about modernists there, but that’s just taking certain types of authors whose work is still best known in the form that it first came in. Which is a weird thing to say, but for instance, there are plenty of people who know Shakespeare and we’ve had many, many, many forms of Shakespeare, both as plays and as movies.

Edwin (20:02): It’s got to be some games.

Phil (20:03): There’s a tonne of ways to know Shakespeare, but really people know Allwell and Kafka by reading Allwell and Kafka now, although I’m sure there’s also comic versions of these things, but the fact that this is another way to understand an author’s work is interesting.

Edwin (20:23): It is. And also you almost, after seeing the George War games on there, you almost, it’s almost to me mandatory that you put classics, even if they’re not easily gamified, you almost sort of salute the fact that they’ve actually put Animal Farm on there and Big Brothers watching you kind of games up there.

Phil (20:48): I mean, if you want to do a shiny game of a similar kind of era, you obviously do the Great Gatsby

Edwin (21:00): Far out. Oh god. Well I was thinking of Crime of Punishment, which they haven’t successfully able to make into a TV series with the 12 episodes. They couldn’t do it.

Phil (21:12): Well, if you want to go there and you want to stick with the Russians, what about War and Peace, obviously?

Edwin (21:17): Oh, that’s been great. Big long TV series with Anna, Karen and all that stuff as well. But yeah, there’s sort of those BBC, epic adventure kind of things with the big actors. But looking at Crime of Punishment, one of my favourite novel, it’s 400 pages long or something, but it’s only on page 250 that actually describes a physical item in his vicinity. And you realise that he’s actually been in his head for two 50 pages. That’s the brilliant side. And it’s hard to read now. It probably wouldn’t read so well now very slow. But actually he says, and he watched a guy lighting the street lamp and you realise, oh shit, I’m reading something hundreds of years old and also in a different country and they don’t have electricity even.

Phil (22:05): Oh, but this is the thing about Say, okay, Doto is a bit further back, but really even although Orwell and Kafka were certainly around when Orwell died after, but Orwell was around to do, I believe he did some film reviews. Kafka was certainly around for silent film. And the reason I make that point is to sort of say, I think you can argue that people, those writers are affected by things like film storytelling and seeing the world in different ways. But I also think that this here games, which is very modern

Edwin (22:59): If you think about throw VR into the idea of games where you’re talking about someone actually flipping reality.

Phil (23:06): Yeah. It’s another way of seeing the world is what I’m

Edwin (23:09): Reading. Book of being in it.

Phil (23:11): Yeah, that’s what I’m headed for. And the thing about that is some people are going to argue that it’s great. I’m certainly going to say, especially applying my former teacher brain, anything that can help people towards reading some of this literature is a good thing.

Edwin (23:29): Yeah, I think a lot more people need to read that sort of literature now and they’re not, they’re reading soundbites at the moment.

Speaker 3 (23:38): What do you mean

Edwin (23:40): Reading’s a big thing at the moment? We’ve just had all social media, including YouTube, I didn’t realise, banned for under 16 year olds in Australia, literally.

Phil (23:49): But not all of that is reading. Some of it is, but

Edwin (23:51): Not all of it. But it’s to help them read so they can bloody put the bloody iPad down and pick a book up. I think that’s part of it. I think the literacy rates jumping down when the screens started because mom and dad have had their screens for a while. But now what happens is mom and dad update their screen every one or two years and give the old screen, which is still functioning fine, thank you very much to their child. And we know that if that screen had been made in America, we’re looking at Trump’s thing, they actually put the cost out. It’d be $25,000 per piece to buy an iPad. But because we’ve got poor countries with poor people working for $10 a week and all this making iPads, we have the iPad and what it has done is it stopped kids looking at books. I think that’s what the general thing is. That’s

Phil (24:40): What the argument is.

Edwin (24:42): Oh, Atid, they’re not saying that. That’s the elephant in the room. A lot of people committing suicide because they’ve been bullied online. So you’ve got a whole lot of stuff going on there. So yes, they’ve got to read the books, get back to reading those books. But then my question is if there’s a game out there like papers Please, which was at the time very successful. And let’s throw star G Valley into that too. That’s a little story game. A little top down 3D thing where you chop wood and do things and talk to the villagers and stuff. That’s super, super popular.

Speaker 3 (25:15): Okay.

Edwin (25:17): They’re successful games. I just wonder whether you can make a successful game with maybe not the words from Crime and Punishment, they want to fall asleep after half an hour, but maybe

Speaker 3 (25:31): Some of the ideas.

