Abso-freaking-lutely! Watching those videos about some schmuck bilking people out of trillions or stealing the goddamn death star of ships is FAR more fun than playing that game. .
Oh how I tried. Did the tutorial and some stranger reached out for me to join their company so I set the autopilot to take me to him and realized it would take 1 hour and 45 minutes of real world time to get there. I couldn't just let it run on its own cause what if space pirates. I could have just as much fun staring at a green light waiting to see if it would turn red
Dwarf fortress. Honestly the greatest example of a sandbox game that has systems so deep that it’s been generating wild and unpredictable stories for decades at this point.
At a certain point, I do just wonder what is the actual point with Dwarf Fortress. I mean I get it, the dev set out to create the most mechanically dense simulation they could, and they basically succeeded. But what does that actually achieve, apart from weird patch notes that people use to make memes? Like it's a game that I find it hard to believe that people actually enjoy playing. That probably sounds more dickish than I intend it to, but it is how I feel.
I love the fact that Yahtzee doesn’t want to look at guilty gear lore just in case it takes away from the randomness of the characters when the Lore is even more random
Well, for certain characters, that's true, but there are some characters whose back stories take themselves too seriously. I, for one, love both styles, and love everything from Ky Kiske to Zappa
I genuinely like that the Entity from DBD plucks the different killers from the franchises, nerfs them up and tells them, "There. Now go sacrifice some people for my amusement. And don't ask where Jason is, my Eldritch Legal Team is working on it."
While it’s not outright confirmed, the way Pinhead’s story is worded in DBD suggests he may have shown up in the Entity’s realm uninvited Which makes the fact he’s going easy for sport even funnier Man just woke up one day and decided he's going to mess with *everyone* lol
@@KingOfElectricNinjas Similar to Myers who, while plucked by the entity specifically, can do his own thing and just kill survivors without playing by the rules first much to the entity's annoyance probably. The Entity wants them to suffer but Mikey boy just wants to stab.
As someone who plays DBD my absolute favorite thing was one of the Developers was doing an interview were they were convinced to play their game as a killer then they proceeded to get bullied by the survivors using flash lights..... which was a huge complaint of the game at the time....... and the very next update they nerft flash lights into the ground.
@@cattysplat funny enough I looked it up because I wasn't sure it was a Developer....... only to find out it was the games Director that was the one that got bullied.
@cattysplat why is that shocking? Making a game and actually being a master of it are completely different concepts. It's not as if any of the developers of super Mario 64 have any speed run records or any championship teams made up of developers. They honestly dedicate less of their lives on the games they make then people who obsess over playing them.
I truly believe the devs don't play their game in online mode, nor do they understand how the community has taken advantage of some items and abilities
Satisfactory. I love watching TH-cam channels doing 20-minute super-cuts of building massive factories. But what you don't see is the 300 hours it took in real time, and actually slogging through all that effort is just something I don't have time for as a full-time working adult.
If you ever do find the time, I'd highly recommend giving it a shot. It's not really a slog, because it's just so chill. There is no pressure at all, just a relaxing atmosphere where you can take all the time you need. It also has the best tutorial I've ever seen in a game, because the tutorial is the game.
Satisfactory, and games like it, is like putting in all the time, energy, and effort to learn computer programming, but with the end result being just a fake factory in someone else's video game that you can't do anything with.
I made the mistake of trying to play fear and hunger, but yeah it's an awesome story, there's some good ideas in like character customization and combat, but it's fundamentally an unplayable experience with how unforgiving it is.
Yup, Fear and Hunger for me as well. Not so much for the difficulty, it’s the sexual violence that just feels sooooo unnecessary. But man, I’ve spent so many hours watching lore videos, it’s so dense and intriguing.
@@johnosullivan1680 part 1: don't die to prison guards as cahara step 2: ignore the entire marriage system (losing limbs sucks a lot more now) step 3: ignore the bunny mask cult (good luck grinding sylvian affinity for those healing spells and pheremones)
For me I feel Pizza Tower fits into this category. The concept of having to memorize so many button inputs and needing to traverse quickly through an environment is a bit stressful for me, but theres something about watching someone play it flawlessly, hearing the music, and seeing these cartoonish abstractions of classic video game troupes fly about the screen that makes it really fun to watch and look at. Not to mention I feel the general world and characters are captivating and I really love seeing fans of the game make mods and add to the game. Its really impressive to behold
Fighting games will always have one standout that attracts an audience outside of its base, for my age group it was Tekken 3. Strive definitely got a larger outside audience thanks to its stylish graphics, wide internet word of mouth, and being on the Xbox Game Pass certainly helped bring in some new blood.
Pathologic. A very philosophically interesting game to talk about, and reportedly one of the most miserable gaming experiences imaginable, which is a large part of why it’s so interesting.
I'll just keep reaching Hbomberguy's video on it. I'm pretty sure at this point I've spent as much time watching it as a full playthrough of at least one of the characters would take.
@@Saltience give it a go! It's cheap and I think a lot of it's difficulty is overstated. It's not a fun or easy game but it's worth playing even if you don't get past the second day
Actually, Yahtz, if you'd kept up with the lore, you'd know that the Sniper is adopted and he's actually from New Zealand. Australians are shaped like inverted triangles and have australia-shaped chest hair.
It's because of a genetic mutation that makes them particularly susceptible to the life-giving effects of Australium. It also gives everyone a 6 pack and a glorious mustache, even the women.
@@GregTheLion Wait is TF2 lore more complicated than GG lore? I've read into both of them and I thought I had a pretty good handle on TF2 while Guilty Gear is like, impossible.
Deception games (like Among Us, Traitors in Salem/2, Deceit, or any of those social deduction games). There's something enjoyable and deeply satisfying about watching someone play the game and "play" along with them. I don't do the Twitch thing, so I'm never actually a part of it, it's more just watching it unfold. There's a group I enjoy watching that plays a LOT of them, and a lot of them you don't normally see, just to try them out. It gets very loud and antic-filled. Shout outs to Kaif and the Salt Raiders channels for their shenanigans. Been keeping me sane since covid struck.
I like the idea of Among Us of trying to kill everyone without being discovered or to figure out who's the killer, but the fact it's multiplayer-only makes it a wasted opportunity for me. Games like Unreal Tournament and Quake 3 made me realise that multiplayer can be fun if you don't have to deal with network connection issues or trying to bring multiple computers into the same building to play, and can just trade bullets with computer-controlled opponents/teammates instead. Unfortunately, most developers of multiplayer games emphasise the "player" part of "multiplayer" and don't bother with any computer opponents.
Starcraft 2 is so fascinating to watch with an experienced commentator explaining what's going on and why. The high skill ceiling makes it nearly impossible to get into the game, but having these crazy 4D strategies explained to me by a charismatic Dutch man always excites me!
I was never a fast gamer, so every time I'd play an RTS I'd set the pace to 'slide show', and Starcraft 1 was no exception. But I loved the moods SC1 put me in, from the first cryptic reports of Zerg on Mar Sara ("Priority alert! Backwater Station under attack by unknown alien organisms. Distress beacon activated at 0658...) all the way to DuGalle's final letter to his wife which would never be read ("Whatever you may hear about what happened here, know this: Alexei did not die gloriously in battle. I killed him. My pride killed him. And now, it has consumed me as well...") So when Starcraft 2 came out, I never even finished the Terran campaign. But still I've watched the whole story several times on TH-cam.
@@baseddepartment9656 That's why watching from a caster's POV is so much more interesting. They follow the key parts of the game and explain anything confusing. Lowko is awesome!
Agreed. I even like playing other RTS games but Starcraft is just way too much of an overoptimized micromanagement test for me. RTS multiplayer is really only good as long as noone really knows what they are doing.
@@doppelrutsch9540 Exactly! And it's so wild watching a game between 2 players, but from the commentators POV it looks like a game of 6v6 with how much is happening at once. Hahaha
Fighting games. The whole genre. Exactly like Yahtzee says here, I genuinely can not get into the actual gameplay enough before it breaks me. The 'fun' never happens. But I want to have fun, I want to live in the world and feel like I can paint with the colours of the wind and actually have a working comprehension. The way the characters are displayed and the amount of personality! It kills me that I just can't play them.
I've played a lot of fighting games and I can tell you from experience the joy of playing them is the desire to improve, it's kinda like an rpg in way. only you yourself is getting stronger and better through practice, not the character itself. at least that's how I see it.
Playing Disco Elysium makes the part of my brain that gauges whether or not I'm having enough fun-per-minute scream at me to do something else with my extremely limited free time, but I can listen to someone else play it while I get work done just fine.
@@reubenbailey7491I got stuck in a few places, but the answer almost every time was to go to bed (in game) so the next day would come. I enjoyed my playthrough very much, all in all.
It's always great to hear stories but when you play it and die repeatedly because you have 1 sanity point and basically anything can easily kill that 1 sanity made me want to throw my PC at the wall and never want to play it again.
I've found recently that I receive significantly more joy out of working on my Minecraft mod (a minimap) than I do actually playing the game. The gameplay loop of fixing bugs, adding features, snd seeing those fixes and features in game, not to mention sharing those fixes and features with the others in the Discord who care, is a much more compelling gameplay loop to me than the _actual_ game of Minecraft!
In my case it's getting old abandonware games to run. No I don't mean a rom running on a console emulator, I mean getting some late 90's non-DOS or early 00's game running on current Windows through combing the internet for fixes, tweaks, fanpatches, compatibility mods, API wrappers or even virtual machines to get the thing running, preferrebly without glitching. I figured out this interest cause when I got one of those games running, I'd play 3 runs in one sitting then felt compelled to try and get the next one running instead of the one I wasted 15-30 minutes getting to run.
You've discovered the secret magic of helping members of your community. The myths say that at one time in the distant past, we all used to live like that.
I remember Mark Hammel talking about going in to do an audition for the character of The Joker for this new Batman cartoon that was coming out. And he was just beside himself in the waiting room because at that point in time the most famous Joker was Jack Nicholson, and he could not for the life of him do a Jack Nicholson impersonation. So, sweating bullets, he walks in for his turn. And the men behind the table are all hunched forward with their heads in their hands, miserable expressions, and the first thing they say is "Don't do Jack Nicholson!" Queue Mark doing an internal happy dance.
Speed-running is more of a way of playing a game than a game itself, but to me it feels like a whole new game when I watch someone speed-run a game I've played. I tried it and know I don't enjoy performing a speed-run but love seeing others succeed at them.
This hurts my rule loving brain. On one side I feel the game should be respected to play the way developers intended for best experience. On the other, holy crap what crazy skills did the runner just do?
Same. I don't do speedrunning myself because that's just not how I like to play games. I like treating them as worlds to explore, stories to experience, not as obstacles to be overcome. But watching OTHER people overcome those obstacles, learning about all the bizarre tricks they can use to utterly break the game, is fascinating to me.
The trick to speed running is you have to play it five hundred times slow to play it one time fast. I just don't have the dedication to min-max routes and look for bugs and such, takes all the fun out of it. But it IS neat to watch.
Yeah, I love watching people break a game open in the worst ways possible. I could never do it myself, I lack that distinct 'tism to repeat the same precise task over and over again for two thousand hours
Guilty gear is absolutely dripping with character style and gorgeous animation, it's genuinely heartwarming to see it being known enough to be on this list.
And i love that he looked it up and had no idea what was going on. Because that was also my reaction at first! And then it also has the main villain with the name "That Man" and I am like "yes this is amazing"
Guilty Gear is one of those series where I really wish they would take the characters and world and style and such that it already has, but put it all into a totally different gameplay genre. Though it's always my third place genre swap wish behind Darkstalkers at number 2, and Disgaea at number 1. And in all three cases, the genre I'd switch to is big ol' open world third person adventure-RPG, the genre that most enables exploring and interacting with a setting.
@@Alloveck funnily enough they tried that way back in the day. Guilty Gear 2: Overture was a 360 launch game that was a 3rd person hack and slash + moba with a story mode with big action set pieces and important lore built in. This was all before the concept of a MOBA was fully realized as well. It was not particularly well received at the time but has a very small cult following. GuileWinQuote made a great video on it!
@@Alloveck Open world is where mystique goes to die. Personally I've been checked out of the series after XX since while I respect the technically impressive aspects of Xrd/Strive, I like the style/overall feel more in that gen. Not that I'm good at any of them.
@@Alloveck I don't think they'd work as well. The incredible expressiveness of the characters are best expressed through their fighting game moveset because it just allows for so much variety. That being said, a less goofy fighting game but one also made by Arc System Works called BlazBlue has made a roguelite 2D hack-n-slash a la dead Cells Called entropy effect with many of the same animations and characters carried over. There's 0 lore in that game at all but if you just want the characters it's something.
Definitely Soma. I even purchased a copy I had no intention of playing just because I watched a playthrough all the way to the ending and enjoyed every moment of it.
Yahtzee is this for me - I have not and never will play the majority of games in his career, but analysis is always a separate pleasure from the media being addressed
yea, i have his game wish listed and i fucking love his videos, but they dont look like my jam and i don't want to be let down by the true art of someone who's critical opinion i put so much respect behind.
@@isaacs8057 NGL I got 'The Consuming Shadow' and thought it was pretty bloody good! If you get a Croshaw game expecting a 3xA experience, you're gonna be let down. If you play one though I can tell you what you will get, something original. Take the plunge and do it knowing two things, 1. Yahtzees games are 100% made by him and him alone. If you're over 30, his games will fill you with genuine nostalgia. Partly because the graphics don't consume an entire hardrive and partly because it takes you back to when a game didn't try to do everything, it just did what it did well. and 2. It doesn't change his prowess as a scathing games reviewer in fact personally, I respect him more for putting his money where his mouth is.
Likewise. Yahtzee and I occupy largely opposite ends of the spectrum (my preferences are for strats and sims) with only very few points of crossover in the RPG end.
I'm so glad I'm not alone in this! I am not and will never be a 'gamer', but I have loved Yahtzee since the very early days, right when ZP first started. Fine analysis and humour enjoyed for their own sake really does it for me.
Smash Bros Melee. I haven't played that game since Brawl was released, but the way they keep finding new ways to make characters viable after they've been written off for about 20 years is INSANE
This. I just know that I won't have the patience or time to learn all of the hard-as-nails tech in the game, but I have definitely consumed thousands of hours of content across all of the tourney, analysis, obscure fact and community videos I've been watching for over a decade.
