I am part of an event called “nethackathon” where multiple streamers hand over the same character/savegame to the next person in the schedule, like a relay race. What other games do you think would be good for a similar kind of event?
Nethack is ideal for a few different reasons:
- it has a clearly defined objective (win the game)
- permadeath means there are real stakes, we care if each character lives or dies
- a winning run usually takes about 10-20 hours, short enough to be done in the weekend of the event, but also long enough that it can’t be completed by a single person and requires multiple streamers in 2 hour “shifts”
- transferable savegames (we play on a common server)
- the game itself is interesting and deep
What other games do you think would work well in this format and why?
Cassette Beasts is a creature collector with a substantial single-player campaign and a permadeath difficulty option.
You could also have permadeath as a house rule, which would let you play singleplayer games with traditional campaigns. For example, you could play Elden Ring or Borderlands 2 and commit to deleting the character upon death.
A weird suggestion: Keep Talking and Nobody Explodes is a co-op puzzle game about defusing a bomb. The player who’s streaming will have the bomb but stream only audio, not video, and everyone else will have to use the defusal manual to guide them to safely disarm the bomb. You’ll have to advance level by level.