Edwin (25:32): Some of the ideas, yeah, gamify the ideas probably without saying. They used to say when I was doing multimedia at tafe, they used to say, oh, these are the three or four choices you’ve got, but it’s not true. You’ve got the drag and drop functionality of a game. And they say this in education completely arrested because they’re not involved in game making. You’ve got the drag and drop, you’ve got the question and answer. Do you remember this in education you were teaching there where an interactive thing was, pick the right answer, multiple choice drag and drop the pictures into the right area. You had like three or four different things and they thought they were gamifying learning, but really it was a very minimal way to do that.

Phil (26:18): Well the thing is that if you really wanted to dig down deep into that, which we won’t, don’t have the time, but the fact is that the gamification of learning has been a conversation for at least 20 years. And the reason is this feeling that once again a bit like you were saying, the attention of young folk is taken up by games in a way that takes them away from education. And educators want those eyes back on, well, I guess screens at school to learn things.

Edwin (26:56): Well they acquiesced. They basically said, oh, we’ve lost the kids’ attention. They’re all playing games. Tell you why do we gamify education? And they went the completely wrong way. They basically gamified crime of punishment.

Phil (27:11): Well, I dunno, I don’t think it’s a difficult one because it is

Edwin (27:13): Difficult. Very difficult.

Phil (27:14): Computers are tools they, but unlike the standard type of a idea of a tool, here is a hammer that bangs in a nail. Every computer is, to use a poor analogy, a Swiss army knife. It does so many things that there was not really going to be a way to say, well we’re only going to use this as a tool for education, which means you’re going to be looking at it and learning things. It’s got all these other things that it does. Games being one of the other things that it does. And there was, I guess like any new thing, it just got out of people’s control. We’ve got to have this for business, we’ve got to have this for education. How are we going to do it? We don’t know

Edwin (28:05): Exactly. Now we’ve got robots, what are they going to do? I know they’ve got a great idea. Fold clothes and put stuff in the washing machine. They got $80,000 robots that people have. The podcasts have been given to trial and other people have bought because they’ve got so much money, they dunno what to do with themselves or they just didn’t need that third cast. So they bought a robot and they’ve tasked these robots brains the size of a planet to fold washing and this whole YouTube video’s on it doesn’t fold very well. You need to learn how to fold. And I’m thinking you’re talking to a brain with so much more potential than your own and you’re asking it or you can’t fold a polish shirt in the same way as you fold a t-shirt mate, and you’re doing that to it. But of course it’s got no ego, thank God because it’ll be feeling really belittled but the same robot because sit with your child after school and teach at maths without the child even knowing it’s being taught.

Phil (29:01): Oh, the irony just going on right there.

Edwin (29:05): But people don’t, the kids think he’s playing

Phil (29:07): Ball,

Edwin (29:07): But the robot’s gone. The kid likes ball. We’re going to go down the basketball court and I’m going to teach him how to count to 10 and he’s not even going to know.

Phil (29:16): What was the robot in the movie ai?

Edwin (29:18): What was

Phil (29:19): That?

Edwin (29:21): They just did the Pinocchio thing. That was just Pinocchio.

Phil (29:24): Remind me what the robot was. There was one, there was a teddy bear robot.

Edwin (29:28): Oh yeah.

Phil (29:28): But there was another, what was the main robot in ai?

Edwin (29:32): I think it was the guy out of sixth sense, the little kid.

Phil (29:35): Oh yeah, that’s right. Yes,

Edwin (29:36): Yes. What’s

Phil (29:36): His name? Haley Joel Osmond, who is now no longer a little kid, but yeah, that’s right. That’s right. That was an interesting,

Edwin (29:45): He went down and lived at the bottom of the sea for a million years and then he actually lived so long that the next version of human can to collect him that remember the aliens. They were next humans or possible. Nobody. It’s not really, I don’t think it’s discussed.

Phil (29:59): I think what you’re saying here to go big with this for since we started big, let’s continue this way,

Edwin (30:05): Let’s stay.

Phil (30:07): I think what you’re saying is that the robots that we’re getting to now fold our clothes.

Edwin (30:11): Oh my God,

Phil (30:12): Could very well live far beyond us and the representation,

Edwin (30:18): Folding clothes for the next human iteration. Exactly. Imagine that humans, they will get, and now we’re just connected with the robots, but still getting them to fold our clothes. Well, Chinese car factories are having problems at the moment. They’ve got humanoid robots and they’re very good. They’re doing most things, but they’re getting a couple of things wrong if you don’t get the right, there’s a lot involved when you’re putting a car wheel on a car. So they’re getting some of those tasks wrong at the moment, but they have not employed 30,000 workers for the factory. They’ve actually bought 15,000 new robots from, and they’re all in experimental. We are not seeing ’em in the streets just yet, but they’re going to be in around in a minute.