The most I've played of them was a bit of Brawl way back in college. I won a couple of times only by sheer accident with my frantic button-mashing. I did not yet play video games.
Definitely my answer. I always liked Melee more than Brawl, and continued to play it casually with my college roommates after Brawl came out. I've loved watching it as an e-sport though, ever since learning about the scene through Evo 2013 and watching the Samox documentary. I have zero desire to learn how to even wavedash consistently though.
World of Warcraft and Final Fantasy 14. I find the lore both of the in game kind and the meta kind fascinating around these games but know damn well that if I ever started one I'd get hooked for awhile before I fizzle out (not to mention I refuse to play anything with a monthly subscription fee).
A weird thing about tf2 I noticed is that the sweatiness of the game is based almost entirely on which map you play. Go to any payload map and you will have snipers so acurate you wonder why Valve even bothered removing the bots. Medieval mode has it's fair share of tryhards but also just people having fun playing a melee only mode in an FPS. And then you switch to 2 fort and you instantly get gunned down for trying to play the game instead of joining the pootis cult
Payload is one of the most popular competitive game modes so that's where all the comp players go to blow off steam. 2Fort on the other hand is a remarkably bad CTF map because it's way too defender sided resulting in an eternal stalemate, the same goes for High Tower. However, this also means that because nobody has to worry about anyone actually completing the objective and CTF and Payload Race don't have a time limit, players are free to goof off.
Yeah if yathzee when back to playing tf2, he would get used to it. Tf2 is a oblein where with the expection if certain servers and the likes, it pretty chill.
There are casual 24/7 2Fort Servers specifically to just goof off and not play seriously. It's kinda beautiful in the way it shows off people's love for something can go beyond the developer's intention.
@@leithaziz2716 >There are casual 24/7 2Fort Servers specifically to just goof off and not play seriously. and none of them have "skial" in the title anywhere at all.
This is part of why I still play TF2. If I want to try and win, I can, but I can also just rocket jump to the enemy team, play a quick game of Rock, Paper, Scissors, and then I hit my killbind and watch everyone around me do the same. It is as serious or silly as everyone takes it at any given moment.
Warhammer 40K. Never played any of its various expressions - not the OG game itself, not the TTRPGs, or any of the numerous video games. But I find the design, the aesthetic and the lore ENDLESSLY fascinating.
I'm with you on that one! I love the Warhammer Fantasy and 40k lore. I even like buying and painting the pieces, but I'll be fucked if I actually try to play a game. Just watching other people play it turns me off on wanting to play it.
I try not to look up the answer but I get really bad tunnel vision. There's a good flow and getting stuck for hours kind of sucks. Alot of the time its because of over-thinking things or missing one key detail I overlooked. Though 10% of the time, it was obscure AF and other people in the comments are saying they had no clue, either.
You have to pick the right people though because some of them just seem utterly incapable of playing the puzzle game. You end up screaming at your screen, press the blue buttons, it's obviously the blue button. IT'S NOT BEHIND YOU WHY WOULD IT BE BEHIND YOU GO BACK AND PRESS THE BLUE BUTTON. ARRRRR
7:01 Rainworld: Love the setting/lore, art style, and characters. Tried to play it 3 times, and always rage quit before leaving the starter zone. It's a really really hard game, and while the difficulty adds to the atmosphere and plays into the story of the game really well... it's like how Yahtzee said something along the lines of "Being boring for story reasons doesn't make the game less boring." Being miserable and really hard for story reasons doesn't make a game less had. Though of course some people find hard challenging games fun, I'm just not one of them. So I just watch the lore videos and follow the really vibrant Rainworld animation/animatic community. So many fantastic artists.
I had the same experience with this game; the world-building is really interesting, and I've heard there's a lot of really cool stuff to uncover, but it almost felt like the game resisted me at every turn. I refunded it and bought Animal Well instead, and never looked back.
I tried playing Rain World at least 4-5 times before it clicked. I used the special menu to reduce the difficulty (primarily to iincrease the timer, because I just don't enjoy time-based mechanics) and spent a while in the starting zone feeding crocs until I had a friend. I loved my croc. I ended up completing the game on that run. It is by far one of the deepest and most breathtaking experiences I have had in gaming.
Yep. Rain world was my first thought. The game is gorgeous, and the story/lore excellent, but it's definitely way more fun to see other people fight through it than it is to do myself.
I'm really glad that I've got to the stage in my life where when I see a game that looks interesting but has a high learning curve or skill barrier, I'm happy to just let it go. Maybe that's a result of more than a decade of hating FromSoft games, and constantly having to hear about them, and being exposed to people who won't shut the hell up about them. Or maybe I'm just old.
I want to shout out Dwarf Fortress, which I love specifically for the patch notes. Alcoholic cats and vampires framing babies might be my fave bugs of all time.
I hear you on Dwarf Fortress. I wish I could enjoy it but gooooods it's too complex. Fortunately, I got the Lite experience of Dorf via Rimworld (juuust simple enough to love), and Caves of Qud (not a colony-builder, but it's loaded with weird/insane things you can deal with in creative ways.)
@@AegixDrakanyknow as someone who picked it up only when it got a steam release ive never found it that complicated. its def got a lot going on but if you just want to experience the game the biggest stumbling block i experienced is understanding how to get my dwarves to do what i need them to lol. but its really not that different from other colony management games in terms of base mechanics
Let's not forget the overwhelming tendency around the release of DF's "villains" update for necromancers to cause complete global zombie apocalypses before the world had fully finished generating its history.
Tarn Adams (the creator of DF) has even talked about how there are a lot of people who don't even play the game who still contribute to their forums and their Patreon, just because they love the stories from people like Kruggsmash. He even jokes sometimes that the people who watch the TH-cam videos and listen to the stories are actually the real players, and the people who play the game are more like the QA department because of all the "crap" they have to deal with in the game.
Every single game in the “mascot horror” genre. I love the designs of the characters, the ridiculous lore, and overall haunted house child-like atmosphere they go for is satisfying to me. I also love watching people (speedrunners mostly) actually play and more often than not break them into smithereens by finding fun exploits that rattle my understanding of the behind-the-scenes of game dev programming and how bad it can get.
You just explained the FNAF streamer/lore craze in the early 2010s. I think the milking of the franchise was unfortunately what hurt the appeal in the long run, but it was still a fun time worth remembering. We got all the funny markiplier memes. shoutouts to "PURPLE GUY!" and "WAS THAT THE BITE OF 87!?"
@@leithaziz2716 It also doesnt help that Scott was basically just letting Game Theory write the story for him at some point. And what follows was just an overly convuluted mess that feels like at some point it forgot that a story needs more than vague ass hints as to whats going on.
The first game I thought about, is actually a boardgame called "Room 25". It's like the movie 'Cube', where various contestants are stuck in a moving maze of blocks trying to collaboratively escape. The twists: 1) there are 1 or 2 betrayers among the players, aiming to have everybody killed, 2) You plan out your moved before taking your turn to execute those moves. I quite like observing a group playing the game, trying to figure out who shady etc. However, I don't particularly like playing it. Being the hidden betrayer introduces a level of stress I'm not enjoying myself (just like I don't like it when playing Among Us)
As a completely accurate stereotype of a 47 year old dad gamer, I know I will never play a Souls game but I sure do enjoy watching playthroughs of them on TH-cam. I honestly spend most of my solo free time nowadays watching playthroughs of various games and I reserve my actual video game play time for playing games like Remnant 2, DRG (and hopefully Space Marine 2 next year) with my daughter and her uncle.
@@akiraigarashi2874 Yes, but we usually wait awhile to play new games. Gives time for the prices to drop, bugs fixed, and additional content to be added.
@@user-kr5vm8nk1d Yup, we've enjoyed our time with it for sure and are looking forward to the new DLC coming out soon. Hopefully once we've exhausted all that we want from it, SM2 will be in a more fleshed out state and we can continue the family bonding there. :)
I kinda hate them (48 here). They're really fun worlds with super interesting lore and combat but I don't get to enjoy them because regardless of how much time I've put into Bloodborne (at least 20 hours by now), I can't get past the second boss. Time is fleeting. Prioritizing a game I can only barely progress in only leeches what's there.
This is me with Fear and Hunger. I am *fascinated* by the very deliberate yet unrelentingly cruel game design the game has going through it, but it is something I likely would not enjoy playing. Frankly, the mysticism of not really knowing the ins and outs of the game make it even more engrossing.
I played a decent amount of the first one using a hit and run strategy that made the game pretty easy, then I realized I liked the themes, setting and lore of the game more than actually playing it. Ended up just watching a lot of TH-cam videos on it
Return of the Obra Dinn. Ive watched like 8 different people play the game and it gets me everytime because the little differences in knowledge and assumptions that people make bring something totally new to the game. I likely would have enjoyed playing it but watched it because money was especially tight when it came out, but honestly it worked out. Seeing how many people fall for the same trap or who gets info figured out even earlier or plain just knows more than i do so they can figure something out an extra way is great.
For me, it's Starcraft 2. I love watching matches, I think the idea of economy strategy and microing units for battle is a fun combination. I can't find myself playing it ever, though, because I feel like constantly jumping around the map would remove my ability to enjoy what is going on. It would be more like a whirling dervish dissipating and me just sitting there going, "what happened?"
I am "casually good" at those kinds of games, but with really nobody to play against, my only option would be to play against the "actually good" people online. And I seriously lack the attention to do the macro, nor the reflexes to do the micro. So I never really play them. That said, I do enjoy watching some Starcraft and Warcraft 3 at high level play. I know just enough to actually follow what's going on and appreciate some of the nuance.
Ooh thats a good one. Funny thing is about starcraft is I love the campaigns to death. Played all of them multiple times and probably will again some day, and watching pro matches is often fun, but actually playing competitive games is just untenable
Same thing with me. I love the strategy and unit control of Starcraft 2, but playing it is basically beating your opponent at building a lot of stuff, like a PvP Factorio, up until you get good enough at the game where the strategy finally starts to really matter. Which is why I love watching pros play it.
Man, I love watching the GSL, and that high-level strategy and execution is jaw-dropping. But I haven't played an RTS since BfME2 (and before that was Red Alert 2).
Outer Wilds is a game I have great appreciation for and will never play, but for a completely different reason than the ones in the video: The game is purely about discovery, and I experienced the game by watching someone else do all the discovering themselves, so there is not really a game left for me to play. The closest I can get to the joy and thrill of discovering the game myself is vicariously through watching new people play it for the first time themselves.
Outer Wilds is such an amazing game that you can only ever experience once. Theres nothing stopping you from blitzing the ending sequence 20 minutes into a fresh save. Also a game that you really should 100% on your first go or you will never ever get those last few question marks ticked off in the journal.
Just beat Outer Wilds and you are exactly right about having the game spoiled for you if you don't make the discovery yourself. I am so glad I went into it blind. One of the best video game experiences I've had in year's
Total War. I love watching people play that series, I find it extremely frustrating and fiddly to play myself, and the depth of those systems may as well be in Atlantean for all the sense I can make of them. But when a person understands the game and plays it at a high level, it's very satisfying to watch
The Oddworld series, namely Abe's Oddysee and Abe's Exoddus. The Oddworld games have such a unique atmosphere to them that can feel eerie and serene at the same time and I really like that, but the gameplay of finding and guiding hundreds of Mudokons thru death trap mazes to safety was too stressful for me. I made it through all of Abe's Oddysee and got the good ending, but when I learned Abe's Exoddus nearly tripled the number of guys you have to save, I never played past the first level.
2:38 This is one of the unique parts of TF2 that I find so great compared to every other game that mimics it, including one I used to play: Overwatch. The characters are so *characterized.* SFM and Garry's Mod animations can feel believable, it doesn't just come off as random and replaceable with other characters from other games. They're archetypes yet they don't feel like corporate blandness. You can get into a class for their personality as well as their playstyle so easily.
I love everything about TF2 except the way it's game modes are set up and it's community. Valve you don't have to worry anymore Overwatch is dead, you can stop that stupid 5 min warmup and single round map restart that always kills the pacing of the game!
I played Overwatch for a good while, around the time Sombra was added, I enjoyed the seasonal events, Retribution was my favorite out of the bunch. I don't play the game much anymore ever since Overwatch 2's release but I still like to look up the new characters, interactions, all that sort of stuff.
I genuinely think part of it is that the mercs are allowed to be actually mean to each other. Overwatch is all lighthearted banter or some iteration of "I don't like/trust you". The mercs, by contrast, are constantly insulting and mocking each other, and it makes it feel like they have genuine relationships instead of every line of dialogue feeling like it's gesturing at "lore". There's also the matter that the mercs are allowed to get excited and really express themselves. Overwatch characters feel very emotionally flat by comparison.
Ugh, I don't wanna admit this: Metal Gear I LOVE the campy tone, characters, dialogue, and bizarre methods in which Snake picks people off one by one. I love that the series is tongue in cheek, and is absolutely aware of what is doing and doesn't apologize for a goddamn thing. But I absolutely cannot stand, under any circumstances, stealth based games. I don't like having to hide, my anxiety skyrockets. And there's nothing worse than going part way into a level, stepping on a potato chip or whatever, and having my brains provide a new coat of paint for the fucking wall. The only game I've ever played with stealth mechanics that I ENJOYED was Batman Arkham City, and when I say enjoy, I mean I TOLERATED the stealth aspect because the rest of the game was so damn good.
3:04 As a sentence mixer, I appreciate the art being respected by someone outside the YTP/GMod/SFM circles. Thank you for the acknowledgement, Yahtz, it will 90% of the time be funnier than AI slop.
As someone who watched a lot of Ytp during the hayday of youtube it always blew my mind of people being able to cobble together sentences from other sentences, as i grew older i saw some ways people could do it easier, like with me watching a lot of Thomas the tank engine ytp and the entire show have pretty much having very few narrators if not just one singular narrator made getting some pieces together probably a bit easier but the patience and the craft required for it all for just a minute or two of pure parody gold always blew my mind.
@@bullstrode5875 Seeing what some people can do with Morshu is incredibly impressive. Very small sample size, very broad application if you know the ways of placing phonemes together.
@@bullstrode5875 It helps that George Carlin did much of the US narration and had a long career doing explicit stand up comedy before and after his time on the show.
By playtime to watchtime ratio it has to be Mario Maker 2. I have no desire to play or make levels, but watching Panga go through all the weird stuff humanity has come up with is mesmerizing. I'm also glad games like Dwarf Fortress and Rimworld exist, but I prefer strategy games to be a little simpler.
