Unfortunately, Season does little to emphasise the nature of journeys outside of animating vast beautiful landscapes that conform to meanings that impress, homogeneously, the overwritten narrative laboriously pounded into your ears. The talkiness of the story, dully delivered by some sleepy performances that suffer from totally absent direction (or convincing character motivation), completely eats up any sense of player empathy with the characters; the vistas become postcards with absent scrawl on the back, written by a backpacker convinced of the cosmic significance of staying in hostels and eating "local cuisine" served out of tourist traps.

Normally I say, "verbs, not vibes" for designing the delivery of how a game should feel in conveying its tonality, but the aggressive nature with which Season commodifies its world through the gathering purpose (poorly framed as archival bedrocking, something which totally goes against the current efforts of archival practices wresting free of the nature of highly authored "cornerstones" of import in many institutions of the past) it builds all interaction around the vague, ethereal nature of journeying - literally, leaving things behind - is wasted on the acknowledgement of the game as a product. It's not the developers fault that game clipping and sharing is now a highly commercial enterprise external to games as art, but given the antiquity of that facet of community nowadays, they should have realised the optics and feel of such a scaffolded feel when moving through their spaces.

Spaces being here a very general term. The game is sidewalks: paths are enclosured, and any trying to feel less like a zoo animal will immediately bring more to mind the feeling of playing Super Mario Bros than Sable. You can follow motion through forward or back, but regardless of what you feel is pushing you in a direction, the developers do not allow the desires of the player nor of a player narrative to create expectation, payoff, or ambiguity of the journey outside of the highly rote, terribly cliched, experience.

And as a capstone, the animatic cutscenes have some of the worst examples of stealing the component parts of comics to "cut costs" I've ever seen in a game. The lettering is atrociously mechanised, creating a horribly ugly script that has no life or wit to its line, yet it draws all attention to it by being placed in awful MS paint ovals that consider not at all the composition of the frame they are put in. The models at rest in each 'frame' are not composed on beats of the scene, but at dim relaxations of muscle, taking all life out of the image, rendering the screen a puppet show lost for a puppeteer.

Anatomy is one of those cultural fetish objects that is written about by critics as a sort of Voight-Kampff test or Rubicon to cross. It falls within a style of art that appeals to interpretation and self expression through criticism: as in poetry we have analyses of Dickinson’s poorly scrawled letters or Sapho’s endlessly retranslated fragments; as in music we have this overturning and mirroring newly appearing in the music of Julius Eastman right now; as in film there are endless essays on the short and long works of Jonas Mekas or on the varying iterations of parlour tricks in Marienbad. In games, this type of fetish criticism tends to be more rare - cyclically there are discussions on IPs reverentially (the Dark Souls of whatever or the timeline of Zelda) but rarely does there crop up a game that pours out writing equally revealing of the game and the player/writer. Of course, nearly anybody who has chosen to do some writing on games has gone at too much length over a specific game niche to their own interests, but less often is there a game with an audience seemingly populated only by those who wish to espouse at length both the merits of the software and the experiences of play surrounding that .exe.

I won’t give into that impulse here, in any way moreso than is typical of my longwinded frothing, but I will try to at least see from where the bridge has been constructed in Anatomy and to where it ports traffic in its players. Something beyond its place and time (beyond the narcissistic indie prestige that comes with its makeup and distribution) resonates at a unique frequency for people, and just as much as it is worth investigating the game’s explicit texts and its audience, it is worth investigating Anatomy’s cultural presence presence. Just as in Dickinson, Eastman, and Mekas, the tension between alienation and opacity is not secluded in the face value of Anatomy: there is a read that dignifies the idea of the house as something which is present and obscured, enshrining the psychological force demanding the critical/diaristic writing that populates Anatomy’s cultural profile. That divide and union typifies this style of intensely isolated and cozied art: Eastman’s hammering minimalism unseats yet forcefully teaches his melodies violently; Dickinson’s ironclad form is belied by contrasting and incomplete metaphors built of the familiar; Mekas’ capture of comforting everyday life is reduced to truncated memory stylised outside the initial experience of it and further made partial in each recall; Anatomy sections its rooms with the inset knowledge of North American floorplan familiarity, and then betrays the player with endless trespassing transgressions across boundary. All of these are contrasting and codependent ideas which must be bridged by an emotional reaction to the art - founding an expanse which can only be commuted across by firmly planting descriptions of the experience which set off the audience member, which then demand a thorough extolling of that journey for the coordinated expectation of the journey’s destination to complete the thematic resonance. In Anatomy, the idea of the home is the horror but it is also the stakes. The player must identify with a primordial, and subconscious, ordination of sleep, sustenance, and security while equivocating to antagonistic ideals which are invading the subconscious via text denying any particularity towards a universal feeling of those fulfilled urges. I think this is why Anatomy impresses itself so much on its players: it strongly makes a case for its themes in as outspoken a manner as it can and directly counters them to the unspoken understanding most players have in costumed iconography making up the world. It’s this wonderful push and pull of where the site of resonance sits - it moves from the player inhabiting the home to the home consuming the player.

