When most people do a Let's Play, they usually do it as themselves. No acting, no work of fiction. They are just playing a game and providing commentary on it. However, there are some people who decide to pretend to be somebody else for their let's play.
Not the characters in the game they are playing, but characters completely unrelated to the game. While a regular Let's Play is made as an entertaining walkthrough to the game, these kinds of Let's Plays are almost purely made for entertainment.
As such, these people will often goof around and pretending not to know how to play. Sometimes though, they will take gameplay seriously while keeping in character of whoever they are pretending to be. These kinds of Let's Plays don't finish the games they are playing very often with each game being played as a one shot. Some games do get played to completion like a normal Let's Play, but the focus is mostly to entertain by showing what it would be like if certain fictional characters played video games.
That being said, some of these still have the gameplay and voices recorded simultaneously, so there is often a big chance of the actors unintentionally but noticeably breaking character.
See also Virtual YouTubers, dedicated streamers/content creators who depict themselves with an animated Digital Avatar with varying degrees of Kayfabe, which also features some overlap with this trope.
Examples:
- Believe it or not, The Annoying Orange has a gaming channel
which features the cast of the series playing games as their respective characters.
- On Das Sporking member Silais' sporks of Chrono Cross and The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim (the latter hosted on his own blog) are framed as if the games are being played by the casts of Neptunia and Breath of Fire respectively.
- EthGoesBOOM is, to quote his YouTube channel, "a gaming YouTuber guy who makes silly voices". He dedicates a majority of his videos putting on different voices, acting as the various animatronics from Five Nights at Freddy's, playing games and reacting to videos. Sometimes said videos even devolve into their own little stories that can span throught several episodes.
- Homestar Runner:
- The episode "Videlectrix - Halloween Waggle" has the two employees of the fictional company Videlectrix stumble their way through the Atari game Haunted House.
- The series "Disk 4 of 12" features strong Bad doing lets plays of games that appeared as floppy disks throughout Strong Bad Email.
- The episode "Videlectrix - Halloween Waggle"
- Kizuna Ai is a Virtual Youtuber known for writing blogs and doing Let's Plays. Little to nothing is known about the team that created her and the person who provides her voice.
- Marik Plays Bloodlines, a spin-off of Yu-Gi-Oh! The Abridged Series, in which LittleKuriboh plays Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines in-character as Marik from Yu-Gi-Oh!, with occasional interjections from Bakura from the same.
- A YouTuber going by "The Nerd Gamer" is sporadically releasing episodes of a Republic: The Revolution LP, where he both plays and talks in-character as a suitably ideologized pro-Communist party leader the entire time.
- The Nostalgia Critic: In one episode, The Nostalgia Critic (in character, not as Doug Walker) decides to do a Let's Play of Bart's Nightmare after getting requests to do more video games.
- Petscop is a Let's Play of a fictional game known as Petscop by a character known as Paul.
- Stephen Georg's Ninten Speaks channelnote had a 55 episode "Ninten plays Minecraft" series.
- Two Best Friends Play was this in the early years. Their videos involved Matt and Pat playing exaggerated versions of themselves, with lots of scripted jokes and heavy editing. (And for some reason, they pretended to be Americans and tried to hide that they were actually Canadians.) After they started doing multi-episode, full game LP's, they dropped the fictional personas and just played as themselves.
- Two Saiyans Play: The franchise started with Takahata and Lanipator from Team Four Star as Nappa and Vegeta playing video games. It later had spin-offs with Lani also voicing Krillin and MasakoX voicing Goku.
- Vannamelon has a series of Let's Plays where she roleplays as Fluttershy from My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic.
- Glove and Boots had a (sadly now inactive) seperate gaming channel where puppeteers Damien Eckhardt-Jacobi and Vincent Bova livestream games as their characters Marionote and Fafa.
- Cartoon Network uploaded short YouTube videos of Steven Universe characters playing Save the Light: Peridot, Pearl and Amethyst, and even Onion.
- Joel Haver did a livestream speedrun of Dark Souls III, in-character as Caleb, a small-town dudebro from a few prior videos. A bit later, Caleb did a followup livestream of Elden Ring.
- Sonic the Hedgehog 2: Special Edition is an LP by Docfuture of another game that doesn't exist, allegedly an upgraded port of Sonic the Hedgehog 2 to the Sega 32X. This one parodies Let's Plays as a genre, the Sonic fandom, and the Easter Egg hunting and conspiracy theories surrounding the real Sonic 2 in particular.