Dungeons and Dragons I consume a lot of DnD based material like Baldur's Gate 3, The Legend of Vox Machina, and Honor Among Thieves, but I can never actually get a DM and group together to actually play it.
Same. I guess I'm a tourist who thinks tabletop podcasts, video games, and story adaptions can be plenty fun, but the two or three times I actually got to join a table were about the driest experience I've ever had playing a multiplayer game. I'm sure a lot of it depends on the people you're playing with, but actually putting a group together, managing the game, and finding the time for everyone involved is a lot of hoops to repeatedly jump through.
Came here to say pretty much the same thing. I used to play tabletop games in school like Cyberpunk, DnD and WH40k but wouldn't be able to get a group and that kind of time now so I just play PC game adaptations and watch AiN and Critical Role content.
Lotta people are in the camp, especially me at first, I chanced on my local gamestore having a board for open games and I managed to find some amazing groups who I adore being around as well as playing with. Hell I'm a DM now just a year in!
I adore Disco Elysium and its story. The very concept of your character's different personality traits talking to you and often arguing with each other is fascinating. Yet everytime I sit down and load it up, I find myself with no drive to do anything. I just kinda stand there for a moment staring at Kim's stupid face and call it a day.
Dota2 - i played at the start when everything was wacky and people's attitude was very relaxed. Then came the sweat and rage. Now i just enjoy watching it. Xcom EU - watched 3 modded play throughs each around 300 hours at least. Cannot for the life of me bring myself to play it.
As a Guilty Gear fan, seeing Yahtzee mention it with respect is absolutely neat. Props for also mentioning Dizzy's Instakill move, a great example of the creativity in this franchise, regardless of whether you are actually playing it. Another relevant mention could be a character named Answer, who spends the whole fight time talking on a cell phone during meetings. And when some other fighter eventually shoves fingers up his rear end (I swear this makes sense in context), he has to continue speaking through the meeting as if nothing happened, while also screaming in pain. You don't see that in every fighting game!
Came for "I'm a Medic main", stayed for "Guilty Gear." Also Yahtz, if you did play Guilty Gear I feel you'd like the dandy vampire who talks like Sean Connery.
I love to see Shounic, 3Kliksphilip and The War Owl talk about TF2 and CSGO, even though I don't play them. I also enjoy False Swipe Gaming essays on competitive Pokemon
@@brunoberti8790 I've dabbled a bit with competitive pokémon. I actually went 7-0 back in one of generation 8s ranked seasons. But it certainly not for everyone
TF2 is always something I'll be intrested in reading about and watching about. It's just such a amazing work of art. It's a complicated skill based game with a ton of weapons and mechanics to learn about and debate about, that ALSO has a large community of talented comedians who make gmod/sfm animations like classic looney toons, and is just plain fun to watch.
2:05 - 2:19 is a perfect encapsulation of how I've felt about all online shooters and why I can't get into some of the games I love to watch or even play but just don't get to.
@@MrTheBest2WasTaken Definitely is. TF2 is really an exception to the rule, because it's been around long enough, all the tryhards have moved on or found their niche lobbies (Highlander/Meet Your Match/etc.) But the main thing that got me with that segment was his reference to a moment in time when NEW THING IS OUT and everyone wanted to do NEW THING, which I think is an issue with modern society being obsessed with NEW THINGs rather than just letting them be and enjoying them in the moment or more organically.
For me it's city builders. I get bored extremely quickly when playing them myself but I love watching people build beautiful and functional cities and I also enjoy when they explain the real life concepts behind what they're building.
Oh man... Same. I WANT to enjoy playing them, I even spend money on them hoping I will enjoy playing THIS one... and they just sit there on my drive rotting, lol. But I will faithfully watch me some City Planner Plays and think "Oh, I like that, I should try that out the next time I play the game" lol
I also definitely love watching other people play way more than I like playing them just because I always fall into a routine with "play it your way" games like those or Stardew or Minecraft. Like the first time I play it's all fun and experimental, then I start finding what works efficiently enough for me, and then after that it's too much effort to try to change my play style so every city looks pretty much the same, every Minecraft world is basically the same...but then I watch someone else play and they'll have a COMPLETELY different experience. I watched my wife play stardew valley and her farm was entirely different. I was putting everything like right next to the house because it's right next to the box and that's just what makes the most sense. Her garden is in this forest clearing surrounded by flowers just because that seemed like a nice place to put it. Entirely different approach to the same game
A lot of good horror games like Alien Isolation and Darkwood are like that for me. I am fascinated by horror and fear, i am fascinated by the thought and effort it takes to make something genuinely feel terrifying despite being behind a screen, and i am a big fan of the games that manage to pull that off... problem is that i am also a fucking coward, and if a horror game is good enough for me to admire me that usually means it is also too scary for me to play it
It's funny, I have kind of the opposite problem. I'm fascinated by horror, and the theories behind how to create good spooks, but none of it really scares me personally. I love Alien Isolation, and it definitely made me feel tense, but not in a horror sense, more the sense of not wanting to get instant killed and have to start over on that section. The closest ive gotten to being spooked is stuff like Slender: The Arrival, and even that is more of being startled at the sudden camera static when ol bald-face is nearby.
I don't fuck with horror games that much, but Alien Isolation is one of the few examples of the genre that I genuinely got into and loved it enough to finish it. I got so frustrated in the first 1-2 hrs that I uninstalled it, and the final third drags a bit, but I just love the design and the atmosphere of that game, and the sense of menace really excited me in a way I don't often feel with horror. It's not a game that really terrified me, sometimes it's not even scary, but there is something viscerally thrilling about it. The original Dead Space hit the same way for me.
Horror game fear are easily broken by dying, death almost becomes a comedy as you come back to life again and again. Unlike real life where today I ran screaming from a wasps nest because there are no respawns and that's real pain.
Street Fighter. It barely counts because I do attempt to play them but always end up giving up because I can't git gud for the life of me. But I adore the characters, their designs, the storylines, the various media associated with it (comics, wiki, etc.) and watching high-level players go at it.
Ironically, I think the closest I come to this is the amount of time I've spent watching/listening to TH-cam reviews and opinion pieces on games series I haven't actually played yet. I've never played a Silent Hill game yet, but I've been through Yahtzee's entire coverage at least three times by now. Not to mention this is how I treat almost everything on Game Dungeon.
Not a game, but I love watching speerunning every now and then. It's fascinating how almost every game in existence is made with spaghetti code, and that there's people out there finding each random exploit possible.
I'm not really interested in watching speedrunners or getting invested in speedrunning, and I guess I'm a bit of a romantic because I find peeling back the layers of abstraction and exposing the wires and code that makes the illusion run to not be as exciting as the illusion itself. But it is something that I find fascinating from time to time, especially the community around it, even though a lot of them are very sweaty. Summoning Salt made me care more about speedruns of Ninja Gaiden 2 than I ever thought possible.
Same. It's fascinating to me how they do it. I also like watching people play randomizers in Souls games. Truly some chaotic goodness there that I can appreciate even though I'll never do a randomizer run myself.
Souls-likes, specifically the ones with a lot of knowledge-based shortcuts and rewarding exploration. I don't handle Difficult Games well, I get too frustrated knowing that I'm losing souls even when they're not actually that big of a deal, and the focus on bosses isn't really for me. But oh man, the lore and the exploration and the multiplayer features and the way the world wraps around on itself, hiding secret synergies... I wish I could enjoy it. I've been getting into metroidbrainia style games, and they kind of scratch the itch. Tunic on no-death mode is a masterpiece.
The Witness - I love smart, layered puzzles (games or otherwise), but first person games give me motion sickness, so I can only stomach 30 minutes of the game before me head hurts and today's dinner wants to come back out for a chat. Baba Is You - As much as I love orange pressing my brain for the creative and out of the box solutions of this unique meta game, I love more to analyze those solutions themselves and ponder the bizarre logic Arvi Teikari went through to make them logic puzzles. Flower - Lovely chill game where you are THE WIND, and you must gather the petals of flowers so you can see what a gorgeous stream of air you are. Too bad I can only stomach it for half the time of a regular FP game. For the same reasons.
Kingdom Hearts. The entire series. I was a Disney fan as a kid (I know, shocker) and loved the old animated movies like Hercules and Little Mermaid, so when as a 9 year old I found out that there was a 7 year old RPG featuring characters from those movies I was all over it. Couldn’t get out of the first town after you finish the tutorial island. A full decade would pass before I was old enough to just buy parts of the mainline series, and it now collects dust in my hard drive. I kept up as best I could with the “story”, but it was always the interplay between RPG shenanigans and my favorite childhood Disney characters that made me love the games.
Probably doesn't matter now but if you do decide to ever play these games, skip the first one and just play KH2. If it turns out you like it try some more, but the first game kind of sucks.
@@CT3LA I’m actually planning on doing a full marathon of the parts of the series I have (mainline titles only) but as an adult I’ll admit it’s harder to get into. The Disney stuff appealed to a different, younger me.
Destiny 2 for me. Played the first one from release, mostly solo and got a sense of achievement during the Iron Banner events because I was someone without all the raid gear still performing very well. Towards the end I started playing with a group of friends I knew in school and made some great memories. This carried over into 2 until the update they did that brought back the moon where I needed to do a very grindy subquest to continue the story and because this was the beginning of 2020 and 'the troubles' had just started, I wasn't in the right head space for it so I took a break. That break ended up being like 3 years and by the time that itch came back and I felt like going back in, I was told that the game had recieved that many updates and was even entering the stage of vaulting prior content, it was simply too much of an issue to get back in because I'd have to look up the order of playing the updates, learn the lore of vaulted content for context. Tldr, I'd be experiencing a diet version of being a new player, and Destiny 2 simply doesn't cater to that well and given I'd be tackling it alone as my old teammates had long moved on from it anyway, I was condemned to be the returning veteran with no idea what was happening and pining for his glory days.
I fucking love Dizzy's Instant-Kill despite also never playing the game it is from. The compilation with Birthday Train playing over it is a banger video even without any GG knowledge and legitimately made me interested in Strive. Hearing Yahtzee casually mention that specific Instant-Kill is downright astonishing.
I'm just commenting to help pad out Yahtzee's engagement metrics. I have nothing to add to the conversation because my biggest struggle is getting my lazy ass to play any video games in the first place.
I genuinely enjoy watching both World of Warships as a game and more often Soulslikes. Both of them very interesting concepts, only the latter is typically a good games, all very fun to watch with a good presenter. I recommend the Mighty Jingles, awesome TH-cam channel!
It appears Yahtzee has discovered the reason why many people watch streamers play games. We cant be bothered to play many titles whether its lack of funds or desire to learn to play. Plus sometimes a good commentary can make a mediocre game experience better. I love watching horror games being played, when I watch them I do not get scared and the story is usually interesting. Playing them however spikes my anxiety so I just stumble and fail, so no playing horror for me....
I do wonder how fair is it that we can watch full walkthroughs of any game (story included) online, for free. Yeah, its free advertising & promotion but how much does that translate to sales? How often do we just go "I'll watch the cutscenes on TH-cam."
@@pickyphysicsstudent201 I think the question to ask is "were you going to buy it in the first place"? I'll watch games I never plan to play and in that scenario no sale was lost. I don't think I've ever come across a game I wanted to play and then went "Nah, I'll just watch a playthrough". Playthroughs have resulted in me buying way more games than have stopped me.
@@legomacinnisinc Yeah, video games aren't movies, interactivity is a crucial part of the experience. If you can get everything you want out of a video game by watching a walkthrough or cutscene compilation, you probably weren't going to buy it anyway.
I’d say majority of games I like are the ones I never play. Oftentimes its because said game is in a genre i dont like playing and I simply like the execution of the concept/idea, admiring it from a distance.
Elden Ring I don't have a lot of free time to sink into games anymore and am not interested in "getting good" with learning boss attack patterns but holy hell I have watched hours of lore videos about Elden Ring and the DLC and love it
Sunless Seas/Skies. The story, setting and writing are so phenomenal, but 9/10 of the gameplay is slowly moving cargo across a massive map and praying you don’t bump into any of the instant death monsters or events, sending you back to the start of not only your finances, but your story.
Just wanted to say they almost immediately removed permadeath, and even suggested that you should never play with it, and use saves. Also, Failbetter Games did not communicate to the players that these are not trading or fighting games (trying to play them as such is absolutely miserable and futile). I played Fallen London, so I quickly realized trading is purely a bonus activity, and you get most of your XP, money, and, well, fun from discovering (port reports) and doing quests. So I always advise players who bounced off these game to try this, ignore trading, plan expeditions (so that you visit several places), and also run from fights (in Sea = for most of the game, in Skies = until you're comfortable).
Fully agreed. I love Fallen London (when I remember it exists and what I was doing in that game, which is its own can of worms), but the Sunless duo is...well, exactly as you describe. Funnily enough I've gotten the most enjoyment out of the Mask of the Rose visual novel. It's a fun little dating sim/murder mystery that's for sure!
It's really not that hard, it's just tedious. Great setting, great atmosphere, but it it will run thin before you finish. Permadeath was a good experiment but it really doesn't work in a game with so many static elements. Still glad I played it though. I like Sea better than Skies because I prefer the writing/tone and I think the world feels better to explore as a shipping route when you can visit everything in one theoretical trip rather than sequestering everything in regions, as cool of an idea as that was
3:20 it gets cuter yahtz, those guys voice heroes in DotA 2 and have done various announcer packs for that game too (she's the default DotA 2 announcer and he did a bonus one a few years ago)
as someone who has spent quite a bit of time reading the guilty gear wiki, it's surprisingly well thought out and coherent on the story side of things once you get past the word salad of terms. some things are still just there for the sake of being there but it's fitting of the world building so not actually sticking out all that much in the end. i love the megaman legends games, even own them, but i never got back to playing them because the platforming was too finicky
The "intentional ignorance" part reminds me of how there's nothing quite like playing a game after months or years of learning about it exclusively through reading discussions and seeing only small snippets of gameplay footage or occasional screenshots at most. The way the actual game diverges from the concept of the game I'd built up in my head out of a few scraps of hard info gives it a sort of... dreamlike weirdness, and you can't experience that if you go in knowing too much. Or much at all. Also, even as a jaded and cynical lifetime gamer who knows very well what to realistically expect of games, my imagination always, ALWAYS somehow still skews games toward being more malleable and interactive and less... rigidly "gamey" than they end up, for lack of a better term. I guess I must still have some actual childlike optimism deep down after all, or maybe it's just how much I wish games would be like the stupid kid days again, when games weren't yet so predictable and still seemed like they could be anything.
