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Note: It is likely this post will be stolen and harvested by AI, which I am getting quite sick of. I may be moving my posts elsewhere at some stage this year in order to prevent that from happening. But to be honest, I’m mainly leaving this note here to see if the people stealing my stuff can even be bothered reading it before they churn through it with a thesaurus machine and repost it. I look forward to it 🙂
Streaming is a lot of fun. But, it is also more difficult than I sometimes acknowledge to myself when I start a stream for the day. It can be hard to sustain academic discussion across a three hour period about a single game. So I do hope I’m also able to be entertaining – but streaming is also weird in that it’s not like talking to a room full of people. I can’t read the room or always ascertain how people are feeling. When I’m talking, I sometimes wonder – is this an interesting tangent? Does my terrible sense of humour land? Learning how to sustain interest has been a learning curve, and I’m obviously falling in and out of practice all the time.
There were some fun playthroughs I did this year though, and I wanted to reflect on how a few of these games feel to stream. Maybe this will provide some insight as to why I stream what I stream – and how I’m feeling as I’m flailing around, wondering what the hell I’m doing 🙂
Some Spoilers Follow For Certain Games.
Pathologic Classic HD
Old Streams Playlist (Changeling / Bachelor)
New Streams Playlist (Haruspex)
The game that I have streamed for the longest amount of time by far, and of course one of the most important games I have ever played. It’s strange because I’m sure I repeat myself sometimes during streams, but I feel that there’s always something new to consider when it comes to Pathologic.
It also suits my streaming style completely perfectly. Dialogue freezes time in-game, so I can ramble for as long as I want in something slightly more interesting than a pause menu. The walking is relatively low-stakes for me these days, meaning I can provide interesting commentary without needing to stop talking and focus on the gameplay on the screen. Reading out the dialogue also lets me still talk while still having interesting things to say, and letting my internal stockpile of “things to analyze” recharge a bit.
Pathologic is a cornerstone of my channel and a piece of media that fascinates me (and most others who play it). An odd, difficult game that seems like it should collapse under its own ambitions, but thrives. Much like Silent Hill 2 (2001), it works within its limitations, with all of those restrictions adding to the work, rather than detracting from it. Classic HD deserves to be played and enjoyed, even if all you do is make it through the Bachelor’s route. It is the kind of game that alters your perception of what a video game can be – and it changed my life to such a degree that I’m writing this right now, after having streamed it for over forty or fifty hours.
What else can I say about Pathologic other than that I’m disappointed with the new allegations brought forward about Ice-Pick Lodge director Nikolai Dybowski? Given my channel started because of an earnest love for this game, it gets harder and harder to feel comfortable about my channel’s profile picture being directly associated with Pathologic. Does that mean a change? Maybe, if I find an artist I like the style of. But it is disheartening to think of yet another influential piece of art that has been produced by another bad person. The allegations in 2021 were already serious enough, but with even more stuff coming out, I feel bad for everyone else at Ice-Pick Lodge who have to have their names associated with his.
Regardless of all of this, I’ll be finishing Classic HD this year and moving on to Pathologic 2, as the latter has been requested who knows how many times over the years. But I may shift away from Pathologic as a general aesthetic for my channel because of these most recent allegations – but I will see what happens.
Yakuza Kiwami (Full Game Spoilers Follow!)
Full Playlist
Yakuza Kiwami was far out of my comfort zone in terms of streaming, but definitely within my comfort zone when it comes to the games I play in my personal time. I’ve come to treasure the Yakuza series, and it does so much right.
The themes of the story are certainly straightforward. Kazuma Kiryu takes the fall for a crime he did not commit, and in the intervening years in prison, emerges to find that the best friend he covered for has snapped under the pressure of being the head of a crime family. If the game had anchored itself more strongly around the dynamics between Kiryu and Nishikiyama, I think the original Yakuza could have had a story even better than Yakuza 0. Sadly Kiwami is beholden to the fact that it is a remake, and it suffers from the fact that it still has to adhere to the original game’s story beats (well, it doesn’t have to, but they did anyway). Much of the game is spent away from Nishiki, and we waste time on subplots with characters we are never really given that much reason to care about. Nishiki’s spotlight as the central antagonist is essentially stolen, although I do still love that the final battle happens in spite of that. Nishiki still has a score to settle. As with most tragic battles through the series, the final boss here is a fight that feels avoidable, but at its core, was never going to end in a handshake.
Kiwami was an odd game to stream, in part because of my erratic streaming schedule. Given I wasn’t able to stream very much to start with, I ended up playing the first three or four episodes blind, before going ahead and finishing the game at home. I’m now up to Yakuza 5 and Judgment (playing both simultaneously) and have 100% completed Yakuza 0 and Yakuza 4, while also intermittently attempting to finish Kiwami 2 and Yakuza 3. By now I’ve seen and done much of what the Yakuza franchise offers, and I still love these games a huge amount.
