Reflecting on Two Years as a Twitch Streamer
Though streaming can be mentally taxing, it is also one of the most rewarding things that I do in my daily life. Before being shuffled indoors over these past few months due to social distancing and self-quarantining during the COVID-19 pandemic, streaming was a source of mental health for me after a long day of teaching English and exercising. In that time, streaming helped me unwind from the stress of everyday life and recalibrated my mood by having intellectual conversations with friends about games – something utterly disconnected from what my life typically requires of me.
There have been many times in the past year where, despite my copious backlog, I vacillated between what to play next – and that would sometimes leave me in a streaming rut. In some ways, I envy people who lean into multiplayer or speedrunning games – things that you can more or less extract infinite value and enjoyment from. But those motivations ultimately don’t appeal to me as someone who plays games primarily for their narrative and aesthetic value, thus variety continues to steer my compass towards what to play next. For when I crashed and burned on titles like Arkham Knight or Danganronpa 2: Goodbye Despair, I was able to easily pirouette into palette cleansers like Control and Uncharted 4: A Thief’s End. In the past year, I completed roughly 40 games excluding special events like Clone Hero sessions or Pokemon nuzlocke runs, and I’d like this article to filter down some of those experiences that I think are worth recommending.
Ultimately, I feel a deep sense of gratitude towards everyone who takes a few minutes out of their day to interact with my channel on Twitch, humoring the wide range of games I like to dabble with. I have been lucky enough to be part of a community that has raised thousands of dollars for charity through streaming incentives, a community that overwhelms me with people to watch on a daily basis, a community that continues to engage critically and astutely with the necessary conversations that need to happen around gaming, introducing me to a ton of experiences I’d never have had but for their recommendations.
As with my previous Twitch article, I’d like to curate the top ten most gratifying playthroughs I’ve completed on stream since publishing my previous thoughts last year. I hope for this list to serve both as a record to look back upon as well as a recommendation to other people looking to stream something new. As before, this list doesn’t necessarily represent a comprehensive review of any game’s quality, rather I intend to focus on games that were the most memorable to stream – the reasons of which I shall soon elucidate.
10. Super Mario Sunshine
I grew up without a Nintendo console. With the exception of the GameBoy Advance SP, the first Nintendo product I owned was the Switch. But when I would walk to my best friend’s house after elementary school, we would always pop in something mind-blowing into his GameCube. Super Mario Sunshine was a game that I had played for dozens of sessions as a kid, but never got anywhere beyond a few hub worlds because my friend didn’t own a memory card. Cranking up the emulation settings to their limit, I brought the bouncy and colorful world of my childhood nostalgia to life on my computer… with a DualShock 4 controller. Though not the optimal way to experience the game, I made it to the end a little covered in paint – a sign of getting lost in the process of art. The tight feedback loop between level attempts made this game always feel fresh while streaming, even if I got stuck. The level design iterations also kept already-explored areas teeming with secrets to discover and magic to experience. I think I made people watching as nervous as I was in the sections where FLUDD is taken away, and I remember laughing hysterically when the physics would backfire on me. Super Mario Sunshine is a super soaker of creativity packed into a tiny island that I knew inside and out by the end.
9. Sly 2: Band of Thieves
The Sly series snuck by my childhood with apposite stealth, but considering that Jak and Daxter was my favorite game from that era, this follow up with Band of Thieves filled my heart as an adult. Sly 2 takes everything great about the first Sly Cooper game and dials it up considerably higher, evoking an incredibly powerful yearning for that early-2000’s era of cartoony 3D platforming. The ultimate reason this game lands in this list is the variation within the gameplay compared to the first Sly Cooper game (which I also streamed), where you now have completely different interactions with the world when controlling different characters. This variation in the gameplay made me feel like I always had something to talk about, which is the sign of a great game to stream. With stylish animations, a prowling soundtrack that evokes something of the James Bond movies, and the silly humor interplaying the characters in key scenes, this is a style of game that I wish would resurface in the AAA industry.
8. SSX Tricky
Speaking of games that I wish would resurface in the AAA industry, SSX Tricky is easily the most energetic and radical sports game of its ilk. It took everything that made the Tony Hawk games successful and applied that formula to snowboarding, integrating an endlessly funky soundtrack with larger than life characters whose personalities still jump off the screen nearly two decades later. This past summer was when I finally learned how to run PS2 discs in my computer in a way that kept (most of) the design integrity of the game intact, despite the scratches on my disc. It was unbelievably satisfying to return to the alpine peaks of this game and, in the process, I was delighted to be introduced to some amazing speedrunners of this game that I still watch to this day. The best part about this game for streaming is that you can complete the world circuit races and tricky modes with each character, so you can return to the slopes again and again without ever pulling off the same trick twice.
7. Mass Effect 2
I didn’t expect to become invested in the Mass Effect universe. I have a heavy aversion to space-based games and shooters as a genre, but those aesthetic and gameplay elements are not what make Mass Effect 2 special. Sure, it’s a considerable upgrade from the original game in some key areas (i.e. the Mako), but what elevates this experience is the integration of its side quests with its characters. Typically with games, and especially when I’m streaming, I will ignore side quests and go straight for the ending. I struggle to think of many games that have as effectively leveraged optional side quests to capture my passion for a crew of ragtag characters as Mass Effect 2 did. As a result, I ended up spending quite a few more hours streaming it than I was anticipating. From start to finish, my journey with Captain Shepard was riveting, an illusive experience that I can scarcely imagine will be surpassed by the third game when I get around to playing it.