I was like that back during the PS1 era and earlier. Before we finally getting a PS1, we just had the NES and GBC/GBA. So my way of experiencing "new" games were though gaming magazines & videogame shows on TV (Video Power, Electric Playground, etc.) Finally getting to play them after months/years of just imagining how they were was amazing. Although these days if it's a game I really want to play, I avoid as much info as I can. Aside from spoilers, I fear that seeing discussions about the game would affect my expectations for the worse.
Any horror game ever. A lot of them have great stories and artistic merit but I don't enjoy any part of getting spooked or jumpscared myself, so instead I just watch various youtubers get spooked or jumpscared for me
100% me. I hate horror and can barely stand the tension of playing it yet have a huge morbid curiosity and always wanna see what the monster or disturbing stuff is, and then immediately regret it. Why the hell do I do it to myself? I hate jumpscares and people trying to make the most disgusting stuff possible, yet apparently really appreciate what goes into making horror games. I think I do like the tension it provides. If I ever get into game developement I'd want to challenge myself to make a very effective horror game without any gore, jumpscares, or disturbing imagery. Maybe a fusion of Slender, Amnesia, and FNAF but with, idk, teddybears as the enemy.
I enjoy watching my friends play league of legends on the main summoners rift map but have 0 desire to actually play myself. While I’ve since stopped playing entirely, I did really enjoy the ARAM game mode for taking away the pressure of laning, last hitting, and map awareness. It brought the game quickly to where my favorite moments were, the team fights, and made that the entire mode. Add on that it usually took half the time of the main game mode, so you doing poorly wasn’t potentially pissing off your 4 other teammates for a half hour+, taking off that pressure to do well. I really appreciated having a mode where I could experiment with characters I didn’t understand, could get multiple games in the same span of time as a couple summoners rift matches, and generally play a mode where (with exceptions of course) no one cared how well you did. Even when people did take it too seriously, even teammates would often say “it’s an ARAM bro, chill. Summoners rift is that way” I guess more than anything I resonated with Yahtzee noting that games online feel way sweatier than they used to. I don’t find online PvP relaxing anymore. Feels like I have to be laser focused in many of them to even do middlingly well and relaxing is my main motivation for playing. Additionally, if my MMR gets high enough, everyone I play against seems to start using the strongest guns or characters exclusively (while also having laser aim) and that’s not as fun when I want to run an experimental build and screw around.
3:40 I feel like it's worth pointing out that lots of stuff in fighting games is deliberately *not* reactable. Since everything has counterplay, if you could react to everything then nobody would ever get hit. High-level play is much more focused on what you expect your opponent to do and putting yourself in a position to counter as many of those options as possible. It's more like playing a game of rock-paper-scissors every second, but sometimes rock is twice as good as paper or scissors.
The Outlast series, specifically lately the Outlast Trials. I've watched some fantastic vids that not only break down all the lore and story, but bring in what was going on in the world at the time of the trials to give more context for WHY the trial environments are doing specific things like the winter event being to prep for a nuclear winter.
Scorn. I absolutely hate the disgusting torturous things that happen, but I looooove the atmosphere and setting and the running theme of endless pain. It's...weirdly comforting, aside from the horrible torturous parts.
@@gargaj You know what's funny, you can avoid combat 99% of the time, there's a video called "you're playing Scorn wrong", that shows how to do it, just don't get near the monsters and they will go away permanently, but the game gives absolutely ZERO clues that you can do that. It's mind boggling to me why they didn't teach the players that, considering that is the biggest problem players have with the gameplay.
I can firmly agree that sometimes context ruins everything and do enjoy randomly watching a youtube compellation of something I have absolutely nothing to do with but looks cool.
Real time strategy games (Iron Harvest for example)because I’m terrible at them. The time I was decent has long passed as Brood War is gone. So I don’t touch them anymore but I do enjoy watching others play them. Not so much high end but just someone who genuinely likes them. It is a joy to watch and I always love all the unit voice acting, unit types, story and map design.
I think now might be the time to admit to myself that I will never get more than an hour into Elden Ring and thus it is my favourite game I don't play. I've watched countless playthroughs, consumed many lore theories and am indulging in challenge run vods but being the kind of gamer who plays to unwind, I cannot play it myself without it frustrating me too much. I love you Elden Ring, just leave me alone.
Ultrakill. The music is great, and the vibe of the whole thing just seems so fun and chaotic, I just cannot get into gameplay that fast and twitchy myself. It's super fun to watch people be good at it though.
Rainworld. Love the world, the visuals, the mood, the lore, the cute little slugcats. And the idea that all the other animals are just off doing their own thing, that you are just one small living creature of the many. If I would play it I probably would break my controller in about 10 minutes.
Rainworld is one of my favourite games, but I really, really get why so many people bounce off it, or straight up hate it. It's insanely unforgiving, and the controls feel really precise and really imprecise at the same time. The enemies often hide in blatantly unfair spots, and there are many areas where it's hard to tell what is and what isn't a platform, or what is and isn't a pole you can grab onto. The various systems in the game are also really cryptic. Actually figuring out where to go is really difficult at times as well. Even with all that, I absolutely love it. I love the world, the atmosphere, even the weird mechanics. I'm also generally interested in games that have controls that feel unique. It's a very specific vision, completely uncompromised. There's truly nothing else like it.
@@Resopheed There was a lot of thought put into Rain World as an ecosystem. And as real-life ecosystems will gladly demonstrate, predators are usually pretty damn terrifying for their prey, given concepts like camouflage for ambush hunting or persistence hunting. Rain World replicates this feeling with surprising fidelity and as a result it makes no attempt to make the world fair for the player as a creature very low on the overall food chain.
@@subtlewhatssubtle Yes! The ecosystem aspect was obviously one of, if not the biggest focus of the game. And in order to imitate a real ecosystem, there's gonna be mechanisms that feel utterly unfair to the prey. You'd think that'd be a big no-no, to make a game that is THIS unfair to the player, but it HAS to do that in order to provide the intended experience. Now that opens up the whole can of worms of whether making a game deliberately tedious and unfair is good, but in Rainworld's case I'd argue it was absolutely necessary. Just another reason I find the game so fascinating.
@@subtlewhatssubtle this is one of the reasons I love the game. There's times where it's unfair because of annoying design (screen transitions in particular) but the way the creatures act as actual living things just trying to survive rather than just being obstacles, it's frustrating and wonderful.
Props for giving Mortal Kombat it's due lore-wise but, in order to fulfill the request. 1) Blood Omen: So I loved the first Blood Omen but Soul Reaver had that one tower where you had to flip a switch and then try to get to a door that, due to the unfinished graphics, was a matter of luck. Then my friend finished it and it actually had a ****ing "To be continued" on it. The cherry on top was that the next games were going to be on a different console and, at the time, I hadn't really been sold on getting a PS2. So, I tapped out on the game but watched a supercut that someone did that had all of the cutscenes/important bits of Soul Reaver 1/Blood Omen 2/Soul Reaver 2. (I'm thinking that I'll give the remasters a try if/when they come to Gamepass and see if I like it better then. 2) The Witcher. The gameplay just doesn't do it but I was big on the story so ditto on the Youtubing the story. (Sidenote: I was a Triss/Geralt shipper for many reasons BUT I also liked the way the "no romance" path for Yennifer and Geralt ends. There was a weird notion in the community that, if you ship one, you must hate the other. For me, I liked how they handled the "no romance" path in the sense of two people who were deeply in love once but too many things have happened and too much time has passed. In my head canon, Yennifer and Geralt still care for each other but in the way of former lovers who had an amicable split-up.) 3) World of Warcraft/Overwatch/Apex Legends/Dead By Daylight: I put these all together because the reason is mostly the same. I adore watching the animated shorts to the point that I've subscribed to the channel. I've even read much of the character lore. BUT, with three out of four of them, the idea of getting on a never-ending loop of multiplayer matches leaves me cold. With WOW, I already have SWTOR and, even without that, the idea of getting into another MMO both in terms of hours needed AND gameplay leaves me cold. (If/When SWTOR ends, that'll be the end of my involvement with MMOs.)
Talks about Source Filmmaker being released publicly, shows well-known Gmod meme video. Not that I blame him, Antoine and a few others have perfected the art of Gmod to such an extent that it can be hard to tell the difference if you aren't intimately familiar.
Off the top of my head I would say "Don't starve", "Lethal Company", "Factorio" and "Breath of the Wild" and it's sequel. There are more too, sometimes I realise that a game is more fun to watch or read about than actually play myself.
Oh yeah come to think of it I wasn't a huge fan of OOT since I tend to like more Final Fantasy style RPG, but watching people play Zelda is pretty neat.
I play Tears of the Kingdom, but I do also love watching people play it, just because there's SO MUCH stupid shit you can do in that game and everyone always finds new ways to be dumb and it's great. Especially when things inevitably go wrong, and even more so when they go wrong but work anyways. It's 'task failed successfully; the game', it's probably the closest we'll ever get to a game where you play as Wile E. Coyote, and it's absolutely incredible.
Well, to be fair to Factorio, it does take quite a while to finish. I tell new players on the Steam forums 60-80 hours for your first rocket launch. The upcoming expansion will be about as much as the base game, and mods can go even longer.
I've never felt guilty or that I was missing out by not playing a particular video game, but I totally feel this way about Warhammer 40k tabletop. I just don't have the time or money to make an army, yet I love listening to Luetin, Weshammer, and Scholar's Lore as they explore that horrifying, amazing galaxy.
I feel like this about Dark Cloud 2. A friend showed me this very charming, whimsical title of the Playstation 2 era and I loved it but I don't feel compelled to play it for how hard it can get when trying to fullfil every quest and even some exploration.
Grand Strategy games by Paradox. I used to play them, but I'm not a teenager, anymore, with "infinite" amount of time. Nowadays, I just like to watch videos of people completing different challenges on HoI4.
Eve online. The stories make it sound like a spy thriller, but the gameplay makes it feel like lower middle management in accounting.
Abso-freaking-lutely! Watching those videos about some schmuck bilking people out of trillions or stealing the goddamn death star of ships is FAR more fun than playing that game. .
Oh how I tried. Did the tutorial and some stranger reached out for me to join their company so I set the autopilot to take me to him and realized it would take 1 hour and 45 minutes of real world time to get there. I couldn't just let it run on its own cause what if space pirates. I could have just as much fun staring at a green light waiting to see if it would turn red
They written books about what's going on in EVE Online, have they not?
@@FalseGoose eve online is a game ya play on a second moniter as ya play a fun game on your main moniter.
This was the first thing that came to mind. I've read many epic stories about it but I tried to play it once and have zero interest in going back.
Dwarf fortress. Honestly the greatest example of a sandbox game that has systems so deep that it’s been generating wild and unpredictable stories for decades at this point.
None are as timeless as the great saga of BOATMURDERED.
@@Chaosrain112"I hope you like miasma!"
I remember seeing a joke before that a geology textbook is a good tutorial book for Dwarf Fortress.
The steam version is actually very playable now, I enjoyed it, while the original ASCII version's GUI and controls were just too obscure to get into.
At a certain point, I do just wonder what is the actual point with Dwarf Fortress. I mean I get it, the dev set out to create the most mechanically dense simulation they could, and they basically succeeded. But what does that actually achieve, apart from weird patch notes that people use to make memes? Like it's a game that I find it hard to believe that people actually enjoy playing. That probably sounds more dickish than I intend it to, but it is how I feel.
I love the fact that Yahtzee doesn’t want to look at guilty gear lore just in case it takes away from the randomness of the characters when the Lore is even more random
Well, for certain characters, that's true, but there are some characters whose back stories take themselves too seriously.
I, for one, love both styles, and love everything from Ky Kiske to Zappa
The backstory of the setting literally begins with 'so scientists invented magic...'
When does bucket show up?
I looked at the games for the first time because of him and they have not gained a fan
she manifested herself when Daisuke learned trans people exist sometime before her debut
I genuinely like that the Entity from DBD plucks the different killers from the franchises, nerfs them up and tells them, "There. Now go sacrifice some people for my amusement. And don't ask where Jason is, my Eldritch Legal Team is working on it."
In Pinhead's case he's deliberately playing with kid gloves because he enjoys the game and treats it as a sport, respecting the rules.
While it’s not outright confirmed, the way Pinhead’s story is worded in DBD suggests he may have shown up in the Entity’s realm uninvited
Which makes the fact he’s going easy for sport even funnier
Man just woke up one day and decided he's going to mess with *everyone* lol
You opened the box
@@scarletknight1996 😫😫😫
@@KingOfElectricNinjas Similar to Myers who, while plucked by the entity specifically, can do his own thing and just kill survivors without playing by the rules first much to the entity's annoyance probably. The Entity wants them to suffer but Mikey boy just wants to stab.
As someone who plays DBD my absolute favorite thing was one of the Developers was doing an interview were they were convinced to play their game as a killer then they proceeded to get bullied by the survivors using flash lights..... which was a huge complaint of the game at the time....... and the very next update they nerft flash lights into the ground.
That's how you do it, haha
Frankly shocking how few developers actually play their games to a high skill level.
@@cattysplat funny enough I looked it up because I wasn't sure it was a Developer....... only to find out it was the games Director that was the one that got bullied.
@cattysplat why is that shocking? Making a game and actually being a master of it are completely different concepts. It's not as if any of the developers of super Mario 64 have any speed run records or any championship teams made up of developers. They honestly dedicate less of their lives on the games they make then people who obsess over playing them.
I truly believe the devs don't play their game in online mode, nor do they understand how the community has taken advantage of some items and abilities
Satisfactory. I love watching TH-cam channels doing 20-minute super-cuts of building massive factories. But what you don't see is the 300 hours it took in real time, and actually slogging through all that effort is just something I don't have time for as a full-time working adult.
It is a lot faster to build factories like that than it used to be at least. Zooping and blueprinting have genuinely changed my life.
If you ever do find the time, I'd highly recommend giving it a shot. It's not really a slog, because it's just so chill. There is no pressure at all, just a relaxing atmosphere where you can take all the time you need. It also has the best tutorial I've ever seen in a game, because the tutorial is the game.
@@Iksbrown oh I have hundreds of hours in it. I just like watching others play it more
@@AZZKlKR
Cool man, as long as you enjoy it in some way it's all good :D
Satisfactory, and games like it, is like putting in all the time, energy, and effort to learn computer programming, but with the end result being just a fake factory in someone else's video game that you can't do anything with.
