Let’s Play Siren
On Good Games™, and Making Art from Art
Why are Let’s Plays popular? Obviously there’s the entertainment angle, be it from two grumpy guys sitting on a couch and riffing over a game or all out multiplayer madness or choked laughter at the beauty of a physics engine, but that’s just one genre. Some LPs are screenshot compilations, or even wrappers for intense, creative fanfiction. Some are bizarre, surrealist experiments. But another, often less appreciated format is the informative LP, a sort of “game for game’s sake” recording of a playthrough that seeks mainly to show the game itself off. The player provides commentary and context, but the game itself is the star of the show.
Of course, any LP is at least a little informative. ChipCheezum re-records segments of a game tons of times to just get that perfect take. Even Car Boys is about the exploration of a game space and modding community that most people have never even heard about. But to me, the one LPer who best exemplifies the informative LP is supergreatfriend. If you’ve never heard of him, I’m not totally sure how you found me, but I guess that’s besides the point. He tends to LP some of the more avant-garde horror and action games, along with plumbing the depths of ill-moderated content platforms. His best known LP is probably Deadly Premonition, an appreciative look at one of Swery65’s janky but heart-filled adventures.
Supergreatfriend has a gift for looking past the many flaws and difficulties of games to get at what still makes them compelling, letting York ramble on about his favorite movies while his shopping cart of a car flies around and bounces off things completely inappropriately. He knows the most effective tactics and best weapons, and explains them to viewers in his characteristic deadpan, embracing the jank and and always staying positive. He gives these games something that they don’t have by themselves: accessibility.
And this brings us to his latest LP, Siren (Forbidden Siren, if you prefer). Originally released for the PS2 in 2003 and re-released on the PS4 online shop in 2016, Siren is a horror game about a small Japanese town called Hanuda, a death cult, and immortal zombies. It has tank controls, your characters all die in 1 to 3 hits, and all enemies are unkillable, standing back up soon after being gunned down. The puzzles are obtuse and sometimes completely nonsensical, with characters doing things that don’t pay off for hours in the story, and possibly even longer for the player, who experiences the entire game completely out of order, jumping between 10 playable characters all throughout a complicated 3-day timeline. The game constantly sends you back to old stages, with progress locked behind even more obtuse secondary goals that might actually be unsolvable if, in other stages, often with other characters, you haven’t performed seemingly random actions.
The game is a solid wall. The PS4 re-release has achievements, and as supergreatfriend goes over at the end of the game, while about 75% of players have the first achievement, for beating the first level, only 5% have the second, for getting to the stage select screen, maybe a quarter of the way into the game, if that. And it’s easy to see why. This game is frustrating in the extreme. Even as an expert, supergreatfriend has several points of the LP where he admits what he’s about to do is just blind luck, and many times where he dies unintentionally because this game can be shockingly unfair. Going into this game without a guide, you will be stonewalled as early as level 3, where the game introduces the unkillable enemies, gives them guns, and makes it an escort mission, in all its early-2000s-frustratingly-impossible-escort-mission glory. One of the game’s main mechanics is sightjacking, which allows you to look through the eyes of other characters in the level, but unless you have a very strong sense of location, figuring out who these characters are and what they’re even looking at is extremely difficult, and requires a lot of mental mapping that some people just find impossible.
But despite all of that, and sometimes even because of it, I think this game is great. It might even be the best game I will never play myself. The deadliness and invincibility of the enemies create a tense atmosphere and a mood of unrelenting despair that the game never lets up on. The ensemble cast meets a variety of mostly horrible fates, but there are many powerful, complex story arcs and compelling scenes. The non-linear narrative is one of the most creative things I’ve ever seen in a game, with the story masterfully hiding information and keeping your mind jumping to set up some truly fantastic gotcha moments. The entire concept of “seeing through the eyes of another” is explored both as a game mechanic and as a thematic element, with the player themselves looking through the eyes of characters who themselves can look through others’ eyes.
