I think one of the most embarrassing things I’ve ever cried at is the my dinner w andre episode of community lmfaoo. I’ve never even liked that show either so maybe I’m just a crazy emotional bitch

this is good :-) I like this :-) feeling like this as someone who gave up their original career path in the arts many years ago now at this point :-) the game def might be seen as romanticizing the artistic path which I think can be dangerous but I don’t think it pats itself on the back too much at least I was able to look over that

(also I finally got a laptop so that I could play weird obscure stuff like this and rpg maker games so if anyone has any good recs a cheap laptop can handle pls comment them)

I bet all the old ppl in the universe are having a field day rn, bet they’re all drinking surge and eating dunkaroos while playing this and talking about how life used to be sm better. bet my weirdo 35 y/o conspiracy theorist coworker that actually still lives w his parents and is grossly flirty towards me is is rlly excited rn. as for the game itself idk seems hollow asf from the very few races I played, cheapo endorphin rush from placing first in the same gameplay loop that vampire survivors suffers from, but idk at least that game had a decent aesthetic and not the very tacky nineties version of cyber-aesthetics that is seemingly present in every game in this series.

idk I think the walmart ds one seems a lot better….
that’s like a little reductive, this is rlly cool and well designed, like everything from character designs to layout of the house is all very inspired, but also I finished this like three days ago and I just have nothing to say rlly. cool stuff going on with the whole family dynamic, I think that’s rlly cool and like a better and more true version of the actual “underbelly of suburbia” that a lot of horror writers try and fail to tap into, but also it and most things in this game aside from the actual design of it is so like undercooked

last weekend I was supposed to work at my job both days both closing shifts but instead I went with my boyfriend to go visit his family. his family are at this point in my life basically my family, they’ve taken me in in every way and treated me as one of their own, regardless of my faults or shortcomings and not even taking into account that I’m not blood related at all, they are my family. on Sunday night me my boyfriend and his youngest sister went to the beach at sunset, me and his sister shared a salad and all of us afterwards kind of retreated into ourselves as we sat on the beach. I just laid down in the sand and listened to the waves and the people talking, a child came up to us and asked if we wanted our future told, in moments like these I feel surrounded by God, I feel surrounded by life and like I am actively being looked out for by someone or something that I can’t wrap my head around fully. I never would have imagined that this would be my life, I thought my life would be a lot different and I thought I would be much more important, but apparently I am important in my boyfriends eyes and his family’s eyes, my family’s eyes, and I think I am important in God’s eyes.

I don’t want this review to come off as overly preachy or without some level of context. I am not a devout Christian, I believe organized religion is by and large evil, I believe religious people in general contort their beliefs to harm others, I believe the church has done more harm than it’s done good, I believe that Pentiment believes all this too. so it’s definitely a bias I share w the game. I have not stepped into a church since I was a kid, I haven’t prayed in years. that’s not what religion to me is and that’s not what faith to me is, that’s not what god to me is, God to me is the wind I felt on the beach and the relaxation I felt overcome my body.

every conversation that my boyfriend my sister and me had that weekend ended up circling around the same topic. how hopeless and how bleak everything feels right now, how truly boring this life is. I was born post y2k and pre 9/11 to a father and mother who were too immature to have me, a mother who told me that if abortions didn’t go against her religion she wouldn’t have had me. I was born into uncertainty and so were the rest of my generation. and as soon as we started to find our footing then Covid happened and that did kind of set everything back in lots of ways. there’s another recession about to happen and inflation is awful and everything feels so uncertain for children of a certain age, all three of us have several years in between us but all are temporarily stuck at this crossroads waiting for the world to get better before we make any big plans. but at least for me when sitting on that beach that anxiety was lifted off me, and I think off them too as no one really spoke for the time we were there, everything felt right.