I never would have expected to see Yahtzee reference Heavy is Dead and "Surprise Buttsex" in a video, but here we are.
This is the second time we've gotten a Heavy is Dead reference. Last time it was even by name
I had I hadn't thought of surprise buttsex in years and the memories came crashing down like a burst dam 😂
The heavy is dead?!
@@Oscar97o Yes. He died.
@@anexplosion5436 *Gasp!*
Fear and Hunger. The lore is fascinating and its engaging to watch streamed because it could all go wrong at any moment. 0 desire to play it
This, but for RPG Maker horror in general. Notable example (besides Funger) would be Corpse Party.
I made the mistake of trying to play fear and hunger, but yeah it's an awesome story, there's some good ideas in like character customization and combat, but it's fundamentally an unplayable experience with how unforgiving it is.
Yup, Fear and Hunger for me as well. Not so much for the difficulty, it’s the sexual violence that just feels sooooo unnecessary. But man, I’ve spent so many hours watching lore videos, it’s so dense and intriguing.
@@johnosullivan1680 part 1: don't die to prison guards as cahara
step 2: ignore the entire marriage system (losing limbs sucks a lot more now)
step 3: ignore the bunny mask cult (good luck grinding sylvian affinity for those healing spells and pheremones)
@@johnosullivan1680 It isn't unnecessary, you can say you don't like it. No need to hide behind these coward statements.
For me I feel Pizza Tower fits into this category. The concept of having to memorize so many button inputs and needing to traverse quickly through an environment is a bit stressful for me, but theres something about watching someone play it flawlessly, hearing the music, and seeing these cartoonish abstractions of classic video game troupes fly about the screen that makes it really fun to watch and look at. Not to mention I feel the general world and characters are captivating and I really love seeing fans of the game make mods and add to the game. Its really impressive to behold
Never thought in my life I’d hear Yahtzee say guilty gear
Fighting games will always have one standout that attracts an audience outside of its base, for my age group it was Tekken 3.
Strive definitely got a larger outside audience thanks to its stylish graphics, wide internet word of mouth, and being on the Xbox Game Pass certainly helped bring in some new blood.
Famous quote: Guilty Gear Strive is a music album with a game attached to it.
I love it
Same here. Last game I expected him to mention 😂
Am I the only one who thinks xx accent core plus r has more style than strive?
Pathologic.
A very philosophically interesting game to talk about, and reportedly one of the most miserable gaming experiences imaginable, which is a large part of why it’s so interesting.
That's one I think I like better existing as a concept than something I actually experience.
I'll just keep reaching Hbomberguy's video on it. I'm pretty sure at this point I've spent as much time watching it as a full playthrough of at least one of the characters would take.
There's also its even more esoteric sibling - "The void".
Aka the worlds most stressful waifu based gaming experience
@@Saltience give it a go! It's cheap and I think a lot of it's difficulty is overstated. It's not a fun or easy game but it's worth playing even if you don't get past the second day
I found Hbomberguy's alt account
There's plenty of video games I don't play, but am super happy to watch detailed lore analysis videos of.
Knowing that Yahtzee is a fan of the batshit crazy tf2 SFM parodies that basically define the game’s legacy now is just deeply satisfying
Wdym thats classical Millennial stuff?
pfp checks out lol
was wondering if i'd find someone with a derp scout avatar commenting on the TF2 segment.
that pfp. I haven't thought about that since...
@@artemisiakyrell7727 Hello fellow eltoro64rus enjoyer
Actually, Yahtz, if you'd kept up with the lore, you'd know that the Sniper is adopted and he's actually from New Zealand. Australians are shaped like inverted triangles and have australia-shaped chest hair.
If Yahtzee can't keep up with Guilty Gear lore, what makes you think he'll have a chance with TF2 Lore?
It's because of a genetic mutation that makes them particularly susceptible to the life-giving effects of Australium. It also gives everyone a 6 pack and a glorious mustache, even the women.
@@GregTheLion Wait is TF2 lore more complicated than GG lore? I've read into both of them and I thought I had a pretty good handle on TF2 while Guilty Gear is like, impossible.
@@Cluke6 Ah, but does TF2 lore matter at all to anyone's enjoyment of the game?
@@Plotatothewondercat I think TFs main appeal to me is the characters, the lore gives more moments with them, so I like em bunches ^^
Deception games (like Among Us, Traitors in Salem/2, Deceit, or any of those social deduction games). There's something enjoyable and deeply satisfying about watching someone play the game and "play" along with them. I don't do the Twitch thing, so I'm never actually a part of it, it's more just watching it unfold. There's a group I enjoy watching that plays a LOT of them, and a lot of them you don't normally see, just to try them out. It gets very loud and antic-filled.
Shout outs to Kaif and the Salt Raiders channels for their shenanigans. Been keeping me sane since covid struck.
I like the idea of Among Us of trying to kill everyone without being discovered or to figure out who's the killer, but the fact it's multiplayer-only makes it a wasted opportunity for me. Games like Unreal Tournament and Quake 3 made me realise that multiplayer can be fun if you don't have to deal with network connection issues or trying to bring multiple computers into the same building to play, and can just trade bullets with computer-controlled opponents/teammates instead. Unfortunately, most developers of multiplayer games emphasise the "player" part of "multiplayer" and don't bother with any computer opponents.
Starcraft 2 is so fascinating to watch with an experienced commentator explaining what's going on and why.
The high skill ceiling makes it nearly impossible to get into the game, but having these crazy 4D strategies explained to me by a charismatic Dutch man always excites me!
I was never a fast gamer, so every time I'd play an RTS I'd set the pace to 'slide show', and Starcraft 1 was no exception. But I loved the moods SC1 put me in, from the first cryptic reports of Zerg on Mar Sara ("Priority alert! Backwater Station under attack by unknown alien organisms. Distress beacon activated at 0658...) all the way to DuGalle's final letter to his wife which would never be read ("Whatever you may hear about what happened here, know this: Alexei did not die gloriously in battle. I killed him. My pride killed him. And now, it has consumed me as well...") So when Starcraft 2 came out, I never even finished the Terran campaign. But still I've watched the whole story several times on TH-cam.
Watching the game from a pro's point of view is also dizzying the first time because they all swap between camera hotkeys so fast.
@@baseddepartment9656 That's why watching from a caster's POV is so much more interesting. They follow the key parts of the game and explain anything confusing. Lowko is awesome!
Agreed. I even like playing other RTS games but Starcraft is just way too much of an overoptimized micromanagement test for me. RTS multiplayer is really only good as long as noone really knows what they are doing.
@@doppelrutsch9540 Exactly! And it's so wild watching a game between 2 players, but from the commentators POV it looks like a game of 6v6 with how much is happening at once. Hahaha
This is ironic because Dead by Daylight is a game that I play but don’t like.
This is some harsh spitting facts, bro.
Same went for me but for Destiny 2, at least until last year when I finally willed myself to uninstall for good
Sums up about 90% of the player base.
Was it fun at first or?
@@Mechpilot0790its the definition of a game youll play for 5 hours or 5000.
Fighting games. The whole genre. Exactly like Yahtzee says here, I genuinely can not get into the actual gameplay enough before it breaks me. The 'fun' never happens. But I want to have fun, I want to live in the world and feel like I can paint with the colours of the wind and actually have a working comprehension.
The way the characters are displayed and the amount of personality! It kills me that I just can't play them.
I've played a lot of fighting games and I can tell you from experience the joy of playing them is the desire to improve, it's kinda like an rpg in way.
only you yourself is getting stronger and better through practice, not the character itself.
at least that's how I see it.
Playing Disco Elysium makes the part of my brain that gauges whether or not I'm having enough fun-per-minute scream at me to do something else with my extremely limited free time, but I can listen to someone else play it while I get work done just fine.
YES. THIS. I feel so lost when I play it man.
I think I'll start recomending people to put streams of this game as background instead of playing it, thank you.
@@reubenbailey7491I got stuck in a few places, but the answer almost every time was to go to bed (in game) so the next day would come. I enjoyed my playthrough very much, all in all.
Well said. I listen to Disco Elysium video essays while I play Call of Duty
It's always great to hear stories but when you play it and die repeatedly because you have 1 sanity point and basically anything can easily kill that 1 sanity made me want to throw my PC at the wall and never want to play it again.
I've found recently that I receive significantly more joy out of working on my Minecraft mod (a minimap) than I do actually playing the game. The gameplay loop of fixing bugs, adding features, snd seeing those fixes and features in game, not to mention sharing those fixes and features with the others in the Discord who care, is a much more compelling gameplay loop to me than the _actual_ game of Minecraft!
In my case it's getting old abandonware games to run. No I don't mean a rom running on a console emulator, I mean getting some late 90's non-DOS or early 00's game running on current Windows through combing the internet for fixes, tweaks, fanpatches, compatibility mods, API wrappers or even virtual machines to get the thing running, preferrebly without glitching.
I figured out this interest cause when I got one of those games running, I'd play 3 runs in one sitting then felt compelled to try and get the next one running instead of the one I wasted 15-30 minutes getting to run.
You've discovered the secret magic of helping members of your community. The myths say that at one time in the distant past, we all used to live like that.
ITS NEVER GOOD ENOUGH!
as i get older this is transforming into my new hobby as well
I remember Mark Hammel talking about going in to do an audition for the character of The Joker for this new Batman cartoon that was coming out.
And he was just beside himself in the waiting room because at that point in time the most famous Joker was Jack Nicholson, and he could not for the life of him do a Jack Nicholson impersonation.
So, sweating bullets, he walks in for his turn.
And the men behind the table are all hunched forward with their heads in their hands, miserable expressions, and the first thing they say is "Don't do Jack Nicholson!"
Queue Mark doing an internal happy dance.
Speed-running is more of a way of playing a game than a game itself, but to me it feels like a whole new game when I watch someone speed-run a game I've played. I tried it and know I don't enjoy performing a speed-run but love seeing others succeed at them.
This hurts my rule loving brain. On one side I feel the game should be respected to play the way developers intended for best experience. On the other, holy crap what crazy skills did the runner just do?
Same. I don't do speedrunning myself because that's just not how I like to play games. I like treating them as worlds to explore, stories to experience, not as obstacles to be overcome. But watching OTHER people overcome those obstacles, learning about all the bizarre tricks they can use to utterly break the game, is fascinating to me.
The trick to speed running is you have to play it five hundred times slow to play it one time fast. I just don't have the dedication to min-max routes and look for bugs and such, takes all the fun out of it.
But it IS neat to watch.
Yeah, I love watching people break a game open in the worst ways possible.
I could never do it myself, I lack that distinct 'tism to repeat the same precise task over and over again for two thousand hours
This is why I love TASes in particular. No human is ever gonna pull off their crazy shit but seeing a hypothetical perfect run is mesmerizing.
Guilty gear is absolutely dripping with character style and gorgeous animation, it's genuinely heartwarming to see it being known enough to be on this list.
And i love that he looked it up and had no idea what was going on. Because that was also my reaction at first! And then it also has the main villain with the name "That Man" and I am like "yes this is amazing"
Guilty Gear is one of those series where I really wish they would take the characters and world and style and such that it already has, but put it all into a totally different gameplay genre. Though it's always my third place genre swap wish behind Darkstalkers at number 2, and Disgaea at number 1.
And in all three cases, the genre I'd switch to is big ol' open world third person adventure-RPG, the genre that most enables exploring and interacting with a setting.
@@Alloveck funnily enough they tried that way back in the day. Guilty Gear 2: Overture was a 360 launch game that was a 3rd person hack and slash + moba with a story mode with big action set pieces and important lore built in. This was all before the concept of a MOBA was fully realized as well. It was not particularly well received at the time but has a very small cult following. GuileWinQuote made a great video on it!
@@Alloveck Open world is where mystique goes to die.
Personally I've been checked out of the series after XX since while I respect the technically impressive aspects of Xrd/Strive, I like the style/overall feel more in that gen. Not that I'm good at any of them.
@@Alloveck I don't think they'd work as well. The incredible expressiveness of the characters are best expressed through their fighting game moveset because it just allows for so much variety. That being said, a less goofy fighting game but one also made by Arc System Works called BlazBlue has made a roguelite 2D hack-n-slash a la dead Cells Called entropy effect with many of the same animations and characters carried over. There's 0 lore in that game at all but if you just want the characters it's something.
Definitely Soma. I even purchased a copy I had no intention of playing just because I watched a playthrough all the way to the ending and enjoyed every moment of it.
Yahtzee is this for me - I have not and never will play the majority of games in his career, but analysis is always a separate pleasure from the media being addressed
yea, i have his game wish listed and i fucking love his videos, but they dont look like my jam and i don't want to be let down by the true art of someone who's critical opinion i put so much respect behind.
I've only played 5 Days a Stranger, but it was quite enjoyable
@@isaacs8057 NGL I got 'The Consuming Shadow' and thought it was pretty bloody good! If you get a Croshaw game expecting a 3xA experience, you're gonna be let down. If you play one though I can tell you what you will get, something original.
Take the plunge and do it knowing two things, 1. Yahtzees games are 100% made by him and him alone. If you're over 30, his games will fill you with genuine nostalgia. Partly because the graphics don't consume an entire hardrive and partly because it takes you back to when a game didn't try to do everything, it just did what it did well. and 2. It doesn't change his prowess as a scathing games reviewer in fact personally, I respect him more for putting his money where his mouth is.
Likewise. Yahtzee and I occupy largely opposite ends of the spectrum (my preferences are for strats and sims) with only very few points of crossover in the RPG end.
I'm so glad I'm not alone in this! I am not and will never be a 'gamer', but I have loved Yahtzee since the very early days, right when ZP first started. Fine analysis and humour enjoyed for their own sake really does it for me.
Smash Bros Melee. I haven't played that game since Brawl was released, but the way they keep finding new ways to make characters viable after they've been written off for about 20 years is INSANE
This. I just know that I won't have the patience or time to learn all of the hard-as-nails tech in the game, but I have definitely consumed thousands of hours of content across all of the tourney, analysis, obscure fact and community videos I've been watching for over a decade.
The most I've played of them was a bit of Brawl way back in college. I won a couple of times only by sheer accident with my frantic button-mashing. I did not yet play video games.
