WET | Ep. 1 – Cool People Don’t Use Stairs
🔥 A Friday Night Schedule Gets Hijacked
Some games patiently wait their turn. WET has apparently spent the last seven and a half years plotting an elaborate escape from my Xbox 360 collection.
I’ve wanted to bring this 2009 action game to the stream for years, but it kept being delayed, moved aside and, more recently, becoming slightly cursed. Every time WET appeared on the schedule, something seemed determined to stop it happening.
So this Friday, I finally took drastic action. Our regularly scheduled Red Dead Redemption 2 was postponed, the schedule was rejigged, and Rubi Malone was unleashed.
🎬 About WET
WET is a stylish third-person action shooter built around doing almost everything the least sensible way possible.
Rubi Malone can slide, leap and wall-run through firefights, dual-wield pistols, carve enemies apart with a sword and generally turn every room into something resembling a lost grindhouse action movie.
The Robert Rodriguez and Quentin Tarantino comparisons came quickly on stream, alongside films like Desperado, Equilibrium, Kill Bill and the work of John Woo. With Rubi voiced by Eliza Dushku, there’s also more than a little Faith from Buffy the Vampire Slayer in her attitude.
Basically, subtlety has not been invited.
💿 Seven Years Later, We Finally Begin
This is the beginning of our WET playthrough, although technically Rubi had escaped captivity a couple of days earlier when I tested the game.
I’d been worried I’d lost the disc, only to discover it sitting on top of the Xbox 360 the entire time while I rummaged around looking for it. Then my “quick test” became long enough that I reached Chapter Three and completely forgot to do the sound check.
Naturally, that meant checking the stream audio live instead. What could possibly go wrong?
We’re playing primarily for the story rather than chasing collectibles or perfect scores, and this opening stream carried us through the first five chapters.
⚠️ What Happens in This Episode
We began properly with Chapter One, “Chinatown Rundown”, and after so many years away from WET, there was definitely a period of remembering exactly what sort of game this is.
WET does not want you cautiously hiding behind cover and carefully lining up every shot. It wants Rubi Malone sliding across floors, leaping through the air, running along walls and shooting two people simultaneously while something explodes behind her. Once that rhythm started coming back, I remembered exactly why I’d wanted to bring this game to the stream for so long.
Even the tutorial managed to give us our first official Deathloop after somehow getting reset. That naturally gave chat something else to keep track of, with SpiffyMango starting the Deathloop counter and confidently predicting that I’d finish the game with fewer than 52 deaths.
We’ll see how well that prediction ages.
DrewXRubi also quickly became our unofficial WET consultant, offering advice on upgrades for the infinite-ammo pistols, suggesting we invest in extra health and generally providing useful information while I concentrated on the much more important business of sliding around shooting people.
Chapter One itself went remarkably smoothly, though, and before long we were straight into Chapter Two, “Vehicular Carnage.”
That was where things started getting a little more… WET.
Suddenly we were dealing with shooting, exploding vehicles and quick-time events all at once, and those QTEs became responsible for a suspicious number of Deathloops. I may also have been slightly distracted by reading chat when I was supposed to be paying attention to what button the game wanted me to press.
Obviously, I blame chat entirely.
There was also the small matter of the bridge we were driving across, which appeared to be approximately the same length as the runway from The Fast and the Furious. We just kept going. And going. And going.
Somewhere, presumably, there was a planning committee responsible for this thing.
Eventually, thanks to the mercy of a checkpoint, we escaped the cycle and completed the chapter. But the interesting thing was that Chapter Two wasn’t actually the level I’d been worried about.
That honour belonged to Chapter Three.
When I tested WET earlier in the week, I’d only intended to make sure the game worked and perform a quick sound check. Instead, I became so distracted actually playing it that I completely forgot about the sound check and kept going until I reached Chapter Three, “Boneyard Workout.”
Which meant, naturally, we ended up doing the actual sound check for the stream levels live on stream.
Professional operation we’re running here.
More importantly, Boneyard Workout had already given me a preview of something I absolutely hate in games: time trials.
I like exploring at my own pace. I like looking around. I like working out where I’m going without a clock sitting there silently judging every wrong turn. During testing, this level had gone completely tits up because I kept failing the timed sections, so I’d spent most of the stream knowing that eventually we were going to reach it again.
And then something unexpected happened.
We actually got through it fairly easily.
There were awkward jumps, rapidly disappearing seconds and plenty of concern about finding the correct route, but we weren’t interested in gold medals or silver medals. The objective was simple: survive the bloody thing, get across the finish line and never speak of it again.
The final time trial looked like it might ruin that plan.
We reached a point where the game told us to drop down, which we did, only to discover that neither I nor apparently anybody else could immediately work out where the next checkpoint had gone.
The clock was still running.
About 20 seconds disappeared while I desperately searched the area, increasingly convinced we’d blown the entire attempt. Then I happened to catch sight of another checkpoint above us.
Somehow we got to it.
Even better, it turned out to be the second-to-last checkpoint before the finish line.
We made it.
After all the problems I’d had with that chapter during testing, the supposedly disastrous live attempt was actually the successful one. We escaped Boneyard Workout, received our dual shotguns and even managed the magnificent achievement of earning zero points for the overall performance.
Perfect.
Let’s never discuss that level again.
With the time trials finally behind us, we moved into Chapter Four, “The Dirty Rat,” and immediately returned to the sort of chaos WET is much better at delivering.
By this point, the stream had developed its own vocabulary for dealing with enemies. Guns were accompanied by plenty of “stabby stabby” and “slicey slicy,” while the increasingly frequent piles of bodies inevitably raised the question of whether everybody was, in fact, “dead, Dave.”