I would feel weird talking this personally about a game without giving some context as to my religious background. up until my tweens I went to both a religious fundamentalist school and church, it terrified me and instilled within me a deep religious paranoia that’s only exacerbated by me having obsessive compulsive disorder. throughout my teens I did not think of religion or spiritualism at all especially given the fact that my mother became more of a religious fanatic and I would often see her awake at 4 am knelt down praying. I wanted nothing to do with it esp. considering the fact that it brought my family no solace or comfort seemingly, that it only made them more bitter and resentful. later in my teens I would become rlly religious and almost holier than thou in a way that now seems rlly cringey and lame and now I have just settled into some loose Christianity flavored spiritualism than anything else. I realize that religion, esp, western judeo-christian religions are smth for privileged ppl. despite plenty of problems w my biological family I rlly am a privileged girl, I haven’t known that much struggle in my life. my bf on the other hand is wildly different from me in that way. his entire family was very standardly catholic, not in an overbearing way just very middle of the road catholicism, but with coming from a poor family and having to deal w the fallout of Covid and just worsening financial situations they are no longer rlly a religious family. and I don’t blame them, religion like all hobbies or all beliefs or ideologies that ppl spend too much time pooping thought into are for the privileged and the wealthy.

this is a theme throughout each act of pentiment. the balance between devoutness and wealth. we see this through food and the meals the player character has with npc’s, brothers and sisters of kiersau abbey who are much more willing to chastise u for speaking out of turn or saying anything that can be misconstrued as sacrilegious have large bountiful meals that often times aren’t even finished fully while the ppl down below in tassing go hungry. but meals with the townsfolk and peasants of tassing oftentimes go much more smoothly and it seems like they’re going out of their way to secure both ur spot and ur comfort at their dinner table. my biological family very rarely had meals at a dinner table, most times we all fended for ourselves, made our own meals, ate by ourselves. but when I am with my boyfriend’s family I always know there’s a spot for me at the table, to have a meal with them, to share a memory with them. the first year or so that I was around them I didn’t know how to go about this, it made me uncomfortable to eat in front of them, now I look forward to it and see the table as smth communal rather than just someplace to eat. this is echoed not only in pentiment’s dinner scenes but also in fx’s the bear and any anthony bourdain series, two things that that pentiment’s dinner scenes often reminded me of in the way all showcase the passing of thoughts and ideas and beliefs and heritage through sustenance. at some point in act 2, a character that was rude and haughty in the previous act now is hospitable and offers you some of their good apples. it reminded me a lot of a recent episode of American dad where the smith family end up on a deserted island with no memory of their past lives and no idea on how to escape, they’re stuck w a tv that only plays an ad for gold top nuts. through this ad they’re able to bond and through past cultures they’re able to build the base for a new culture and a new society, the episode ends w them fully understanding who they are and back at their house, unable to give up on tradition they again share a dinner of gold top nuts and make a promise that they’ll put out their good nuts for each other.

at the heart of pentiment is exactly what the smiths were doing by rewatching that ad over and over again, the passing down of thoughts and customs and beliefs and ideas and ideologies from one society to make an altogether new one. it’s a sentiment similarly echoed at the end of guns of the patriots when solid snake says “We can tell other people about - having faith. What we had faith in. What we found important enough to fight for. It's not whether you were right or wrong, but how much faith you were willing to have, that decides the future.”, that is the core of what pentiment is saying as well but with twenty additional years of history behind it. everything that’s happened between 2001 and 2021 is here, present and accounted for, every significant historical moment from 9/11 to the Covid pandemic makes its way into the subtext of pentiment. it’s a game about the history of the 1500’s but viewed through the lens of the 21st century and informed through everything that’s happened in the last twenty years.

games critic and essayist noah Caldwell gervais said in his resident evil retrospective It Takes A Few Years For The New Rot To Settle In Though. It’s a quote that I was haunted by throughout every act of pentiment, an idea that is always at play when examining how exactly did andreas mailer end up in tassing, what led to these terrible things and why must these terrible things repeat and repeat and repeat ad nauseam, much farther than when act 3 ends and much farther than 2023. we have built our towns and our cultures and our lives on the backs and the buildings and the bones of others and they all always come crashing down and we always rebuild them back on the same rot and decay.

constantly I was also thinking of otessa moshfegh’s lapvona and the adult swim animated series moral orel, both of those are also about religious towns and how religious communities function. all three are very much so tragedies as well though, humanistic and very loving tragedies, in these stories there aren’t evil per se. just ppl that are cruel and misguided and blind and who contort words that are supposed to be meant as comfort to bring harm to their towns. none of these pieces of media spend time damning the worst ppl in these towns, instead all of the time is spent making sure u understand how these communities sprung up and how they allowed for ppl to take control and turn them into smth quite fascistic. instead we spend time sympathizing w ppl ur supposed to hate and learning ugly truths about ppl who at first glance ur supposed to love or be endeared by. hope is what allows ppl to keep living after being wronged and it’s also what allows ppl to continue wronging others.