I’m sorry. I’m part of the problem.
seeing characters like DK and Yoshi win their first majors in 20 years is crazy
Definitely my answer. I always liked Melee more than Brawl, and continued to play it casually with my college roommates after Brawl came out. I've loved watching it as an e-sport though, ever since learning about the scene through Evo 2013 and watching the Samox documentary. I have zero desire to learn how to even wavedash consistently though.
World of Warcraft and Final Fantasy 14. I find the lore both of the in game kind and the meta kind fascinating around these games but know damn well that if I ever started one I'd get hooked for awhile before I fizzle out (not to mention I refuse to play anything with a monthly subscription fee).
A weird thing about tf2 I noticed is that the sweatiness of the game is based almost entirely on which map you play. Go to any payload map and you will have snipers so acurate you wonder why Valve even bothered removing the bots. Medieval mode has it's fair share of tryhards but also just people having fun playing a melee only mode in an FPS. And then you switch to 2 fort and you instantly get gunned down for trying to play the game instead of joining the pootis cult
Payload is one of the most popular competitive game modes so that's where all the comp players go to blow off steam. 2Fort on the other hand is a remarkably bad CTF map because it's way too defender sided resulting in an eternal stalemate, the same goes for High Tower. However, this also means that because nobody has to worry about anyone actually completing the objective and CTF and Payload Race don't have a time limit, players are free to goof off.
Yeah if yathzee when back to playing tf2, he would get used to it. Tf2 is a oblein where with the expection if certain servers and the likes, it pretty chill.
There are casual 24/7 2Fort Servers specifically to just goof off and not play seriously. It's kinda beautiful in the way it shows off people's love for something can go beyond the developer's intention.
@@leithaziz2716 >There are casual 24/7 2Fort Servers specifically to just goof off and not play seriously.
and none of them have "skial" in the title anywhere at all.
This is part of why I still play TF2. If I want to try and win, I can, but I can also just rocket jump to the enemy team, play a quick game of Rock, Paper, Scissors, and then I hit my killbind and watch everyone around me do the same. It is as serious or silly as everyone takes it at any given moment.
Warhammer 40K. Never played any of its various expressions - not the OG game itself, not the TTRPGs, or any of the numerous video games. But I find the design, the aesthetic and the lore ENDLESSLY fascinating.
most WH40K fans:
You have 40 likes and I can't bear to break that.
That said, once you know enough lore you graduate on to getting angry at rushed changes.
I'm with you on that one! I love the Warhammer Fantasy and 40k lore. I even like buying and painting the pieces, but I'll be fucked if I actually try to play a game. Just watching other people play it turns me off on wanting to play it.
I liked the new hive city shooter, first 40k game I've ever stuck with, but I'm a big Imperial Guard fan
Same. Super into the lore, I even read the books, zero interest in the tabletop or video games.
I know the entire lore of Team Fortress 2, and I haven't played a single second of it.
I'm a horrible puzzle gamer so watching other people solve puzzles is a good feeling of OHHH THAT'S HOW YOU DO IT
That moment of eureka is a far greater drug than anything else
I try not to look up the answer but I get really bad tunnel vision. There's a good flow and getting stuck for hours kind of sucks. Alot of the time its because of over-thinking things or missing one key detail I overlooked. Though 10% of the time, it was obscure AF and other people in the comments are saying they had no clue, either.
You have to pick the right people though because some of them just seem utterly incapable of playing the puzzle game.
You end up screaming at your screen, press the blue buttons, it's obviously the blue button. IT'S NOT BEHIND YOU WHY WOULD IT BE BEHIND YOU GO BACK AND PRESS THE BLUE BUTTON. ARRRRR
bro has empathy
Cracking the Cryptic might as well be heroin
7:01 Rainworld: Love the setting/lore, art style, and characters. Tried to play it 3 times, and always rage quit before leaving the starter zone. It's a really really hard game, and while the difficulty adds to the atmosphere and plays into the story of the game really well... it's like how Yahtzee said something along the lines of "Being boring for story reasons doesn't make the game less boring." Being miserable and really hard for story reasons doesn't make a game less had. Though of course some people find hard challenging games fun, I'm just not one of them.
So I just watch the lore videos and follow the really vibrant Rainworld animation/animatic community. So many fantastic artists.
I had the same experience with this game; the world-building is really interesting, and I've heard there's a lot of really cool stuff to uncover, but it almost felt like the game resisted me at every turn. I refunded it and bought Animal Well instead, and never looked back.
I'm not surprised to see Rain World here, I love the game to bits but I rarely play it nowadays because it's just a simply hard game.
I tried playing Rain World at least 4-5 times before it clicked. I used the special menu to reduce the difficulty (primarily to iincrease the timer, because I just don't enjoy time-based mechanics) and spent a while in the starting zone feeding crocs until I had a friend. I loved my croc. I ended up completing the game on that run. It is by far one of the deepest and most breathtaking experiences I have had in gaming.
Yep. Rain world was my first thought. The game is gorgeous, and the story/lore excellent, but it's definitely way more fun to see other people fight through it than it is to do myself.
I'm really glad that I've got to the stage in my life where when I see a game that looks interesting but has a high learning curve or skill barrier, I'm happy to just let it go. Maybe that's a result of more than a decade of hating FromSoft games, and constantly having to hear about them, and being exposed to people who won't shut the hell up about them. Or maybe I'm just old.
bravo great word choice and stringing together your thoughts its literally food for thought
I want to shout out Dwarf Fortress, which I love specifically for the patch notes. Alcoholic cats and vampires framing babies might be my fave bugs of all time.
I hear you on Dwarf Fortress. I wish I could enjoy it but gooooods it's too complex.
Fortunately, I got the Lite experience of Dorf via Rimworld (juuust simple enough to love), and Caves of Qud (not a colony-builder, but it's loaded with weird/insane things you can deal with in creative ways.)
Dwarf Fortress is easily my favorite game that I never play
@@AegixDrakanyknow as someone who picked it up only when it got a steam release ive never found it that complicated. its def got a lot going on but if you just want to experience the game the biggest stumbling block i experienced is understanding how to get my dwarves to do what i need them to lol. but its really not that different from other colony management games in terms of base mechanics
Let's not forget the overwhelming tendency around the release of DF's "villains" update for necromancers to cause complete global zombie apocalypses before the world had fully finished generating its history.
Tarn Adams (the creator of DF) has even talked about how there are a lot of people who don't even play the game who still contribute to their forums and their Patreon, just because they love the stories from people like Kruggsmash.
He even jokes sometimes that the people who watch the TH-cam videos and listen to the stories are actually the real players, and the people who play the game are more like the QA department because of all the "crap" they have to deal with in the game.
Every single game in the “mascot horror” genre. I love the designs of the characters, the ridiculous lore, and overall haunted house child-like atmosphere they go for is satisfying to me. I also love watching people (speedrunners mostly) actually play and more often than not break them into smithereens by finding fun exploits that rattle my understanding of the behind-the-scenes of game dev programming and how bad it can get.
For awhile I was a sucker for fnaf lore videos. Tried to see how many I could string along before my brain broke
I think the original FNAF games are well designed and are fun experiences, but I have absolutely no interest in playing them.
You just explained the FNAF streamer/lore craze in the early 2010s. I think the milking of the franchise was unfortunately what hurt the appeal in the long run, but it was still a fun time worth remembering. We got all the funny markiplier memes. shoutouts to "PURPLE GUY!" and "WAS THAT THE BITE OF 87!?"
@@leithaziz2716 It also doesnt help that Scott was basically just letting Game Theory write the story for him at some point. And what follows was just an overly convuluted mess that feels like at some point it forgot that a story needs more than vague ass hints as to whats going on.
Hot take: Mascot Horror games are not meant to be played, but streamed and WATCHED.
The first game I thought about, is actually a boardgame called "Room 25". It's like the movie 'Cube', where various contestants are stuck in a moving maze of blocks trying to collaboratively escape. The twists: 1) there are 1 or 2 betrayers among the players, aiming to have everybody killed, 2) You plan out your moved before taking your turn to execute those moves. I quite like observing a group playing the game, trying to figure out who shady etc. However, I don't particularly like playing it. Being the hidden betrayer introduces a level of stress I'm not enjoying myself (just like I don't like it when playing Among Us)
As a completely accurate stereotype of a 47 year old dad gamer, I know I will never play a Souls game but I sure do enjoy watching playthroughs of them on TH-cam. I honestly spend most of my solo free time nowadays watching playthroughs of various games and I reserve my actual video game play time for playing games like Remnant 2, DRG (and hopefully Space Marine 2 next year) with my daughter and her uncle.
Remnant 2 is so much fun. 48yr old childless cat lady. I play with my brother, great for family bonding time.
@@akiraigarashi2874 Yes, but we usually wait awhile to play new games. Gives time for the prices to drop, bugs fixed, and additional content to be added.
@@user-kr5vm8nk1d Yup, we've enjoyed our time with it for sure and are looking forward to the new DLC coming out soon. Hopefully once we've exhausted all that we want from it, SM2 will be in a more fleshed out state and we can continue the family bonding there. :)
I kinda hate them (48 here). They're really fun worlds with super interesting lore and combat but I don't get to enjoy them because regardless of how much time I've put into Bloodborne (at least 20 hours by now), I can't get past the second boss. Time is fleeting. Prioritizing a game I can only barely progress in only leeches what's there.
My brother once convinced me to play through Dark Souls 1 and after beating it with his help, I vowed to never pick up another souls-like again lol
This is me with Fear and Hunger. I am *fascinated* by the very deliberate yet unrelentingly cruel game design the game has going through it, but it is something I likely would not enjoy playing. Frankly, the mysticism of not really knowing the ins and outs of the game make it even more engrossing.
I played a decent amount of the first one using a hit and run strategy that made the game pretty easy, then I realized I liked the themes, setting and lore of the game more than actually playing it. Ended up just watching a lot of TH-cam videos on it
It's the coin flips that make me not want to play. Insta death for having bad luck is pretty harsh.
The way I absolutely knew what the snippet about the Universal Will, Asuka, and the Valentines was about... I guess I am that sweaty.
Return of the Obra Dinn. Ive watched like 8 different people play the game and it gets me everytime because the little differences in knowledge and assumptions that people make bring something totally new to the game.
I likely would have enjoyed playing it but watched it because money was especially tight when it came out, but honestly it worked out.
Seeing how many people fall for the same trap or who gets info figured out even earlier or plain just knows more than i do so they can figure something out an extra way is great.
For me, it's Starcraft 2. I love watching matches, I think the idea of economy strategy and microing units for battle is a fun combination. I can't find myself playing it ever, though, because I feel like constantly jumping around the map would remove my ability to enjoy what is going on.
It would be more like a whirling dervish dissipating and me just sitting there going, "what happened?"
I am "casually good" at those kinds of games, but with really nobody to play against, my only option would be to play against the "actually good" people online. And I seriously lack the attention to do the macro, nor the reflexes to do the micro. So I never really play them.
That said, I do enjoy watching some Starcraft and Warcraft 3 at high level play. I know just enough to actually follow what's going on and appreciate some of the nuance.
Ooh thats a good one. Funny thing is about starcraft is I love the campaigns to death. Played all of them multiple times and probably will again some day, and watching pro matches is often fun, but actually playing competitive games is just untenable
Same thing with me. I love the strategy and unit control of Starcraft 2, but playing it is basically beating your opponent at building a lot of stuff, like a PvP Factorio, up until you get good enough at the game where the strategy finally starts to really matter. Which is why I love watching pros play it.
@@ObadiahtheSlim Playing against the hard computer is enough for me.
Man, I love watching the GSL, and that high-level strategy and execution is jaw-dropping. But I haven't played an RTS since BfME2 (and before that was Red Alert 2).
It's funny that Yhatzee showed footage of Strive while talking about Instant Kills, because it's the first Guilty Gear without them.
Outer Wilds is a game I have great appreciation for and will never play, but for a completely different reason than the ones in the video: The game is purely about discovery, and I experienced the game by watching someone else do all the discovering themselves, so there is not really a game left for me to play. The closest I can get to the joy and thrill of discovering the game myself is vicariously through watching new people play it for the first time themselves.
I had the main game spoiled for myself but, I managed to play the dlc completely blind! It was amazing.
That is heartbreaking. I'm so sorry.
I respect Outer Wilds immensly, but I'm glad I spoiled it for myself rather then played it because I find the ending deeply unsatisfying.
Outer Wilds is such an amazing game that you can only ever experience once. Theres nothing stopping you from blitzing the ending sequence 20 minutes into a fresh save. Also a game that you really should 100% on your first go or you will never ever get those last few question marks ticked off in the journal.
Just beat Outer Wilds and you are exactly right about having the game spoiled for you if you don't make the discovery yourself. I am so glad I went into it blind. One of the best video game experiences I've had in year's
Total War. I love watching people play that series, I find it extremely frustrating and fiddly to play myself, and the depth of those systems may as well be in Atlantean for all the sense I can make of them. But when a person understands the game and plays it at a high level, it's very satisfying to watch
The Oddworld series, namely Abe's Oddysee and Abe's Exoddus.
The Oddworld games have such a unique atmosphere to them that can feel eerie and serene at the same time and I really like that, but the gameplay of finding and guiding hundreds of Mudokons thru death trap mazes to safety was too stressful for me. I made it through all of Abe's Oddysee and got the good ending, but when I learned Abe's Exoddus nearly tripled the number of guys you have to save, I never played past the first level.
2:38 This is one of the unique parts of TF2 that I find so great compared to every other game that mimics it, including one I used to play: Overwatch. The characters are so *characterized.* SFM and Garry's Mod animations can feel believable, it doesn't just come off as random and replaceable with other characters from other games. They're archetypes yet they don't feel like corporate blandness. You can get into a class for their personality as well as their playstyle so easily.
I love everything about TF2 except the way it's game modes are set up and it's community.
Valve you don't have to worry anymore Overwatch is dead, you can stop that stupid 5 min warmup and single round map restart that always kills the pacing of the game!
I played Overwatch for a good while, around the time Sombra was added, I enjoyed the seasonal events, Retribution was my favorite out of the bunch. I don't play the game much anymore ever since Overwatch 2's release but I still like to look up the new characters, interactions, all that sort of stuff.
@@Arc3752i hate casual so much. Luckily community servers are alive in Europe nowadays.
I genuinely think part of it is that the mercs are allowed to be actually mean to each other. Overwatch is all lighthearted banter or some iteration of "I don't like/trust you". The mercs, by contrast, are constantly insulting and mocking each other, and it makes it feel like they have genuine relationships instead of every line of dialogue feeling like it's gesturing at "lore". There's also the matter that the mercs are allowed to get excited and really express themselves. Overwatch characters feel very emotionally flat by comparison.