(Note: Minor spoilers this paragraph, major spoilers next paragraph. Just scroll down past Abe if you wanna remain spoiler free)
Right as the game starts to ramp up to its final climax, you jump ahead to a time “X Days Later” (everything in the game is given an exact date and time, making this stand out). In it, you see the final cutscene of the game, minus the last maybe 20% of the game itself, and it’s a total non sequitur. It introduces elements that haven’t shown up anywhere in the game before now. The tone is nothing like the rest of the game. The credits to the game roll with this playing over them. It’s basically impossible not to laugh, to think the game is fucking with you, somehow. But it’s not, at least not in the way you think. The entire rest of the game is spent getting to this moment. And, even better, Every Single Time you make any amount of minuscule progress towards this ending, the game shows you this cutscene again. And again, and again. In games, cutscenes are often treated as a reward for progress, on par with a better sword or another achievement. As you make your way to the end, the game taunts you with the same reward over and over. Eventually you start to smile every time it comes back, because you know you’re getting there, because everything is falling into place in these last few levels. I’ve never seen a game fuck with me like that before. I love it.
The attention to detail in this game is just incredible. I’m only going to post one true spoiler in this article, and I’m going to warn you to stop reading this paragraph here if you don’t wanna see it. Just jump ahead past Abe if you haven’t seen the full game, really. So basically, in the 684AD scene, where Datatsushi is being eaten alive, its dying body is in the shape of the Mana Cross. This is never mentioned anywhere, but it makes perfect, beautiful sense. Datatsushi is the god of the Hanuda cult, something no one but Hisako even knows. But he is still the literal object that they worship, that they put on their grave markers, that has been following you around throughout the entire game. A symbol that feels like it could’ve been mindlessly cribbed from Christianity is actually a central representation of their god, and the game just leaves that there for you to notice, or not, and it’s so fucking good, oh my god.
The game is incredible, and I would never have seen it if not for supergreatfriend’s LP. I know I wouldn’t have the patience for this sort of thing, no matter how good it was. But at the same time, I don’t wish Siren was a movie, or had an easy mode, or was overall more accessible, because the game that shipped has an unmistakable feel to it, and taking out any one part would change that. Even the extremely amateur English voice acting really started to grow on me as the game went on. Siren isn’t perfect, but its extreme, obtuse difficulty is central to the experience.
I don’t think all games need to be accessible on their own, but I do think this game should be experienced by anyone who wants to expand their idea of what video games can be, and here we finally come back to the idea of an informative LP. Like in Deadly Premonition, like in Illbleed, like in Realms of the Haunting, supergreatfriend guides the viewer through a world that they might find frustrating to experience themselves. He edits videos and makes the game flow in ways that a first time player won’t be able to. He reminds the viewer of details they might’ve missed if they weren’t paying attention. He views the game as someone who has experienced it before and really just wants you to see it in the same way.
You could think of these LPs as a sort of “literary companion” to their games, but I think that’s selling them short. There’s an art to making someone see beauty in a game they aren’t playing themselves. There are things in games that make for absolutely terrible watching, and a good LPer needs to know what to keep and what to cut. They need to work with the game, move at its pace but know when to speed it up or slow it down. Like the medium they’re built from, LPs are big investments for the viewer, and it’s your job as the LPer to distill down something compelling out of this, whether it’s your own humor, your incredible skill, or simply the game itself.
I didn’t realize it at first, but my own Dark Souls LP is my attempt at emulating the supergreatfriend style, with cheery optimism and an eye for the kinds of details that most people might miss. I’ve enjoyed most of my LPs, but this one has been special to me. Every time someone tells me they hadn’t noticed this or that detail, or that my videos have given them a new perspective on the game, it makes me feel so good. It’s made me really examine why the game resonates with me so much, and I’m looking forward to doing more LPs like it in the future. It’s the direct precursor to this Medium account, where I’ve taken that same critical eye to other games I’ve played.
So, basically, thanks for Let’s Play Siren, supergreatfriend.
