One of the more difficult aspects of being a variety streamer is choosing which games to play. There are hundreds of thousands of titles out there, and there are a lot of questions that you can ask yourself.
Do I play a big multiplayer title that everybody knows and can enjoy (even, if like me, you’re really bad at it)? Do I play that new release I’ve been excited about? Do I play that interesting-looking indie game I stumbled across? Do I play a game that I know well, so I can better talk about the mechanics and background? Do I play a game blind and experience it alongside my viewers?
There are two games that I will never stream, not because they’re bad or unenjoyable, but because they are so unique and special that I don’t think that they should be spoiled.
The Witness
When I talk about The Witness, I paraphrase VideoGameDunkey when I say that it is a great game that made me very angry. The central conceit of The Witness is that you wake up on an island full of puzzles, which are depicted on screens strewn throughout the environment. The island is broken up into several unique areas, and the puzzles in each region have a different gimmick.
The reason I will never stream The Witness is that it is a highly-personalized experience. Much as some puzzles are easier than others, some sets of rules will make more sense to the individual than others. There are puzzles that rely on environmental clues, puzzles that rely on audio cues, puzzles that rely on incorporating certain shapes into their solutions, and many more. Some of the more devious puzzles even incorporate multiple sets of rules into their solutions.
It’s a game that encourages you to take your time, enjoy the experience, and come to not just know, but understand the mechanics of each type of puzzle. There is nothing in The Witness that you won’t be able to solve with enough time, and the only penalty for getting a solution wrong is to sometimes have to re-solve the previous puzzle.
When I joke that the game made me angry, it’s because there were puzzles that frustrated me, again on that individual level. There are a lot of puzzles where there doesn’t seem to be a simple or obvious solution, but to simply look up the answer betrays the experience of the game. It is far more satisfying to go to another area, or to turn the game off entirely, come back to that puzzle that seemed too difficult later, and finally solve it yourself.
With a vibrant, stylized world, The Witness is meant to be played slowly and thoughtfully, and it’s very easy to get lost within the game’s world as you try to solve the island’s mysteries. Even now, five years after release, it is a marked contrast to the countless high-action titles that dominate the gaming landscape.
Return of the Obra Dinn
Much of what I just wrote about The Witness could be equally applied to Return of the Obra Dinn - another puzzle game with a unique visual style. In the latter’s case, its dithered black and white art is an homage to the one-bit computer games from the mid-1980s.
The titular ship, believed to have been lost at sea after having gone missing four years prior, drifts into port with no one aboard. It is up to you, an insurance investigator, to determine what happened to the ship and her 60 passengers.
Return of the Obra Dinn’s gameplay loop consists of travelling through vignettes and paying close attention to the people and action you encounter. Lines of dialogue help to identify characters, but there are also subtler means, such as a person’s uniform or their role on the ship. Once you’ve determined who is a person is and their fate, you can add it to your notebook and, in a wonderful manifestation of the clarity of their situation, their individual portrait in a drawing of an event on the ship’s journey involving everyone on board will come into focus.
While the puzzles in The Witness are singular entities - find a puzzle, discover the solution, and move on to the next one - Return of the Obra Dinn is more interlinked. Navigating through the individual vignettes, the fates of some characters may be immediately obvious, but others may take travelling to different points in time to understand exactly what happened, and who it happened to.
The game is also willing to play with its structure - while it gives you all of the information you need to solve its mysteries, the time interval or change in location between vignettes can obscure useful details. When you finally manage to piece together the fate of a character that’s eluded you, it’s incredibly rewarding.
Return of the Obra Dinn also has a defined and compelling story, whereas the events of The Witness are more abstract and open to interpretation. The tribulations of the high seas may be a pastiche of fantastical tales, but it’s incredibly entertaining to see what unfortunate new scenario the ship and her passengers find themselves in.
Ultimately, both games offer creative challenges that have to be figured out instead of powered through, careful thought and reflection at odds with the energy and momentum typically required of streaming. The puzzles in these games aren’t dynamic; they all have fixed solutions, so the risk of spoiling them by streaming these games might mean that someone wouldn’t be able to experience the enjoyment of puzzling things out themselves. While I won’t be streaming them, I highly encourage everyone to check out these wonderful titles.
Are there any games that you would never stream? Let me know! You can always find me on Twitch.