Yo.

As you may know, I love watching Let’s Plays off YouTube. It’s a favorite hobby of mine. Yep, playing videogames and watching total strangers play videogames each take up a juicy portion of my day. I am by no means some kind of Let’s Play connoisseur or whatever, but because I spend so much of my time viewing them I figure I really should be producing something out of this consumption.

Therefore, I present the first in a weekly series of posts where I give my opinion on this week’s (or rather last week’s) best Let’s Play.

Before we get to it, some personal criteria I should mention: for the most part, the only Let’s Plays I watch are “Blind” Let’s Plays, which means that said Let’s Player is playing said game for the first time, recording his or her first impressions and reactions for everyone to see. I also dislike unfinished playlists, and further more, I usually don’t watch LPs of videogames I have never played myself.

Though this particular case is one of the exceptions:

Rose Erifnosi Plays The Path

For those who don’t know, The Path is an indie computer game from Tale of Tales that adapts the Red Riding-hood fable into a psychological horror game. I have never played the game myself — I’m a total coward — but I love watching others play the game and experience its horrors and strangeness, plus I enjoy the discussions that crop up after the game is finished. I usually like watching LPs of horror games because I get a detached feel for the game’s tension and because I get to watch people scream in fear. (So funny.)

But The Path is a little different: it has no jump-scares, no blood, no explicit depictions of any violence at all; just a constant atmosphere of foreboding, as well as some truly mind-scarring imagery. I’ve heard the game described as a videogame inkblot test: the story is so vague and the gameplay is so striking that whoever plays it must come up with their own conclusions about it. This aspect makes it an easy fit for Blind Let’s Plays.

Rose Erifnosi jumps right into the madness with almost no idea what to expect and runs through the entire game in 35 videos varying in length from 7 to 18 minutes. Her bright personality and earnest attempt to empathize with the characters merged with her genuine reactions create a compelling commentary, and she tries her hardest to answer the questions in the game, going so far as to upload extra videos where she does little else than verbalize her opinions.

(And of course I like to see her squirm in fear. This is a horror game, after all.)

Unfortunately, she keeps a pretty loose leash on her editing, so some of the videos tend to drag on and on without interesting commentary or gameplay, but at least she had the foresight to label said videos as possibly dull, so feel free to skip them.

Frankly, I watched very few LPs last week, so this first entry is probably quite one-sided, but among the playlists I watched this was the best of the bunch.

Thanks for reading, and happy gaming.