Chat was also digging deeper into WET’s whole aesthetic, comparing its action and presentation with Equilibrium, Desperado, John Woo films and Kill Bill. The longer we played, the more that deliberately trashy grindhouse personality became one of the things I loved about coming back to it.
Rage mode only pushed that further, turning fights into bursts of stylised carnage, while Drew suggested using the sword to help maintain the kill chains.
Even Rubi pulling out a harmonica managed to trigger one of the channel’s established rules of survival: harmonicas inevitably lead to dysentery.
Long story.
Chapter Four itself flowed surprisingly smoothly. When we eventually reached the boss, we discovered that his arena was essentially the same location we’d encountered near the beginning of the level. There was one important improvement, however: this time it wasn’t wet and filled with electricity trying to kill us.
The boss received the full benefit of our newly acquired firepower.
Our highly sophisticated strategy involved unloading dozens of shotgun rounds directly into his face until the problem stopped being a problem.
As you do.
That felt like a natural place to finish the stream. We’d already made far more progress than I expected, we’d survived the dreaded time trials and we’d reached a decent stopping point.
There was just one problem.
I was enjoying WET too much to stop playing.
The story was continuing naturally anyway. We’d retrieved information from the bloke we’d just dealt with, and that pushed us straight into Chapter Five and another hunt.
So onward we went.
For quite a while, Chapter Five continued the strange pattern we’d developed where enormous portions of the game would go incredibly smoothly, immediately followed by something attempting to trap us in another Deathloop.
Towards the end, we entered a huge open arena absolutely crawling with enemies. By this point Drew’s earlier advice about arena encounters suddenly became extremely important: rather than endlessly killing enemies as they spawned, we needed to find and close the doors they were coming through.
Simple enough.
Except there were doors everywhere.
I worked my way around the arena closing them and eventually thought we’d dealt with the problem, only to realise there was another entire collection of spawn doors on a different level of the area.
Meanwhile, the enemies had apparently not received the memo that I was trying to solve a logistical problem and continued shooting me.
Things got very, very close.
Cars were exploding, enemies kept pouring into the arena, booze bottles were becoming increasingly important as health pickups, and our remaining health bar eventually reached the point where it looked like Rubi was surviving on approximately one pixel.
Somehow, that pixel was enough.
We shut down the remaining spawns, cleared the fight and completed the chapter.
Our target was then bundled into the boot of the car — luxury accommodation, obviously — and that finally gave us our stopping point for the night.
Five chapters completed in our first proper WET stream.
Considering this game had spent years failing to make it onto the channel, we’d suddenly taken a fairly substantial bite out of it in a single evening.
More importantly, I came away remembering just how much I love this game. The exaggerated action, the grindhouse visuals, Rubi’s attitude and Eliza Dushku’s performance all give it a very particular personality. Rubi still feels almost like an extension of Faith from Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and WET has some of the energy I could imagine that long-discussed Faith spin-off having possessed.
This also isn’t going to become another game that disappears back onto the shelf.
We’re continuing on Tuesday.
We’ve already completed the opening five chapters, and I’m thinking another couple of Tuesday streams may actually be enough to finish the whole thing. We’re not worrying about collectibles or trying to perfect every challenge; we’re pushing through the story, enjoying the ridiculous action and seeing where Rubi takes us.
The stream ended by passing that chaos onwards, as we raided into DashDucks and sent everyone across for the next adventure.
And there was one final mystery left over from the evening. I mentioned another Xbox 360 game I remembered owning — something with a World War Two-era setting and a vaguely similar atmosphere — but couldn’t for the life of me remember what it was called.
Editor me has since solved that one:
It was Velvet Assassin.
So I may have to go rummaging through the Xbox 360 discs again.
Preferably this time I’ll check the top of the console first.
📺 Watch the Episode
If grindhouse gunfights, swords, Deathloops, questionable driving infrastructure and my long-running feud with time trials sound like your kind of evening, you can watch the full episode here:
Watch WET Episode 1 on YouTube
You can also follow the entire adventure through the WET series playlist and visit the Dr Ravenholm YouTube channel.
If you enjoy the episode, drop a like, tell me your favourite moment in the comments and subscribe so you don’t miss Rubi’s next rampage.
🌃 Join the Adventure Live
WET isn’t staying buried in the Xbox 360 collection this time.
We’re returning Tuesday and continuing until the game is finished. After clearing five chapters already, I suspect another couple of Tuesday streams might be enough to see this wonderfully ridiculous journey through to the end.
Come join the chaos live on Twitch or YouTube. Chat advice genuinely shaped this first session — and when the shooting finally stopped, we sent the community onward with a raid into DashDucks.
Next Friday, meanwhile, we return to our regularly scheduled Red Dead Redemption 2.
🌐 Community & Links
The stream may end, but the crew doesn’t disappear when the screen goes dark. There are plenty of places to stay connected between adventures.
When the red light comes on, you’ll find me here:
Twitch · YouTube
For the conversations that continue after the credits:
Join the Discord community
Follow the signal across the wider network:
TikTok · Bluesky · Instagram · Facebook · Threads · X
If you want to help keep the operation running:
Channel Merchandise · Support via Streamlabs
And beyond the gaming bunker, there’s more to explore:
Business Centre · Download the Brochure · About Me · Blog
🎞️ Until Tuesday
I’d forgotten just how much I love WET. It’s messy, stylish, ridiculous and feels like playing some forgotten grindhouse film where Faith from Buffy decided guns and swords were the answer to everything.
I’m also going rummaging through the Xbox 360 collection, because the other game I couldn’t remember on stream was Velvet Assassin.
For now, Rubi gets a few days off. Tuesday, we reload.
— Dr Ravenholm
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