the poster for this game I find so clever and so beautiful, the body of the player character is detailed and hard at work, but the face is deliberately clouded. a messy brushstroke that hasn’t been filled in yet. your andreas is not my andreas and vice versa, he is someone that’s shaped by your own personal feelings on god, nature, religion, love, art, family, friends, sex, the church, and the future. he is a blank slate at the start of each new game and to each new player but over the course of the game he becomes his own person due to decisions and backgrounds u have locked him in to, some things are unable to change, some things happen regardless. if u quit the game halfway through there are things that still happen regardless of how u played andreas or how I played andreas. the abbey stays almost identical in between the chapters, the monks and sisters that live up there greet you still with the same mix of hate spite love and righteousness, but the town changes and the ppl within the town changes. decisions u make still affect everyone years and years down the line just as they do in real life.

you see characters in act 2 and act 3 that almost function as what you, the player character, could’ve ended up like if u made different decisions and if some decisions u weren’t locked into from before u even press new game. brief glimpses of who u could be playing as if Andreas in act 1 wasn’t written in such a purposeful way, if he wasn’t born to a life of privilege, a life where it’s okay to be an artist, where it wasn’t okay to play Andreas as u did. brief glimpses of the non player characters and how that could’ve been your fate. you might’ve ended up like Paul or Casper in act 2 or Anna and Ursula or even some of the younger sisters of the poor Clare’s in act 3. it reminded me a lot of a scene from the last season of six feet under where the youngest child of the Fischer family and the only artist in it Clare goes to an art exhibition put on by her old art school friends. she hasn’t seen them in months, she dropped out of school and she’s working an office job, she hasn’t picked up a camera in months, things feel uncertain for her. I love this scene and I love these characters in pentiment that act as a mirror to the player character, It made me reflect on how my life did not need to play out like this and how if I did anything differently or took different paths maybe I would’ve ended up somewhere completely different and maybe I would be someone completely different. in my senior year of hs almost every single day I was working on a project of some kind with several different people. I made what felt like very big very important connections that would get me to the next step. everyone told me I was rlly good and ppl younger than me treated me as a mentor and ppl older treated me as someone on their level. I had made it in my head and then randomly on a fluke I gave it up, I became uninspired and I became jilted and I gave it up. I’m 23 now and I don’t anything to show for it artistically, in the past couple years I’ve made peace with that, I’m okay and even happy with that. I’ve seen and kept tabs on the people I used to collaborate with and work with, all are still working and almost all have improved their talents. but I’ve done almost nothing creatively since high school, but I’m happy. straight out of high school and just a little while after turning eighteen I moved in with someone I didn’t know that well and I’ve been here ever since. And I think to some extent the fact that I’m doing much better now in all ways has smth to do with having faith, not even faith in god or a god but just a blind level of faith.

For the past three years hbo has put out a rlly delightful documentary series called how to with John Wilson. each episode is about how to master a new topic or hobby but also it never ends up being rlly about that, but instead about how to form connections and how communication works in a world where that’s all but impossible. The season that’s currently airing will be its last and this Sunday’s episode felt like both its darkest and most uplifting. throughout the episode Wilson is reminded that he doesn’t rlly matter, doesn’t matter to his alma mater or to hbo or to the next generation or to the art world in general. there’s a really sad fucking just depressing moment of him standing outside of the Elon musk time magazine party and looking down at the streets below as he records a billboard for his own show, he narrates how he’s worked hard for this and ultimately it doesn’t mean much to him and hasn’t made him feel the way he thought it was gonna make him feel. instead after that he winds up at a competition for the largest grown pumpkin. after an entire episode where he seemingly is feeling down on himself and where he is artistically he winds up at a gathering of ppl where there’s a real sense of community. the entire show has been for me about the growing disconnect there is between us all esp. post-covid. that one of the only places he can find a real sense of community and belonging is at a pumpkin growing competition. it almost feels cyclical to the pilot episode where he tries to learn how to make small talk. in one of the only pre-covid shot episodes of the entire series he meets a man on a trip to Cancun, everyone else is having fun at spring break but John Wilson and this man are disconnected in a culture of disconnection and through that are able to bound by breaking down the barriers of what’s considered small talk.

