REVIEW : Watch Me Stream My Mental Breakdown (PC)
Study, Stream, or Work on the Farm?
Some games will test your intellectual prowess in a fight of wits, while some will challenge your mettle when it gets to might and magic. In Watch Me Stream My Mental Breakdown, you play as a friendly but unmotivated panda named Pochi in a game that checks to see if you have what it takes to become the ultimate streamer.
Now, it’s not very often that you can play a game about playing games—or rather, play a game about streamer playing games. Fights consist of you warding off commenters on the Internet with either funny acts of pacification or rage-induced comebacks that feed the trolls, all under the guise of a quirky little card game. That alone and the fact that you’re a streaming panda, for morality’ sake already makes for an amazingly unique title (plus, none of the humans around you seem to notice that you’re a big fluffy bear).
Ultan Games describes it as a “story deck-builder about playing games all day and proving your father wrong”, and in a nutshell, the game is exactly that. You have such high hopes about the lives of the rich and famous that all you ever want to do in life is stream yourself playing video games until you get picked as a partner and rake in all the dough. Your farm folk parents especially your dad have other ideas because college isn’t cheap and they’re just so darn proud of their small boy in the city. But chasing your dreams and living in the real world are on the opposite ends of the spectrum, and you can’t just sit around all day and hope that life will magically turn out great for you.
This, ingeniously, is where the important resource management mechanic comes in. The play is excruciatingly difficult when it comes to managing IRL difficulties because adulting is a thing and the fight is real. As every day goes by in your schedule, you can choose to rest all day to restore your “mental health” bar, go out and get a job or stay in and stream because that’s your final goal.
But here’s where it gets tricky performance can earn you lots of money but will surely take a toll on your mental well-being and physical health. You can go on a streaming streak, but your mental health gets a hit every time you try to fend off trolls. You can recharge it by relaxing, but if you hit the sack early how are you going to give the rent when it’s overdue at the end of the month? If you do make a few bucks from streaming you still have to pay taxes when the month ends, because life sucks.
Picking one option over another will efficiently use up a whole day, and each new day brings its own set of problems. There’s a bit of a randomized effect when it comes to daily events, as you might wake up with a migraine in the middle of the night and lose a mental health point, or a friend of yours might ask for help setting up a streaming channel of her own (you can also choose to either lend a hand or skip it altogether). While the natural progression for the story will still happen chronologically (with hilarious results, I promise you), what happens in between can depend on previous choices you make. There are multiple endings too, so you have to go through different playthroughs to see how Pochi’s life will turn out (here’s a quick spoiler-free tip: ramen is not a diet).
While this part-point-and-click, part card-battler hybrid game is incredibly intriguing, I’m pretty torn. I do enjoy the resource management aspect of the painfully realistic game (being a streamer is hard; why do people even do it?), but sometimes, I just want to keep playing the card game because it’s very pleasant in itself. Grievously, there’s no skip function to go through all the dialogue and events, because at the end of the day, I just want to play that board game.
Because it’s a great card game. The simplicity of the card game’s mechanics doesn’t take away any of its fun factors. You typically pick your battles by picking the channel or style you want to stream in. There are 3 skill traits in every deck, namely, Shrewdness, Ego, and Knowledge. These boards have their unique moves you can use, but you also have to pay attention to the genre of the play you’re streaming as well as the audience. For example, playing an action game with teens as your audience will get you major points when you keep using your Ego cards to bully trolls into a hole, but they may increase your Toxicity level and render your channel un-sponsor-able by ads.
Overall, Watch Me Stream My Mental Breakdown is unique, but I feel like there’s more untapped potential to it. Each playthrough gets a little more comfortable because you keep the cards you earn at the end of each run. I kind of wish there was a story mode and a card game mode where you can just play cards all day instead of being forced to go through the whole calendar and every single dialogue scene over and over again.
REVIEW : Turrican Flashback (PS4)
