After impluse-buying a Nintendo Switch to help pass the time during lockdown, I was bought The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild as a gift. It was one of the titles I’d seen that attracted my to the Switch and I was excited to see just how good it was. Keep in mind, I’d not really played a Zelda game since Ocarina of Time on the N64 as a kid.

One of BOTW’s biggest draws is its open-world, almost sandbox style. You can play the game the way you want to, rather than it being a linear journey. For me, this was also its weakness as it turns out I quite like a bit of structure. One of the other drawbacks is that there’s not a tremendous amount of “re-discoverability”. If you put the game down for a while, you’d better hope you remember how it all works or you’ll feel lost pretty quickly. This is where I made my mistakes, and where I left the game for several months — writing it off as ‘not for me’.

This is why I enjoy streaming

I forget now which of us suggested it, but the idea of re-starting the game and streaming my play-through with a guiding hand from my sister suddenly gave me a refreshed reason to stream that aligned with why I wanted to stream in the first place: to be a better gamer, and to have fun.

BOTW is one of my sister’s favourite games — if not her absolute favourite. I knew that being able to bring her in via Discord to point me in the right direction and help me understand more about what I’m doing would help me re-engage with the game. It was also an opportunity to catch up with her since she’s hundreds of miles away and travel isn’t exactly an option at the moment (thanks, COVID-19!).

I usually stream for around 2hrs at a time, so I’m slowly building up a series of VODs and you can watch the first episode right here!

The aim isn’t to be a speed runner, or the technically best player or anything like that. If anything, it’s to be your average gamer. Struggling with Shrines, constantly being defeated by Divine Beasts, and generally sucking with occaisonal flashes of expertise! With my VODs, you’ll find the timestamps for major moments to help you skip to relevant content, such as a particular Shrine or Tower. But if you watch them through, you’ll find that we chat about all sorts of things