@@screamingcactus1753 now I’m trying to imagine an overwatch character saying “Well, off to visit your mother”
I have never played 95% of the games ever discussed on any series on this channel but golly is it nice to hear people talk about them.
League of Legends for obvious reasons I won’t never possibly play the main game, but the Lore is just too interesting not to ignore it
Ugh, I don't wanna admit this: Metal Gear
I LOVE the campy tone, characters, dialogue, and bizarre methods in which Snake picks people off one by one. I love that the series is tongue in cheek, and is absolutely aware of what is doing and doesn't apologize for a goddamn thing.
But I absolutely cannot stand, under any circumstances, stealth based games. I don't like having to hide, my anxiety skyrockets. And there's nothing worse than going part way into a level, stepping on a potato chip or whatever, and having my brains provide a new coat of paint for the fucking wall. The only game I've ever played with stealth mechanics that I ENJOYED was Batman Arkham City, and when I say enjoy, I mean I TOLERATED the stealth aspect because the rest of the game was so damn good.
3:04 As a sentence mixer, I appreciate the art being respected by someone outside the YTP/GMod/SFM circles. Thank you for the acknowledgement, Yahtz, it will 90% of the time be funnier than AI slop.
As someone who watched a lot of Ytp during the hayday of youtube it always blew my mind of people being able to cobble together sentences from other sentences, as i grew older i saw some ways people could do it easier, like with me watching a lot of Thomas the tank engine ytp and the entire show have pretty much having very few narrators if not just one singular narrator made getting some pieces together probably a bit easier but the patience and the craft required for it all for just a minute or two of pure parody gold always blew my mind.
@@bullstrode5875 Seeing what some people can do with Morshu is incredibly impressive. Very small sample size, very broad application if you know the ways of placing phonemes together.
@@bullstrode5875 It helps that George Carlin did much of the US narration and had a long career doing explicit stand up comedy before and after his time on the show.
Art. Lol
@@ConeJellos there is no higher art than stitching together fifty separate voicelines to make TF2 characters say violently gay nonsense
By playtime to watchtime ratio it has to be Mario Maker 2. I have no desire to play or make levels, but watching Panga go through all the weird stuff humanity has come up with is mesmerizing.
I'm also glad games like Dwarf Fortress and Rimworld exist, but I prefer strategy games to be a little simpler.
Dungeons and Dragons
I consume a lot of DnD based material like Baldur's Gate 3, The Legend of Vox Machina, and Honor Among Thieves, but I can never actually get a DM and group together to actually play it.
Same. I guess I'm a tourist who thinks tabletop podcasts, video games, and story adaptions can be plenty fun, but the two or three times I actually got to join a table were about the driest experience I've ever had playing a multiplayer game. I'm sure a lot of it depends on the people you're playing with, but actually putting a group together, managing the game, and finding the time for everyone involved is a lot of hoops to repeatedly jump through.
Came here to say pretty much the same thing. I used to play tabletop games in school like Cyberpunk, DnD and WH40k but wouldn't be able to get a group and that kind of time now so I just play PC game adaptations and watch AiN and Critical Role content.
Tabletop games count? Mine is for games like baldur's gate, although the "story difficulty does wonder for my engagement in those games.
Lotta people are in the camp, especially me at first, I chanced on my local gamestore having a board for open games and I managed to find some amazing groups who I adore being around as well as playing with. Hell I'm a DM now just a year in!
Be the DM, that's how I got started with D&D way back when.
I adore Disco Elysium and its story. The very concept of your character's different personality traits talking to you and often arguing with each other is fascinating.
Yet everytime I sit down and load it up, I find myself with no drive to do anything. I just kinda stand there for a moment staring at Kim's stupid face and call it a day.
Dota2 - i played at the start when everything was wacky and people's attitude was very relaxed. Then came the sweat and rage. Now i just enjoy watching it.
Xcom EU - watched 3 modded play throughs each around 300 hours at least. Cannot for the life of me bring myself to play it.
As a Guilty Gear fan, seeing Yahtzee mention it with respect is absolutely neat. Props for also mentioning Dizzy's Instakill move, a great example of the creativity in this franchise, regardless of whether you are actually playing it.
Another relevant mention could be a character named Answer, who spends the whole fight time talking on a cell phone during meetings. And when some other fighter eventually shoves fingers up his rear end (I swear this makes sense in context), he has to continue speaking through the meeting as if nothing happened, while also screaming in pain.
You don't see that in every fighting game!
Came for "I'm a Medic main", stayed for "Guilty Gear."
Also Yahtz, if you did play Guilty Gear I feel you'd like the dandy vampire who talks like Sean Connery.
Love the positivity in this one, Yahtz!
I love to see Shounic, 3Kliksphilip and The War Owl talk about TF2 and CSGO, even though I don't play them. I also enjoy False Swipe Gaming essays on competitive Pokemon
@@brunoberti8790 I've dabbled a bit with competitive pokémon. I actually went 7-0 back in one of generation 8s ranked seasons. But it certainly not for everyone
TF2 is always something I'll be intrested in reading about and watching about. It's just such a amazing work of art.
It's a complicated skill based game with a ton of weapons and mechanics to learn about and debate about, that ALSO has a large community of talented comedians who make gmod/sfm animations like classic looney toons, and is just plain fun to watch.
2:05 - 2:19 is a perfect encapsulation of how I've felt about all online shooters and why I can't get into some of the games I love to watch or even play but just don't get to.
@@MrTheBest2WasTaken Definitely is. TF2 is really an exception to the rule, because it's been around long enough, all the tryhards have moved on or found their niche lobbies (Highlander/Meet Your Match/etc.)
But the main thing that got me with that segment was his reference to a moment in time when NEW THING IS OUT and everyone wanted to do NEW THING, which I think is an issue with modern society being obsessed with NEW THINGs rather than just letting them be and enjoying them in the moment or more organically.
Well, it's Kellog's Corn Pops, isn't it? They're basically packing peanuts. No other cereal comes close.
For me it's city builders. I get bored extremely quickly when playing them myself but I love watching people build beautiful and functional cities and I also enjoy when they explain the real life concepts behind what they're building.
Oh man... Same. I WANT to enjoy playing them, I even spend money on them hoping I will enjoy playing THIS one... and they just sit there on my drive rotting, lol. But I will faithfully watch me some City Planner Plays and think "Oh, I like that, I should try that out the next time I play the game" lol
I also definitely love watching other people play way more than I like playing them just because I always fall into a routine with "play it your way" games like those or Stardew or Minecraft. Like the first time I play it's all fun and experimental, then I start finding what works efficiently enough for me, and then after that it's too much effort to try to change my play style so every city looks pretty much the same, every Minecraft world is basically the same...but then I watch someone else play and they'll have a COMPLETELY different experience. I watched my wife play stardew valley and her farm was entirely different. I was putting everything like right next to the house because it's right next to the box and that's just what makes the most sense. Her garden is in this forest clearing surrounded by flowers just because that seemed like a nice place to put it. Entirely different approach to the same game
That couldnt be more different than me, my first real game was a city builder. 1200 later in CS and I never looked back🤣🤣
A lot of good horror games like Alien Isolation and Darkwood are like that for me. I am fascinated by horror and fear, i am fascinated by the thought and effort it takes to make something genuinely feel terrifying despite being behind a screen, and i am a big fan of the games that manage to pull that off... problem is that i am also a fucking coward, and if a horror game is good enough for me to admire me that usually means it is also too scary for me to play it
Same. I try to watch them if there's a playthrough video without commentary
It's funny, I have kind of the opposite problem. I'm fascinated by horror, and the theories behind how to create good spooks, but none of it really scares me personally. I love Alien Isolation, and it definitely made me feel tense, but not in a horror sense, more the sense of not wanting to get instant killed and have to start over on that section. The closest ive gotten to being spooked is stuff like Slender: The Arrival, and even that is more of being startled at the sudden camera static when ol bald-face is nearby.
I don't fuck with horror games that much, but Alien Isolation is one of the few examples of the genre that I genuinely got into and loved it enough to finish it. I got so frustrated in the first 1-2 hrs that I uninstalled it, and the final third drags a bit, but I just love the design and the atmosphere of that game, and the sense of menace really excited me in a way I don't often feel with horror. It's not a game that really terrified me, sometimes it's not even scary, but there is something viscerally thrilling about it. The original Dead Space hit the same way for me.
Horror game fear are easily broken by dying, death almost becomes a comedy as you come back to life again and again. Unlike real life where today I ran screaming from a wasps nest because there are no respawns and that's real pain.
Street Fighter. It barely counts because I do attempt to play them but always end up giving up because I can't git gud for the life of me. But I adore the characters, their designs, the storylines, the various media associated with it (comics, wiki, etc.) and watching high-level players go at it.
Ironically, I think the closest I come to this is the amount of time I've spent watching/listening to TH-cam reviews and opinion pieces on games series I haven't actually played yet. I've never played a Silent Hill game yet, but I've been through Yahtzee's entire coverage at least three times by now. Not to mention this is how I treat almost everything on Game Dungeon.
Not a game, but I love watching speerunning every now and then. It's fascinating how almost every game in existence is made with spaghetti code, and that there's people out there finding each random exploit possible.
Same. I will also never Speedrun anything in my life haha.
I'm not really interested in watching speedrunners or getting invested in speedrunning, and I guess I'm a bit of a romantic because I find peeling back the layers of abstraction and exposing the wires and code that makes the illusion run to not be as exciting as the illusion itself.
But it is something that I find fascinating from time to time, especially the community around it, even though a lot of them are very sweaty. Summoning Salt made me care more about speedruns of Ninja Gaiden 2 than I ever thought possible.
Same. It's fascinating to me how they do it. I also like watching people play randomizers in Souls games. Truly some chaotic goodness there that I can appreciate even though I'll never do a randomizer run myself.
Hello fellow religious Summoning Salt viewer.
Souls-likes, specifically the ones with a lot of knowledge-based shortcuts and rewarding exploration. I don't handle Difficult Games well, I get too frustrated knowing that I'm losing souls even when they're not actually that big of a deal, and the focus on bosses isn't really for me.
But oh man, the lore and the exploration and the multiplayer features and the way the world wraps around on itself, hiding secret synergies... I wish I could enjoy it. I've been getting into metroidbrainia style games, and they kind of scratch the itch.
Tunic on no-death mode is a masterpiece.
The Witness - I love smart, layered puzzles (games or otherwise), but first person games give me motion sickness, so I can only stomach 30 minutes of the game before me head hurts and today's dinner wants to come back out for a chat.
Baba Is You - As much as I love orange pressing my brain for the creative and out of the box solutions of this unique meta game, I love more to analyze those solutions themselves and ponder the bizarre logic Arvi Teikari went through to make them logic puzzles.
Flower - Lovely chill game where you are THE WIND, and you must gather the petals of flowers so you can see what a gorgeous stream of air you are. Too bad I can only stomach it for half the time of a regular FP game. For the same reasons.
Kingdom Hearts. The entire series. I was a Disney fan as a kid (I know, shocker) and loved the old animated movies like Hercules and Little Mermaid, so when as a 9 year old I found out that there was a 7 year old RPG featuring characters from those movies I was all over it. Couldn’t get out of the first town after you finish the tutorial island. A full decade would pass before I was old enough to just buy parts of the mainline series, and it now collects dust in my hard drive. I kept up as best I could with the “story”, but it was always the interplay between RPG shenanigans and my favorite childhood Disney characters that made me love the games.
Probably doesn't matter now but if you do decide to ever play these games, skip the first one and just play KH2. If it turns out you like it try some more, but the first game kind of sucks.
@@CT3LA I’m actually planning on doing a full marathon of the parts of the series I have (mainline titles only) but as an adult I’ll admit it’s harder to get into. The Disney stuff appealed to a different, younger me.
Destiny 2 for me. Played the first one from release, mostly solo and got a sense of achievement during the Iron Banner events because I was someone without all the raid gear still performing very well. Towards the end I started playing with a group of friends I knew in school and made some great memories. This carried over into 2 until the update they did that brought back the moon where I needed to do a very grindy subquest to continue the story and because this was the beginning of 2020 and 'the troubles' had just started, I wasn't in the right head space for it so I took a break. That break ended up being like 3 years and by the time that itch came back and I felt like going back in, I was told that the game had recieved that many updates and was even entering the stage of vaulting prior content, it was simply too much of an issue to get back in because I'd have to look up the order of playing the updates, learn the lore of vaulted content for context.
Tldr, I'd be experiencing a diet version of being a new player, and Destiny 2 simply doesn't cater to that well and given I'd be tackling it alone as my old teammates had long moved on from it anyway, I was condemned to be the returning veteran with no idea what was happening and pining for his glory days.
I fucking love Dizzy's Instant-Kill despite also never playing the game it is from. The compilation with Birthday Train playing over it is a banger video even without any GG knowledge and legitimately made me interested in Strive. Hearing Yahtzee casually mention that specific Instant-Kill is downright astonishing.
I'm just commenting to help pad out Yahtzee's engagement metrics. I have nothing to add to the conversation because my biggest struggle is getting my lazy ass to play any video games in the first place.
I genuinely enjoy watching both World of Warships as a game and more often Soulslikes. Both of them very interesting concepts, only the latter is typically a good games, all very fun to watch with a good presenter. I recommend the Mighty Jingles, awesome TH-cam channel!
It appears Yahtzee has discovered the reason why many people watch streamers play games. We cant be bothered to play many titles whether its lack of funds or desire to learn to play. Plus sometimes a good commentary can make a mediocre game experience better.
I love watching horror games being played, when I watch them I do not get scared and the story is usually interesting. Playing them however spikes my anxiety so I just stumble and fail, so no playing horror for me....
I try to buy games that I've gotten enough enjoyment out of watching, even if I never plan to play them.
I do wonder how fair is it that we can watch full walkthroughs of any game (story included) online, for free. Yeah, its free advertising & promotion but how much does that translate to sales? How often do we just go "I'll watch the cutscenes on TH-cam."
@@pickyphysicsstudent201 I think the question to ask is "were you going to buy it in the first place"? I'll watch games I never plan to play and in that scenario no sale was lost. I don't think I've ever come across a game I wanted to play and then went "Nah, I'll just watch a playthrough". Playthroughs have resulted in me buying way more games than have stopped me.
