Last night I introduced my Switch to the new capture card – they don’t get along perfectly, but I think it’s the beginning of a beautiful friendship.
I’m also really impressed that my cheap, cheap internet has the fortitude to handle both streaming and playing online at the same time. I don’t know very much about how internets work, but I imagined that doing both at once would cause some degradation to one or the other. Doesn’t seem to be the case, though! So that’s something else I can do now.
It’s the big day! I think I’ve done a pretty darn good job of enjoying the season this year, and it helps that I capped it off with a playthrough of my most favouritest horror game of all time. Maybe I should have made some time to watch the movie at some point… Oh well! Embed below!
When I decided -a couple weeks ago- that I was going to play Gynophobia on stream, I had no idea that it was from the same developer as Shadows Peak. You don’t have to watch very far into the video below to hear the contrasting delight and terror in my voice as I boot up the game and learn this fact.
Gynophobia didn’t imprint on me nearly as strongly as Shadows Peak, and it’s clearly the older of the two games, but I do have some appreciation for it. Gynophobia played with my expectations more than a little, though it’s definitely a lot more straightforward than its younger sibling. Still, a fun, wild ride – and my playthrough is much more watchable at a brisk 42 minutes.
Honestly I can’t wait to crack into Andrii Vintsevych’s most recent game, Witch Hunt, at some point. But it’s not in the cards for tonight’s stream. No, this week is going to be something a little more special…
I don’t actually expect anyone to watch these things. They’re more for me to rediscover and reminisce about in six or seven years from now. This livestream of A Girls Fabric Face, in particular, is hilarious(ly bad) because of just how frightened I was by it. But stuff like this gets me. I just can’t deal with haunted houses or ghosts. I just can’t do it.
I really should be a little more prompt in writing posts for the VODs of my Twitch streams, but the fact of the matter is that said VODs don’t often go live for about a week after the stream anyway. When I just use the raw footage from Twitch, it’s not so bad, but sometimes I need to cut it a little, which takes time. Also I’m very stubborn about making sure that no video goes live on my YouTube channel without a thumbnail, and those… they take even longer. Because Photoshop is… well, it’s not hard. But I’m very lazy. Also, I don’t have an editing team to do all that admin stuff for me.
Lastly, and very specifically to this case, my PC decided to up and die after I ended the stream embedded below. Sophie’s Curse was so scary that the power supply straight up ceased functioning. Or something. Or maybe Vernon’s Legacy was so boring that the computer just couldn’t go on. That was the game I was streaming before Sophie, and I cut it out of the VOD because holy crap was it ever boring.
Anyhow, Sophie’s Curse was a lot of fun! I’m glad it ended up being something that I enjoyed. It’s a frantic game of ghost cat-and-mouse, and it’s absolutely terrifying. It had never really occurred to me before, but good sound design is like 90% of creating an effective spooky atmosphere, and Sophie’s Curse has it in spades. From the unrelenting pitter-patter of the rain outside, to disembodied screams and demonic breathing that comes out of nowhere, your ears are constantly under assault by a cavalcade of spooky sounds. It then becomes a guessing game as to which sounds are there to let you know you’re about to die, and which are there just to give you the jibblies.
I’m also very surprised that I managed to beat it. Or, I guess it was more accurate that I was concerned that I wouldn’t be able to finish it. It seemed like one of those games where you can get a handle on it, but the difficulty just ramps up so high that you’re almost dependent on good RNG to succeed. Fortunately, the normal mode was a lot more lenient than I expected, and though Sophie did provide a good amount of pushback, I was able to come out on top in the end. Hooray! I have no intention of ever giving the “Nightmare” mode a real try, though. I think that “Curse” difficulty was juuuuust right for me.
Any hey, if you’re reading this on the day it’s posted… I’ll be doing another Twitch stream tonight. Seems like it’s going to be a Friday night staple, at least for a little while. Why don’t you drop in for a while?
It’s Canadian Thanksgiving Eve, and after a little reflection, I was none too surprised to come to the conclusion that I’ve got a heck of a lot to be thankful for in my life. If you need to find something to be thankful for, though, might I recommend this VOD version of my Twitch stream of an indie horror game called Shadows Peak?
I’m not gonna lie, it seems pretty generic at the start. But then I get jumpscared by a whale carcass! Who could have ever seen that coming!?
But seriously, this game goes places I never would have expected. It’s one of those precious few games that have genuinely caught me off guard and surprised me. I don’t dare say anymore. It is admittedly a long watch at almost 5 hours, but I honestly think it’s worth checking out. And if you would rather ignore my video and play the game for yourself? I’d absolutely endorse that! It’s not a masterclass in subverting expectations like Doki Doki Literature Club, but I had a good time with it and would give it a hearty recommendation.
I set up a Twitch.tv account a few weeks ago. Finally. You would think that this is something I would have done ages ago, if only to follow streamers that I like to watch. But… I don’t actually watch any streamers. Not live, anyway. I can’t be bothered to follow other people’s schedules.
Anyway, it’s been one heck of a learning experience. The most important lesson being that I really need to make sure that my audio levels are set properly. I’ve done two streams now, and both times, getting the game and mic audio tracks to play nice has been a giant hurdle. So I’ve actually gone ahead and done a whole buttload of testing for this week’s stream.
Oh yes, did I not mention? My plan is to stream on Friday nights, and I have christened it the Friday Night Spooker Stream. Because… staying up too late playing spooky games is what I like to do on a Friday night anyhow. And this is also a great way to motivate me to continue working through my massive steam backlog.
Last weekend I played through Oxenfree, which is one of those rare games I bought purposely on Steam, and didn’t just get in a bundle. I’ve actually wanted to play Oxenfree since it was released, but just never made the time. When Friday came around and I was looking for a game to kick off the stream with, Oxenfree just happened to be installed, and I knew that it was a 4-5 hour playthrough. Perfect!
As I mentioned before though, the stream didn’t exactly work as planned. I spent the first couple minutes listening to the stream’s audio through my laptop, and it seemed fine, but three-ish hours in, I was informed that my mic audio was almost completely drowned out. Whoops! Worse yet, I didn’t even end up really solving the problem. The VOD version is up on my YouTube channel (embedded below), if you feel like checking out how bad it was. (At least you can still watch the playthrough of the game.)
