End Of Year Update

Hey everyone!
I hope all of you wonderfully wonderful people had a wonderful holiday!

As some of you may already know, the 23 behind the 20 is soon going to be replaced with a 24, meaning the year is coming to an end. I thought this celebrative numerical addition provides a great opportunity to look back at the previous year, to share a bit of what my plans are for the upcoming year and to evaluate the little poll we started earlier this month.

So first the Bloodborne video.

That one is currently baking in the oven at 350 degrees fahrenheit.

It already smells delicious.

There is a bit of Lovecraft in it, it contains some history of architecture, pregnancies, an exploration of the philosophical origins of Bloodborne’s setting and a discussion about the strange origin story behind a decade old french art-film - while still containing a discussion about Bloodborne's level design, it’s bosses and it’s lore.

While it looks to shake up to be quite a delicious video, it probably needs a bit longer in the oven than I first thought.

I hope to be done with it by the end of January - that’s in part because the video turned out to be a bit more ambitious than first intended, but also because I’m taking it a bit slower with that one, because I’m still a bit exhausted from the year behind us.

After the bloodborne vid the content generation engine will go broom-chugga-chugga-vid-vid again, big “the-algorithm-kills-me-otherwise” pinky swear!

So the results of the poll!

As I see it, we have two clear winners, a bunch of topics that you expressed overall interest in and a bunch of topics in which you wonderful people are statistically less interested in.

Celeste and Inscryption are the two videos that got by far the most votes with 81 for Celeste and 62 for Inscryption. I’ll prioritize those two topics and hope to discuss them in the first half of the upcoming year!

Then there are a bunch of topics that all ended up in a similar voting range. Donkey Kong, Fez, Subnautica and Bloodborne all got 40-somthingish votes, which I think is enough interest to justify doing a video on them!

Finally there are a bunch of topics in which you generally gentle people statistically showed less interest in. Namely WoW, Hogwarts Legacy, The Last of Us, Skyrim and Dark Souls.

What to do with those?

Well, I don’t want to scrap those entirely, because a bunch of you still signaled that you’d be interested in hearing me going on endless tangents about completely different topics starting there!

Since each and every single one of the topics got at least a bunch of votes I’ll probably end up doing one out of two things with them.

Some of those ideas and topics I’ll probably end up baking into other videos when it makes sense - there is already a bit of what we would have discussed in a Dark Souls vid in the Bloodborne script.

The other ideas will probably get smaller Patreon videos at some point. I’ll share more about what I have planned here once I actually get to work on them!

So the next year.
The current plan for the first half of 2024 is to do the following videos in that order.

Bloodborne - Wind Waker - Subnautica (that one thematically ties into the Bloodborne video, which is why I want to tackle it soon) - Twilight Princess (if I ever manage to find a used copy of the remaster for less than 90$) - Celeste - Skyward Sword - Inscryption.

That should keep me busy well into summer and probably a bit beyond.

There is no way this will play out as planned, because it never does. Maybe a game like Silksong or the TTYD remake happens in between, maybe a video just doesn’t want to come together and I decide to put it down for a while, maybe Nintendo shows the Switch successor and we chat about that.

Don’t think about that as a definitive roadmap but more like me sharing what I actually planned to do in the first half of 2024 so that we can have a collective laugh together once 2025 rolls around and we look back at it.

Finally the year is coming to an end.

As you all know this means that I am bound by an old demon pact, concluded hundreds of years ago by the very first let’s players - to share my game of the year with you.
Just like all the other gaming YouTubers. (The other ones just don’t like to talk about the demon stuff. But it’s true!)

So what is my game of the year?

Well, normally my answer would be Baldur’s Gate 3.
But.
Look, I love Baldur's Gate 3 just as much as the next kid but the problem with that game is that it just released with tons and tons of serious and game breaking bugs.
That kind of disqualifies it from getting honored as my game of the year for a very simple reason.
Showering games with praise that launch with big technical problems is how we got Cyberpunk or Fallout 76’s famous launches.

The next contenders would be the RE4 remake, Super Mario Wonder and Tears of the Kingdom.
But.
While all three games are great in their own ways - I just can’t shake off the feeling that I played all those years ago already. They just don’t do enough to separate themselves from the games in the series that came before. (Shame on you RE4 Remake for remaking RE4!)

I really enjoyed Dave the Diver, but I don’t think it’s the best thing I played this year.

I was really looking forward to “The Talos Principle 2” yet for whatever reason I bounced off of it pretty early - I probably should give it a second chance though!

Starfield is a train wreck in my humble onion.

I haven't played Alan Wake 2 and Spider Man 2 yet - though I have a feeling I’ll probably end up liking Alan Wake once I finally get to it.

So what’s left?

Well, funnily enough …
the game that ends up being my game of the year …
in one gaming's strongest years ever …
if I’m being totally honest …
is a simple five hour long indie puzzle game.

My game of the year ended up being: “Cocoon”.

It’s the only game this year that I just ended up enjoying for its entire runtime without any asterisks and a game I wholeheartedly recommend to everyone who likes puzzle games.
It’s currently on Game Pass.

Honorable mention to Chants of Sennaar though.
A game that might have ended up being my game of the year … if only I had played it yet.

If any of you feel like sharing what your personal game of the year is and why - I’d honestly love to read your thoughts!

Thank you again for your generous support - you lovely people are incredible!

I wish all of you a happy new year and I am looking forward to sharing lots of videos with all of you in 2024!

Lots of hugs!