Phil (30:59): Well, they better come up with universal basic income or else the flipping riots are only one generation away.

Edwin (31:05): Well yeah, I was saying to the teachers at Charlie’s school, Charlie’s five, and I was saying, do you think schools just really to keep the kids off there, skating down the street, throwing bricks in people’s windows, do you think that that’s a major function of what a school is? Because I’m thinking they’re learning and stuff and that’s lovely and we all need to learn, sorry about the plane going across, but in the future,

Phil (31:30): I like to think of it as the robot playing drone a drone basically

Edwin (31:35): Just listening to that. I’m just thinking about what it’s putting into the atmosphere.

Phil (31:39): Well, it’s a drone poisoning the atmosphere, but looking down upon us, making sure we’re safe.

Edwin (31:45): We’re just a nice view of you get a window seat.

Phil (31:48): Yeah, exactly.

Edwin (31:49): At the moment as if they even see the house.

Phil (31:51): But what I’m saying is the whole thing is a robot and when it gets to the airport, it kind of does a sort of a fold crouch thing as it lands because basically it’s a transformer.

Edwin (32:04): Oh, that would be good. I’d like that. Well, they’ve got those for the moon and that. Well, they got to try and land on the moon. They’ve had a lot of problems trying to land anything on the moon lately, and they’re not sure why they think they dunno whether it’s the dust or, anyway, we’re off on another subject, but wouldn’t it be great to gamify your life? So rather than actually getting up in the morning, you just stay asleep in your headset and your headset gives you the dreams and your body just wastes away over say 15 years instead of this incessant 85 year lifestyle that we’re lucky to live.

Phil (32:35): I’m going to throw out two more things on top of that. One is, I dunno about bed rotting until dead by the way.

Edwin (32:41): Oh, outro. This is a very beautiful song. This is what we were going to talk about. AI and the what’s saying actor to playing Kafka. They used actors, proper actors. And actually each iteration that they’re releasing, they now they’ve released one in Polish, one in Czechoslovakian and one in English, the one that we saw. And basically that’s the new release of the game is just the revoicing with the actors. So they’re getting actors into birds, which is interesting because using for augment, we’ve got that Southern American guy, which I think is great. He’s great is the stereotype that we wanted.

Phil (33:18): I mean it’s the easiest type of voicing there is though, because there’s no necessity for lip sync or anything like this. I’m not saying what an easy gig give it to me. I’m just saying that as far as voice gigs go, it’s one of the easier ones

Edwin (33:33): That’d be in and out of there in an hour, probably

Phil (33:36): Minimum call

Edwin (33:37): For it. They’re good voices. They’re great voices. Yeah, they’re good actors. But it’s funny to hear actors when I’ve been using for the other game I’m making for the education department.

Phil (33:46): Well, it’s a strange layer between you and the play, isn’t it? That actor?

Edwin (33:52): It’s strange. But what is interesting is looking at the ragdoll and playing Kafka, some of the mistakes of game making. So me and you, you’ll write a script and then I’ll try and emulate it and we’ll cut it up and work it out between ourselves while we’re doing that. I’m playing with code, right?

Speaker 3 (34:11): Yeah.

Edwin (34:12): So the Python code programming language Repi Repi is a subset of PI game, which is just a subset of Python, which is the most powerful language in the world at the moment. All the robots are programmed with it. So what I’m doing, well, a lot of robots aren’t certainly the van home robots. You can programme them with Python, get ’em to set up programmes, weeding, do the weeding, how to recognise the plant and all this sort of stuff. But that’s all written in Python. So while we’re making this silly game,

Edwin (34:40): We’ve actually got the whole Python language. I didn’t know that until I asked a few questions. Can we do this? Yeah, yeah. Just use Python. I’m going What? I know that, but I didn’t know you could do it. So everything that’s available in Python bank database, programming, security systems, all the way through to emulating an AI voice can be done all through Python. Anything can be done through Python. I was seeing these games like playing Kafka and I’m thinking, did you guys think hard enough about the actual gameplay? I know he’s a writer and you’ve got, are there other choices where yes, I know the user has to be led by the hand kicking and screaming sometimes to the end of the game, but can we not at least have enough side quests to make it feel like it was their choice to get to the end of the game? Because at the moment in playing Kafka, I’m just going along for someone’s ride the GameMakers ride and that’s fine. And they’ve got all these people, institutions involved, which also had a say I’m sure in the game.