it will be harder to have real conversations with ppl than it already is. we will be further and further disconnected from everyone as years go by but I think as long as there are days like tassing in 1545 cancun in 2019 or the beach at sunset in 2023 that there will always be small moments of genuine connection w other ppl

dude I just think the world is so fucked bc this is one of the only games this year I’ve actually been excited for and four years ago when I was an annoying nlog I would’ve made fun of anyone who actually played this but now I’m old and I play this on my breaks at work. rlly cute fun game, seems like a lot of work and time and genuine love went into this which is a bit unexpected. the map is like hella detailed and pretty big for this kind of game, plays more like an adventure game rather than a life sim. not rlly a sanrio girly but keroppi is my fave ^_^

hits its peak way too early w chapter 2. rlly gorgeous stuff there thematically, like revisiting all these years and all these moments that one brother couldn’t be there for the other. we watch and read through years of someone’s life happen in just minutes and we know that we can’t stop the inevitable. reminds me of other rlly good media about never knowing someone who was such a big fixture in ur life, stuff like aftersun and funhome and silent hill shattered memories. more than anything though it reminded me of jeffrey eugenides virgin suicides specifically the moments describing the basement where a party was held for the first and last time before the first Lisbon sister killed herself. how the rot and the despair took its toll on the party food and decorations still up in the basement, time continued moving on even if it felt like the rest of the world stopped, at its best moments that’s what quantum break feels like.
majority of the game after that point feels like an excuse for rlly fun set pieces and rlly gorgeous maps and visuals but nothing great holding it up, pretty apparent the writers took a lot of cues from damon lindleof and writers like him, still good and fun, I’ll continue control at some point soon I think

-wanted to play this since it released,, its fucking bad
-man fuck swery, dude is kinda very problematic. like Ik lots has been said about the deadly premonition games but it’s even bad here. anyone who isn’t the main character is written as a stereotype of their gender/sexuality/race. mf went to the david lynch school of writing and his fans went to the same school as david lynch fans ie excusing a weirdos actions bc of some thin veneer of irony on the creators parts. idrc if it’s supposed to be campy or whatever that doesn’t excuse one dimensional writing and forced mysteries lol
-sucks that the machismo brainrot of early 2010’s action games infected auteurs overseas too. idk u can see the kind of gross nu metal sexism infect work that seems interesting like this and metal gear rising and shadows of the damned to the point that it’s just this hollow irony poisoned campy thing but made for straight men
-literally looks like foodfight…
-music here is very often rlly good and an actual standout!! there’s a very good vocal track buried in here but there’s also this horrible irish/celtic punk song in here because seemingly if this got more episodes it would’ve ripped off the departed
-the bald evil guy looks and sounds exactly like joe biden it’s fucking crazy
-WHY the Boston police department called the BPD lmfaooo

-undeniably so fucking jingoistic and patriotic it’s kind of sickening in like a /neg way. I mean I wanna give the devs some excuse here, 2001 was a wildly diff time in American history and hopefully the sequels calmed down politically but also I doubt post 9/11 games do at all and by the time they do they’re so caught up in their silly goofy lore. also idk I have had to excuse right wing/libertarian art I like a lot more than I like this but still leaves a bit of a gross taste in ur mouth.
-suppose it helps that the actual plot here is a fucking bore. master chef and blue minx Cortana boring fucking characters, idc about them or what happened to them or why ur fighting aliens lol. which sucks cuz the world here is so fully formed and fleshed out but I’m not watching rlly boringly directed cutscenes to figure out how we got here nor am I reading some nerd ahh book.
-environmental storytelling here hits though, like I feel like I’m able to glean enough from how the maps are laid out to come out w a more satisfying plot line than whatever is actually happening in the foreground. like rlly cool stuff implied about the balance between nature n tech which is like more apropos in ‘23 than ‘01. idk I live in a major metropolitan city w no greenery or nature to speak of whatsoever which is so diff than my rural upbringing. there’s a real seeming living breathing ecosystem here and that’s cute and smth more games should attempt to do.
-tbh I don’t even mind that the back half of this game is just more or less the same maps from the first half slightly tweaked. I like it like thematically, Ie the effects of war and how nothing ever rlly changes, everything is cyclical. real ending of watchmen/beginning of guns of the patriots wave. btw I don’t like watchmen I’ve just read it and think silk spectre/nite owl are cute.
-played through the middle chapters on my phone w game pass while watching the sex and the city reboot w my bf….and I was wearing new brandy melville shirt….life is good
-consistently felt like Michael Cera in Superbad when he’s playing ps2 game and he keeps complaining about how unfair it is.
-the vehicle controls are actually so awful omg, why would accelerate ever be anything other than the triggers or the action button, actually so evil