After about a decade of threatening it, I am taking advantage of a renewed interested to write (spawned from a 4 hour take-down of plagiarists) to finally write up some Game of the Year content! This will include my Top 5 Games I played in 2023, but it’s important to me to also write about some games that I didn’t play.

I’m at a point right now where I sometimes struggle to play through single player games on my own. I supplement this by watching other people stream video games. Many people are doing this all of the time, but watching a playthrough of a game can be just as fulfilling to me as actually playing it. Sometimes, it convinces me to play it, too. I figured it’d be fun to write about some games I loved this year that I was lucky enough to watch other people play.

Enjoy an audio read-through of the blog-post!

Baldur’s Gate 3

So Baldur’s Gate 3 is the poster child of why I value this category conceptually. There are a ton of games I would not have started if I had not watched someone play it first (one of them ends up on my Top 5 List!), but more often I get to enjoy a game that I’m pretty sure I just would never play on my own. Baldur’s Gate 3 is expansive and immersive; There is so much to do, so many paths that no one playthrough is exactly like another. It’s the exact style of game that I would have spent 4 months straight playing in my 20s, but I know that I would struggle to put enough time into it now.

Which is fine, because it has instead allowed me to follow the many adventures of my friends, who all played very different characters with very different journeys. Gave me the same vibes I had talking about the aftermath of Mass Effect 2 with folks: I didn’t even know half the cast because in the first person I watched’s playthrough, they all died.

It’s also one of those games I just enjoy hearing people talk about. I’ve had more conversations about Baldur’s Gate 3 than all of the Top 5 games I did play this year. A great experience all around.

Slay the Princess

Back in 2017, Gita Jackson wrote a unique review of Resident Evil 7 for Kotaku, where they reviewed the game by watching someone else play it. Their review was recognizing a trend that has become more commonplace since. People watch entertainers play games now, and that is how they play those games.

I heavily related to their review when it dropped--I mean, that’s the entire premise of this blog post--because I am a huge baby who cannot play horror games. I still want to experience great horror games though!

Slay the Princess was in this category. It is a game that, in hindsight, I think I could have played on my own, but when a friend and I found it during one of our weekly digs through the New & Trending section of Steam, it looked horror enough that I did not trust that I could handle it. So imagine how happy I was when one of the streamers I watch, Hololive’s Ceres Fauna, played it.

Extremely Regular Princess, from *Slay the Princess* via Ceres Fauna on YouTube.

I’m not sure what I was expecting going into Slay the Princess, but I can confidently say it cleared whatever bar I set. The art style is striking, black and white line art with greyscale shading that still finds a way to make a character’s blood jump out from the rest of a scene. It is a very creepy game, in ways that are existential and psychological. And the game’s narrative, while a bit hard to follow initially, had me following along the entire way waiting to see what it did next.

If anything, Slay the Princess highlights the flaw of my love of spectating. With a game like From Software’s Elden Ring, seeing streamers and friends fight bosses and find secrets didn’t ruin the experience for me when I ended up playing the game myself. With Slay the Princess, the mystery of the narrative is the playthrough. Once I’ve seen it laid out, there’s not really a reason for me to go back and enjoy a solo playthrough.

Grand Poo World 3

If you’ve never watched someone play a kaizo Super Mario World rom hack, you should check one out. To be frank, it whips ass to see people with such a mastery over a game’s physics engine clear a level that looks like the devil redesigned Donut Plains.

Our devil in question here is BarbarousKing, whose rom hack Grand Poo World 3 is the long awaited sequel to my first brush with the concept of kazio, Grand Poo World 2. Grand Poo World 3 had big shoes to fill; Most of the Super Mario World streamers I watch have Grand Poo World 2 in their Top 3 favorite rom hacks, if not their favorite. From this spectator’s perspective, it more than lived up to the hype.

Grand Poo World 3 is the third genre of game I like to watch other people play: Extremely Difficult Game That Requires A Mastery of a Specific Kind of Game. There’s a ~90% chance I never finish Grand Poo World 3. Hell, it took me about 4 years to beat Marathon, the very first level of Grand Poo World 2. The stream where I finally cleared it was a little over 8 hours, my longest single stream (in comparison, one of my favorite SMW streamers Thabeast721 cleared it blind in roughly 45 minutes). That just means I get to enjoy the experience of learning the levels and clearing the game’s many puzzles through the lens of someone who’s got the chops.

If you don’t have a favorite Super Mario World streamer but you’re still curious, Barb himself has been uploading compilation videos out of community clips, which you should check out.

The Yakuza Series (Yakuza 5, 6)

Kazuma Kiryu experiencing the plot of *Yakuza 6.*

Watching Isaias play through the Yakuza series is my soap opera. It’s my General Hospital, my Survivor, my Bachelor. I’m slowly playing through Yakuza 0 and will eventually beat it (for sure), but I don’t need to play the entire series. I would like to experience it, though.

I think my “hot take” might be that this is, in fact, the ideal way to engage with the Yakuza series. You shouldn’t play it, you should turn on channel 5 just in time to see what Haruka is up to today. Or to watch Akiyama chain smoke.

Lethal Company

Lethal Company is a fun one because, even if I actively played Lethal Company (which I might! As long as I can find a group who doesn’t mind me just being Ship Operator) I think I would still put it on this list and not my Top 5 Games Played. I just can’t think of the last time a game did comedy so well and so effortlessly as Lethal Company does.

A moment of divine comedy from a Lethal Company collab, via Hakos Baelz on YouTube.

Ostensibly, Lethal Company is a scavenging game. You’re on the clock, and your boss needs you and your team to hit a certain profit margin every few in-game days or you will be Fired (into space). The game is actually a Funny Ways To Kill Your Friends Simulator. Lethal Company is a game where you and 3 of your best friends have to constantly Handle Situations, and it will always be fun to watch those situations fall apart.