@@legomacinnisinc Yeah, video games aren't movies, interactivity is a crucial part of the experience. If you can get everything you want out of a video game by watching a walkthrough or cutscene compilation, you probably weren't going to buy it anyway.
I’d say majority of games I like are the ones I never play. Oftentimes its because said game is in a genre i dont like playing and I simply like the execution of the concept/idea, admiring it from a distance.
@@FinDan07 many games I've hoped to play for the story or lore have lost me the moment "survival crafting" is mentioned
Elden Ring
I don't have a lot of free time to sink into games anymore and am not interested in "getting good" with learning boss attack patterns but holy hell I have watched hours of lore videos about Elden Ring and the DLC and love it
Sunless Seas/Skies. The story, setting and writing are so phenomenal, but 9/10 of the gameplay is slowly moving cargo across a massive map and praying you don’t bump into any of the instant death monsters or events, sending you back to the start of not only your finances, but your story.
Just wanted to say they almost immediately removed permadeath, and even suggested that you should never play with it, and use saves. Also, Failbetter Games did not communicate to the players that these are not trading or fighting games (trying to play them as such is absolutely miserable and futile). I played Fallen London, so I quickly realized trading is purely a bonus activity, and you get most of your XP, money, and, well, fun from discovering (port reports) and doing quests. So I always advise players who bounced off these game to try this, ignore trading, plan expeditions (so that you visit several places), and also run from fights (in Sea = for most of the game, in Skies = until you're comfortable).
Fully agreed. I love Fallen London (when I remember it exists and what I was doing in that game, which is its own can of worms), but the Sunless duo is...well, exactly as you describe. Funnily enough I've gotten the most enjoyment out of the Mask of the Rose visual novel. It's a fun little dating sim/murder mystery that's for sure!
It's really not that hard, it's just tedious. Great setting, great atmosphere, but it it will run thin before you finish. Permadeath was a good experiment but it really doesn't work in a game with so many static elements. Still glad I played it though.
I like Sea better than Skies because I prefer the writing/tone and I think the world feels better to explore as a shipping route when you can visit everything in one theoretical trip rather than sequestering everything in regions, as cool of an idea as that was
3:20 it gets cuter yahtz, those guys voice heroes in DotA 2 and have done various announcer packs for that game too (she's the default DotA 2 announcer and he did a bonus one a few years ago)
as someone who has spent quite a bit of time reading the guilty gear wiki, it's surprisingly well thought out and coherent on the story side of things once you get past the word salad of terms. some things are still just there for the sake of being there but it's fitting of the world building so not actually sticking out all that much in the end.
i love the megaman legends games, even own them, but i never got back to playing them because the platforming was too finicky
The "intentional ignorance" part reminds me of how there's nothing quite like playing a game after months or years of learning about it exclusively through reading discussions and seeing only small snippets of gameplay footage or occasional screenshots at most. The way the actual game diverges from the concept of the game I'd built up in my head out of a few scraps of hard info gives it a sort of... dreamlike weirdness, and you can't experience that if you go in knowing too much. Or much at all.
Also, even as a jaded and cynical lifetime gamer who knows very well what to realistically expect of games, my imagination always, ALWAYS somehow still skews games toward being more malleable and interactive and less... rigidly "gamey" than they end up, for lack of a better term. I guess I must still have some actual childlike optimism deep down after all, or maybe it's just how much I wish games would be like the stupid kid days again, when games weren't yet so predictable and still seemed like they could be anything.
I was like that back during the PS1 era and earlier. Before we finally getting a PS1, we just had the NES and GBC/GBA. So my way of experiencing "new" games were though gaming magazines & videogame shows on TV (Video Power, Electric Playground, etc.) Finally getting to play them after months/years of just imagining how they were was amazing.
Although these days if it's a game I really want to play, I avoid as much info as I can. Aside from spoilers, I fear that seeing discussions about the game would affect my expectations for the worse.
Any horror game ever. A lot of them have great stories and artistic merit but I don't enjoy any part of getting spooked or jumpscared myself, so instead I just watch various youtubers get spooked or jumpscared for me
100% me. I hate horror and can barely stand the tension of playing it yet have a huge morbid curiosity and always wanna see what the monster or disturbing stuff is, and then immediately regret it. Why the hell do I do it to myself?
I hate jumpscares and people trying to make the most disgusting stuff possible, yet apparently really appreciate what goes into making horror games. I think I do like the tension it provides. If I ever get into game developement I'd want to challenge myself to make a very effective horror game without any gore, jumpscares, or disturbing imagery. Maybe a fusion of Slender, Amnesia, and FNAF but with, idk, teddybears as the enemy.
Do you watch ManlyBadassHero?
I can enjoy some horror games through him.
I enjoy watching my friends play league of legends on the main summoners rift map but have 0 desire to actually play myself.
While I’ve since stopped playing entirely, I did really enjoy the ARAM game mode for taking away the pressure of laning, last hitting, and map awareness. It brought the game quickly to where my favorite moments were, the team fights, and made that the entire mode.
Add on that it usually took half the time of the main game mode, so you doing poorly wasn’t potentially pissing off your 4 other teammates for a half hour+, taking off that pressure to do well.
I really appreciated having a mode where I could experiment with characters I didn’t understand, could get multiple games in the same span of time as a couple summoners rift matches, and generally play a mode where (with exceptions of course) no one cared how well you did.
Even when people did take it too seriously, even teammates would often say “it’s an ARAM bro, chill. Summoners rift is that way”
I guess more than anything I resonated with Yahtzee noting that games online feel way sweatier than they used to. I don’t find online PvP relaxing anymore. Feels like I have to be laser focused in many of them to even do middlingly well and relaxing is my main motivation for playing.
Additionally, if my MMR gets high enough, everyone I play against seems to start using the strongest guns or characters exclusively (while also having laser aim) and that’s not as fun when I want to run an experimental build and screw around.
I'm honored to know that with every DBD update, Yahtzee is out there somewhere looking down on all of us
3:40 I feel like it's worth pointing out that lots of stuff in fighting games is deliberately *not* reactable. Since everything has counterplay, if you could react to everything then nobody would ever get hit. High-level play is much more focused on what you expect your opponent to do and putting yourself in a position to counter as many of those options as possible. It's more like playing a game of rock-paper-scissors every second, but sometimes rock is twice as good as paper or scissors.
In guilty Gear it's really just about who has the biggest scissor... And it's almost always Nago.
The Outlast series, specifically lately the Outlast Trials. I've watched some fantastic vids that not only break down all the lore and story, but bring in what was going on in the world at the time of the trials to give more context for WHY the trial environments are doing specific things like the winter event being to prep for a nuclear winter.
Scorn. I absolutely hate the disgusting torturous things that happen, but I looooove the atmosphere and setting and the running theme of endless pain. It's...weirdly comforting, aside from the horrible torturous parts.
To be fair the most torturous part about Scorn was the combat.
@@gargaj You know what's funny, you can avoid combat 99% of the time, there's a video called "you're playing Scorn wrong", that shows how to do it, just don't get near the monsters and they will go away permanently, but the game gives absolutely ZERO clues that you can do that.
It's mind boggling to me why they didn't teach the players that, considering that is the biggest problem players have with the gameplay.
Yeah I got so stuck at one encounter that I just got fed up and decided to run past everything, assuming it wouldn't work... and then it did.
Are you German perchance?
I can firmly agree that sometimes context ruins everything and do enjoy randomly watching a youtube compellation of something I have absolutely nothing to do with but looks cool.
Real time strategy games (Iron Harvest for example)because I’m terrible at them. The time I was decent has long passed as Brood War is gone. So I don’t touch them anymore but I do enjoy watching others play them. Not so much high end but just someone who genuinely likes them. It is a joy to watch and I always love all the unit voice acting, unit types, story and map design.
That's Resident Evil for me. Don't do shooters and hate inventory management but am always interested to see what weird places the plot goes.
Trackmania. It makes the HotWheels loving child in my hearth a little happy to see the insane trickshots I envisioned, be done.
I think now might be the time to admit to myself that I will never get more than an hour into Elden Ring and thus it is my favourite game I don't play. I've watched countless playthroughs, consumed many lore theories and am indulging in challenge run vods but being the kind of gamer who plays to unwind, I cannot play it myself without it frustrating me too much. I love you Elden Ring, just leave me alone.
Ultrakill. The music is great, and the vibe of the whole thing just seems so fun and chaotic, I just cannot get into gameplay that fast and twitchy myself. It's super fun to watch people be good at it though.
Same, my one hangup is actually the annoying beep on the stamina bar that feels like it could sink the entire experience for me.
Rainworld. Love the world, the visuals, the mood, the lore, the cute little slugcats. And the idea that all the other animals are just off doing their own thing, that you are just one small living creature of the many. If I would play it I probably would break my controller in about 10 minutes.
I love the idea of Rainworld. If only it wasn't seemingly designed by a crackhead who preemptively killed their entire QA team
Rainworld is one of my favourite games, but I really, really get why so many people bounce off it, or straight up hate it.
It's insanely unforgiving, and the controls feel really precise and really imprecise at the same time. The enemies often hide in blatantly unfair spots, and there are many areas where it's hard to tell what is and what isn't a platform, or what is and isn't a pole you can grab onto. The various systems in the game are also really cryptic. Actually figuring out where to go is really difficult at times as well.
Even with all that, I absolutely love it. I love the world, the atmosphere, even the weird mechanics. I'm also generally interested in games that have controls that feel unique. It's a very specific vision, completely uncompromised. There's truly nothing else like it.
@@Resopheed There was a lot of thought put into Rain World as an ecosystem. And as real-life ecosystems will gladly demonstrate, predators are usually pretty damn terrifying for their prey, given concepts like camouflage for ambush hunting or persistence hunting.
Rain World replicates this feeling with surprising fidelity and as a result it makes no attempt to make the world fair for the player as a creature very low on the overall food chain.
@@subtlewhatssubtle Yes! The ecosystem aspect was obviously one of, if not the biggest focus of the game. And in order to imitate a real ecosystem, there's gonna be mechanisms that feel utterly unfair to the prey.
You'd think that'd be a big no-no, to make a game that is THIS unfair to the player, but it HAS to do that in order to provide the intended experience. Now that opens up the whole can of worms of whether making a game deliberately tedious and unfair is good, but in Rainworld's case I'd argue it was absolutely necessary.
Just another reason I find the game so fascinating.
@@subtlewhatssubtle this is one of the reasons I love the game. There's times where it's unfair because of annoying design (screen transitions in particular) but the way the creatures act as actual living things just trying to survive rather than just being obstacles, it's frustrating and wonderful.
Props for giving Mortal Kombat it's due lore-wise but, in order to fulfill the request.
1) Blood Omen: So I loved the first Blood Omen but Soul Reaver had that one tower where you had to flip a switch and then try to get to a door that, due to the unfinished graphics, was a matter of luck. Then my friend finished it and it actually had a ****ing "To be continued" on it. The cherry on top was that the next games were going to be on a different console and, at the time, I hadn't really been sold on getting a PS2.
So, I tapped out on the game but watched a supercut that someone did that had all of the cutscenes/important bits of Soul Reaver 1/Blood Omen 2/Soul Reaver 2. (I'm thinking that I'll give the remasters a try if/when they come to Gamepass and see if I like it better then.
2) The Witcher. The gameplay just doesn't do it but I was big on the story so ditto on the Youtubing the story. (Sidenote: I was a Triss/Geralt shipper for many reasons BUT I also liked the way the "no romance" path for Yennifer and Geralt ends. There was a weird notion in the community that, if you ship one, you must hate the other. For me, I liked how they handled the "no romance" path in the sense of two people who were deeply in love once but too many things have happened and too much time has passed. In my head canon, Yennifer and Geralt still care for each other but in the way of former lovers who had an amicable split-up.)
3) World of Warcraft/Overwatch/Apex Legends/Dead By Daylight: I put these all together because the reason is mostly the same. I adore watching the animated shorts to the point that I've subscribed to the channel. I've even read much of the character lore.
BUT, with three out of four of them, the idea of getting on a never-ending loop of multiplayer matches leaves me cold. With WOW, I already have SWTOR and, even without that, the idea of getting into another MMO both in terms of hours needed AND gameplay leaves me cold. (If/When SWTOR ends, that'll be the end of my involvement with MMOs.)
Talks about Source Filmmaker being released publicly, shows well-known Gmod meme video.
Not that I blame him, Antoine and a few others have perfected the art of Gmod to such an extent that it can be hard to tell the difference if you aren't intimately familiar.
Scrolled down looking for this exact comment.
Someone oughta show Yatz Emesis Blue.
It warms my heart knowing Yahtz is observing DBD from a nice safe distance.
Dizzy's Finisher is a delight to watch and I cannot wait to see how it looks now that she's been announced for the newest GG's latest DLC.
Off the top of my head I would say "Don't starve", "Lethal Company", "Factorio" and "Breath of the Wild" and it's sequel. There are more too, sometimes I realise that a game is more fun to watch or read about than actually play myself.
Oh yeah come to think of it I wasn't a huge fan of OOT since I tend to like more Final Fantasy style RPG, but watching people play Zelda is pretty neat.
I play Tears of the Kingdom, but I do also love watching people play it, just because there's SO MUCH stupid shit you can do in that game and everyone always finds new ways to be dumb and it's great. Especially when things inevitably go wrong, and even more so when they go wrong but work anyways. It's 'task failed successfully; the game', it's probably the closest we'll ever get to a game where you play as Wile E. Coyote, and it's absolutely incredible.
The Factory Must Grow
Well, to be fair to Factorio, it does take quite a while to finish. I tell new players on the Steam forums 60-80 hours for your first rocket launch. The upcoming expansion will be about as much as the base game, and mods can go even longer.
I've never felt guilty or that I was missing out by not playing a particular video game, but I totally feel this way about Warhammer 40k tabletop. I just don't have the time or money to make an army, yet I love listening to Luetin, Weshammer, and Scholar's Lore as they explore that horrifying, amazing galaxy.
I feel like this about Dark Cloud 2. A friend showed me this very charming, whimsical title of the Playstation 2 era and I loved it but I don't feel compelled to play it for how hard it can get when trying to fullfil every quest and even some exploration.
Grand Strategy games by Paradox. I used to play them, but I'm not a teenager, anymore, with "infinite" amount of time. Nowadays, I just like to watch videos of people completing different challenges on HoI4.
Ironically hoi4 is one of those games I like playing my off time to just put in an hour here and there.