Phil (35:43): Oh, you can bet they did.

Edwin (35:45): There’s five of them.

Phil (35:46): But I mean absolutely though is what you’re looking at. What you’re talking about partly is what would be considered a passive character in filmmaking terms and not a very active character in game terms necessarily either. For one of the things is that that young Kafka writing letters to his father, no young Kafka writing letters in the future about what kind of childhood he had with his father is that’s absolute passivity because his father has all the power and he ends up having to do what he’s told again and again and again. All of which I would argue is not your usual game fair. It’s the very opposite of what a game is usually. That’s basically why they don’t talk about that sort of thing in a game because to shoot ’em up leads you very quickly to the homicide

Edwin (36:40): The boss fight.

Phil (36:41): Exactly. Well it actually leads you to killing the father, whatever that’s called. But Patro side I guess, and they don’t take it there. I mean we’re talking about an author who was discussing what it’s like to be trapped and underneath power, both in his childhood, but again when he becomes an adult. And so all of that is very anti the normal path and material of a game. So we’re in a different world here.

Edwin (37:18): I know, I know. I just feel like if you’re going to I Ready play a one where you put a headset on and then you are the main character in a real way where your decisions, well let’s open. That’s the feeling of open world games. So Charlie plays Goat Simulator three, which I got from him the other day.

Phil (37:37): Oh yeah. Does he like it?

Edwin (37:39): Yeah. Yeah. It’s just like, because I’ve got cameras watching what mum does, I can actually see over his shoulder. He actually bought, purchased an Xbox bloody Game Pass the other day for $200. I took

Phil (37:51): Quickly. Your son did?

Edwin (37:52): Yeah.

Phil (37:53): Okay, keep talking.

Edwin (37:54): So keep your kids off the computers, the computers that have got access to your, a credit card or anything, that’s for sure. He’s only five, but I wouldn’t put that down as intelligence. I’ll put it down to he wanted to play this particular game and he

Phil (38:06): Found the path

Edwin (38:07): To it. It gave him a clear pathway. Microsoft gave him a very clear pathway to get there.

Phil (38:11): Well that’s the gamification of burning your credit card.

Edwin (38:16): Yes. Yeah, exactly. And Microsoft had been in trouble releasing game passes now for $45 a month and they had a Friday specialist, I wish. Is that right? Yeah. It’s not good. If you play games every day, then $38 a month might not be so bad. But I prefer to buy them through Steam the old fashioned way. It’s your game, you can play it when it’s updated, you get the update.

Phil (38:36): I like your definition of old fashioned, but I think

Edwin (38:39): It’s actually quite modern, I suppose, but

Phil (38:41): I think we’re back in the territory of

Edwin (38:44): Non-subscription.

Phil (38:45): Exactly. So are we heading towards the end?

Edwin (38:49): We’re outroing

Phil (38:50): This with all the gain?

Edwin (38:51): Yeah, we’ll just give you a bit of, as an outro, I’ll give you a bit of this AI singer that from Suno that I demoed the other day and I was quite surprised how good it was.

Phil (39:02): What would you roughly

Edwin (39:03): Give, put my factor 100 on?

Phil (39:06): What would you roughly rate claim?

Edwin (39:12): It feels mean to rate it at six, but then it feels too generous. Seven. So I’ll give it a 6.5.

Phil (39:20): There you go. That seems fair.

Edwin (39:21): What do you reckon from what you saw?

Phil (39:24): I would say that

Edwin (39:27): I’d recommend getting it though at 6.5. I’d recommend getting it because it does open the doors to Kafka’s works. Maybe that’s its aim.

Phil (39:37): That’s what I was pushing earlier in this. Yeah. This transcript was exported on Dec 11, 2025 – view latest version here. playing-kafka-review-voice-only (Completed 12/11/25) Transcript by Rev.com Page 19 of 19

Edwin (39:40): As a game 6.5.

Phil (39:42): I’m happy with that

Edwin (39:44): As an idea to get people interested to Kafka’s work. 8.5

Phil (39:47): Maybe. Yeah. Okay.

Edwin (39:48): But really we’re doing game reviews, so six and a half.

Phil (39:51): Yeah, that makes sense. And

Edwin (39:53): Try one of the all world games maybe next time.

Phil (39:55): Yeah, that sounds good. Only four bucks and until then,

Edwin (40:00): That’s a criteria. If it’s under 10 bucks, you might get a review.

Phil (40:03): We’re going to leave you with a piece of music that is a part of Edwin and a part of Suno. What’s it called? Ed and what’s it about?

Edwin (40:13): Well, here she is and it’s called Bed Rotting. I.