6. Uncharted 4: A Thief’s End
As aforementioned, I get burned out by some games on stream and need a palette cleanser. Uncharted 4 was perhaps the best antidote to the frustration and nihilism that Danganronpa 2 had left me with at the time. With no exaggeration, the transition between these games reminded me of running out of my elementary school classroom for recess. As with all Uncharted games, you’re signing up for a cinematic action movie style game with relatively predictable gameplay elements: cover shooting, wall climbing, rope swinging, etc. I wanted some comfort food after burning out, and Uncharted 4 was exactly what I needed – an escape into a breathtakingly beautiful wilderness of boundless energy.
5. Heaven’s Vault
Heaven’s Vault is perhaps the most underrated game I have ever had the joy of playing. It completely got lost in the 2019 Game of the Year discussions on major websites and award shows, which makes me want to pull my hair out because of how brilliant Heaven’s Vault is. Any attempt to capture what makes this game brilliant will spoil much of it, but Heaven’s Vault is dearer to me than almost any game I’ve ever played. The writing conveys character and tone in a way that every game writer should study, the art direction works in a way that I’ve never seen a 2D/3D hybrid style ever achieve, and the core gameplay loop – exploring abandoned civilizations and piecing together an ancient language while piecing together a mystery – provides a uniquely open-ended narrative that satisfyingly pays off no matter how your game ends. When I think about my experience in streaming Heaven’s Vault, no one watching had any idea about the game and thus I was barraged with questions. Despite that obscurity, having people express their desire to play it due to watching brought me a deep satisfaction that playing well known games never can.
4. Octopath Traveler
Octopath October was a meme that I created where I tried to cram the entirety of Octopath Traveler into a month of streaming. As someone who prior to Octopath October streamed about three times a week, usually between three and four hours at a time, I knew this was never going to happen in a month. But it did. I slowly found myself squeezing out an extra hour on stream or rearranging my plans to ensure I’d have time to get an unplanned stream in later that day. Things were looking bleak towards the final days of October, but the credits rolled just in time to take the day off for Halloween. Octopath Traveler has evocative art design, a stellar soundtrack that has no right being as epic as it is, and a battle system that perfectly reflects the characters within the main cast. It might be a bit grindy for someone streaming the game who doesn’t want to spend time with each and every character, but JRPG fans will feel right at home with this modern callback to all the right things about classic gaming that ultimately dignify Octopath along the way.
3. Mutazione
When I wrapped up my three month binge of the Witcher games, I knew that my heavy heart would be cured by steeping myself in the herbal tea of indie games. The cup that I happened to brew myself was Mutazione. This game embraces everything I value in gaming and then garnishes it with things I love in general – its beautifully soft art direction, its deeply written characters, the uncannily magical botany, the transfixingly ambient music, and the whimsical touches that patch these disparate elements together beautifully. It only took me a few sittings to finish the game, but its effective combination of elements caused Mutazione hit me harder than most 50 hour games ever do. I still actively listen to the soundtrack, follow people who play it on Twitch, and interact with the developers on Twitter whenever they’re doing cool things (which is often). Mutazione is the kind of game that I want to shove into everyone’s hands and say “play it.” Just please don’t pronounce it like I did on stream; you’re supposed to say it like a cheesy Italian accent: “Mu-ta-zi-O-ne!”
2. Persona 5: The Royal
I was so scared of playing Persona 5 that it sat in my library for almost a year before I installed it. Even installed, it sat there, intimidating me with its length – 100 hours or more, easily. I became nostalgic for my experience with Persona 3: FES years ago, and when Persona 5: The Royal released, I had a change of heart. Despite already owning the base game, I opened my wallet for a copy of Royal to get into the “definitive” nature of the hype. Something clicked and I dove in deeply. At the time of publication, I am more than 140 hours into Royal and nothing has gotten old yet – the music, the combat, the dialogue, the characters, the plot. The boon of this game is the myriad activities within it. As someone who decided to read all the dialogue out loud when playing this game, that has admittedly stretched out my time somewhat and might tire some people out. Even without reading it all aloud, there are an overwhelming amount of things to do in Royal that enabled every single stream to feel fresh, even when doing something I was very familiar with. I would highly recommend this experience to anyone who plays games on Twitch – as long as you’re in for the long haul.
1. The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt
I have never been sucked down a rabbit hole by an intellectual property like I have been by the Witcher series. In my review of the first Witcher game, I described my magnetic fascination to the world and characters that made up Geralt’s story. It got its hooks in me deeply, to the point where I was alternating between reading the books in the morning and playing the games in the afternoon. It took me three months and 175 hours of streaming to complete all three Witcher games, as well as The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt’s massive DLC expansions. The themes in this game sparked vulnerable and incisive conversations from both myself and the people in my stream, subtly provoking philosophical discussions in a way that few games can. Spending this time with Geralt and company meant something more deeply to me than any high fantasy story has, and The Witcher 3 exemplified this feeling more than any other game in the series. I could (and would want to) recommend all three games within this list, but I’m restraining myself to the third game because of how it symbolizes the apotheosis of my love and passion for gaming and streaming over the past year. The Witcher 3 stands proudly on its own. Anyone who was there knows; anyone who wasn’t should play it.
Feel free to join me as this list expands.
I hope this article and series of recommendations is helpful for people who get stuck in the rut of not knowing what to play next, and wondering where they belong on Twitch. I also hope that this article may serve as an affirmation that video games are intrinsically worth appreciating with as much venerance as other cultural media. Streaming allows me to connect with people in a way that my favorite books, films, and albums seldom allow me to. That singular focus has kept me going for two years so far, maybe more.
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