2023 Year in Review

I haven't done one of these in a hot minute (I think the last one I did was all the way back in 2020?), so I'm doing a year in review, where I take a look at how I've been progressing in all of my hobbies over the past year and look back on how it went.

To start off, speedrunning has been, to say the least, a roller coaster. At the very start of the year, I was blessed by GamesDoneQuick to do a run of Chapter 2 of Poppy Playtime for AGDQ 2023, including an interview that kungfufruitcup did with me. The run by itself went great, with AstralSpiff doing really well on commentary and AnEternalEnigma being fun on the hosting side, but there's some behind the scenes details about the run that make it so special to me. For starters: the fact that I had AstralSpiff on commentary. AstralSpiff is a big inspiration to me in the horror gaming space, with his videos exploring horror games, whether the videos involve challenge runs or speedruns, being really fun to watch and informing the types of horror games I wind up playing. In fact, his video on the 100% speedrun for Poppy Chapter 2, as well as his submission of Poppy Chapter 1 to SGDQ 2022 (that ended up getting accepted) is what inspired me to grind both chapters in the first place. The sheer grind I went through with both chapters, Chapter 2 in particular, is something I don't think will happen with any of my other speedgames ever again. (Seriously, I went *HARD* on Poppy speedrunning in 2022)

Outside of Poppy, I went hard on speedrunning in general in 2023. The new Amnesia game, The Bunker, came out in June 2023, and I got very respectable times in all of the main categories. I also got into more mascot horror speedruns in Joyville and the Garten of Banban series, the latter of which I wound up running on the GDQ channel on the GDQ Hotfix show Awfully Silly, and the former I wound up getting a few world records in that still stand today. I also improved my times a lot in vanilla Scorn, the surprise Anniversary Update for Slender: The Arrival, and At Dead of Night, and I got very respectable times in both of those as well.

Shifting gears from speedrunning, let's talk about vtubing. If 2020 was the year where my activity in the Twitter RP space exploded, 2023 was the year where my activity in the vtuber community exploded. It's a community that's already existed for a few years now, but I only recently got into it starting in late 2022/New Year's 2023.

And let me tell you, the amount of genuine generosity and feeling of community I've seen and felt in these vtubers' streams rivals that of what I felt in the speedrunning scene and Games Done Quick, a community I've been a part of for the better part of my entire life. The new revisions of their models, and the lore videos to go along with it, are some of my most anticipated events of the whole year. The creativity in putting these lore videos and elaborate streams together, as well as fostering a welcoming chat and community, is something that deserves to be celebrated (which we did get this year with filian putting together the VTuber Awards). This growth in the vtuing scene was so big in 2023 alone, in fact, that I decided to become a vtuber myself. The plans for this are still a work-in-progress, but I plan to commission art and rigging for a Live2D model starting in early 2024, and go from there. It'll take a lot of work and planning behind the scenes, but I think it'll be worth it.

Circling back to speedruns (and general gaming), there's lot of new games I'm really excited to speedrun and play onstream, between Honkai: Star Rail, Alan Wake 2, Persona 5 Tactica, and the many Backrooms and mascot horror games that almost surely exist or are about to come out. I'm also smack in the middle of pretty lengthy set of playthroughs I've been doing with the AI: The Somnium Files games, and both of those games, as well as Alan Wake 2, have brought me down rabbit holes plot-wise I wasn't expecting in the slightest, and have really cool characters. I've also gone through some pretty personal stuff (which I won't elaborate on here) that have challenged me as a person, especially in the latter half of the year with world events going on, but so far, I've come out the other side okay.

As far as Twitter RP goes, my main verse by far is Honkai: Star Rail. It is my underdog pick for 2023 game of the year, and I love the story and characters to death.

But yea, that's by and large what my 2023 looked like. Here's to 2024 being even better :)