Kiwami is by no means the best Yakuza game (that award so far for me goes to either Yakuza 0 or Yakuza 3, weird as that sounds), but it’s still a great game by any metric. I was mainly aware I wasn’t able to build the routine schedule needed to bounce off of the chat for a game like this, so I did feel like my commentary here wasn’t as insightful as it could have been. Besides, much of my time was spent pummeling Majima’s face into the pavement over and over again. There’s only so many times you can comment about how much fun rush style is before you just have to shut up and let the fists fly.
Kiwami probably has some of the best “what the” moments of my streams, just by virtue of its bizarre story. Sure, I’ll take Haruka gambling. Ah yes, a spy casino built beneath the homeless park. Of course, a grown man hiding under a traffic cone for months. All of this might seem nonsensical on paper, but the masterful tone shifts in the game make the funny moments an effective counter to dramatic, emotional story beats that, game after game, still produce tears.
Siren: Blood Curse
Full Playlist
Blood Curse is such a strange, strange game. On the one hand it is moody, atmospheric and highly detailed. It is still incredible how a game from 2007 can still look so good. At the same time, it is a grotesquely ugly game at times, with far too many visual filters fighting for supremacy, and murdering your eyes at the same time. The gameplay is a far cry from the previous games in the series, despite being a remake / reinterpretation of the original. Instead of the shibito being almost unstoppable killing machines and your character having the dexterity of a broken tank, the shibito are knocked down in a few hits, take ages to get back up, and your character almost always has access to a weapon.
When the game’s soundtrack kicks in, it is sublime. The sounds are haunting in ways that are hard to immediately describe. The music feels like sorrow (or terror) made audible, at times. Yet at the same time, like – why? Why is there so much that is stripped from the series’ identity? The episodic framing is frustrating. Every chapter opens with a recap, and ends with a “here’s what’s coming up”. But I’m playing the game right now! I don’t need a recap for chapters that are about thirty minutes long at most. Unlike previous games in the series, Blood Curse just doesn’t seem to trust the person playing it, which is a pet peeve of mine. If you aren’t convinced you are telling a story worth remembering, it might be worth editing the story.
This isn’t to say the story is bad. Blood Curse has some great background information going on, and some of the best collectibles in video games. The developers went out of their way to make real versions of each archive item, taking photos of them, and inserting them into the menus. This level of authenticity is to be applauded, given how much more real it makes the game feel. It was a lot of fun to stream just to see people’s reactions to the bizarre final boss battle and all of the overly-grotesque monstrosities the game throws at the player.
While I have more to say about this game, I’ll leave it for a video essay to complete my look at the series (coming this year, I promise)!
Silent Hill: Homecoming
Full Playlist (watched at your own peril)!
One of the strangest and perhaps most miserable streams I’ve ever done, but not because of anything besides the game itself (and my own schedule). Homecoming is probably the worst Silent Hill game (although I haven’t played whatever Ascension was), and playing it on stream was probably an incredible mistake. It’s dry, boring, and repetitive. The game is stingy with resources to the point that slogging through is not an inevitability. You have to fight for every inch of progress in Homecoming – but all more progress rewards you with is more Homecoming. The graphics are bland and inspire no fear. The monster designs only have merit when it comes to the bosses – the others are either copied from previous games or are just grey blobs, or worse, are just human cultists, made faceless and disposable. Rather than attempting to humanize the cultists – which the best entries in the series did to great effect, making them legitimate human threats, these guys are just cannon fodder for the player to gun down. Remember discovering how awful Dahlia was in Silent Hill? The sympathetic qualities of Claudia in Silent Hill 3, or the twisted motives of the killer Walter Sullivan in Silent Hill 4? Scrap all of that. Just make the villains generic murderers who torture people to death with power tools, and who hire legions of faceless thugs to be whacked or shot to death.
The combat in Homecoming is terribly misguided, just because they tried to make Alex Shepherd, our protagonist, more mobile than previous protagonists – but they failed miserably. Travis from Silent Hill 0rigins on the PSP feels better to control, for crying out loud! The input delay is insufferable. Melee combat versus more than one enemy is just one way to get Alex stunlocked and killed most of the time. Enemies react much faster than Alex and yet have no way to resist gunshots most of the time. When you have ammo, you’re invincible – when you don’t, you’d better exploit the one reliable melee combo – dodge, swing, dodge, swing. Repeat until the enemy is dead. Otherwise Alex is too sluggish and slow to respond to do anything. Do you understand that this game is no fun yet?
I’m honestly not sure how many people soldiered through (pun intended) my Homecoming playthrough. It’s got some pretty low view counts, and I don’t blame people. Who needs more Homecoming in their lives? Nobody – but I’m at least glad I finished them. There aren’t many Silent Hill games left to archive on my channel. There’s Downpour, and the Silent Hill 2 remake, and I guess The Short Message. All I know is, I really, really don’t want to play through Homecoming again. The cherry on top of my streams is that the game crashed before the ending cutscene. At the time I said “that’s about right for Homecoming”, and my thoughts have not changed. A fitting ending for a terrible game.
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Thanks to everyone who watches my streams and reads my blogs, I’ll be seeing you all more this year in 2025 🙂
Go here to see last year’s reflection like this.
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