Outside of the text itself, Anatomy is also one of those prestige art objects which, as I said above, can be fetishised for its value of incompleteness. This is often the outside article which denotes the opposing ideals of insider and outsider art, but more importantly, differentiates insider and outsider audiences. The everything for everyone style of creation is the dominant form in all popular mediums - blockbusters like Avatar or Star Wars, thrillers from Stephen King or adventures from Brandon Sanderson, games like Assassin’s Creed or Halo: these are experiences which demand completion of their themes not from the place in the interfacer where those themes mine their iconographic substance, but from the collective consciousness informed by a heavily authored culture. Whether that is manichean ethics, broad antediluvian eco-populism, by numbers approaches of rudimentary logics initialising fictional systems and those fictions operating within them, or even mundanity of hyper familiar context sensitivities across an engine - all of these popular media require not an excitement of new and strange, often painful, mortal fuels within any individual’s capacity to care for what is being communicated, but instead scrap scaffolded by audience populism. Not that there is anything wrong with that on its face, especially when utilised for wrestling popular narratives away from dominant and harmful cultural forces (such as with Star Wars’ parodying 20th century American imperialism), but it typically leads to less acute extolling across any singular piece’s audience, such as is seen in Anatomy and its cultural cohorts. So why does Anatomy cause pens to burst from the palms of its players? Because suburban houses are scarier than the tombs in Tomb Raider, obviously.

For me, this was a palate cleanser game, so to really try and consider it as an entity apart from my personal decision to play it as something which isn’t a proper exegesis of its own identity, instead, using it as a functioning way to return to my own personal levelling point, would be dishonest and kind of insincere criticism. So rather than trying to suss out successes and failures, contrasting them inherently with what they saddle up beside in the mix abreast each other, I’ll just write down a few of the things that I liked about Curse Crackers, from my experience and what I’ve got going on, as well as from what is just text within.

- Normally, I hate the “uWu”, anime, naive girl squad as roster for a video game; I think it’s profoundly embarrassing in Nier, grossly exploitative in any the various Gacha games that spend their unscrupulously earned profits on solely advertising and Viagra, and a consistently mild irritation in games like Momodora, Signalis, and Unsighted. Curse Crackers kind of got through my distaste for this character design though, and in a way that I wouldn’t have expected from the promotional material surrounding the game. The banner splash on the store page is exactly the kind of grossly immature and perverse fetishization and objectification expected from a lot of games which opt to use modern anime styling: breasts half hung out, swooping hair used as tentative covering, enormous eyes set into faces untouched by any age or experience; this store page is, however, basically the only place this caricatured imagery will appear. In the game proper, due to the pixelation of the Gameboy borrowed rendering, everything about the characters, both their sprites in play as well as their portraits, are so nebulous in their approximation of human forms that they can’t rely on titillation to be appreciated. So, in place of that overdone farce, the animation is mostly used, with the weird proportions of anime as groundwork, to effect a very silent film era comedy. Instead of telling jokes that cause the character portraits to sweat, drool, and blush (as done in the “jokes'' of some of the ignoble cousins to this aesthetic), the humour in this game comes from the procedural setting up of a situation, with the clarity of the level art also being a high spot for the game, interacting with the character stretching into tableaus from Hellzapoppin, or from goofishly oafing around mundane spaces like The Tramp, or deadpanning to the camera like Buster Keaton. Even the character costumes that one can unlock through play are much more Abbott and Costello than Honey Pop - silly play dress up as one winks at the audience instead of fulfilling a vastness of sexual reduction (it helps that Belle actually wears costumes and not, like, a tie and a hat signifying ‘business’ over pasties).

- Maybe I’m in kind of a low play sort of place, but the fact that this game can be breezed through without worrying about jump precision or frame perfect double jumps or wall clings on pixel exact collisions is so refreshing. I love a maso-core platformer - like, gimme 1001 spikes while recovering from surgery: I’ll feel loved - but I really didn’t need this month a game goading me into deleting it. I know that some people will play this when they are looking to drench themselves in sweat and build up their thumb calluses (and I might have felt the opposite to how I do now were I looking for that kind of game as well), but it felt so good to just talk on the phone with my mom and mindlessly ace these levels.

- Similar to the last point, but I love hit-the-boss-3-times fights right now. A good health bar battle of attrition smackdown has a title for accomplishment that is more difficult to deliver with a simpler design, such as that in Curse Crackers, for achieving victory that pervades this easier route, but I think that when catering to this feeling of overcoming has gone from a design goal that can be nuanced to a routine part of 2020s game design skinner boxing: it’s a part of the loop to feed engagement, not necessarily the peak of coalescing goals which have been weaved throughout other various components of the game. The 3 hit model is more deployed as a little topper - almost superfluous to the actual experience of play. Curse Crackers uses its bosses almost more as showing off the clarity that can be achieved by increasing the allowable maximum size of their model scales, again reinforcing comedy in the possibility afforded by how things are rendered. Something about stomping on a skeleton who has a mohawk growing from the bone of their skull three times (interspersed with an extremely stripped back Guitar Hero) keeps the pace flowing, keeps the joke from growing stale, keeps the mood light, and allows for a little art flex on the dev’s side.

A ton of this game is forgettable: the dialogue is extremely skimmable, the sense of place is pretty nil, the puzzling is non-existent, and any mechanic or system outside of the platform and throwing is tagged on without purpose. But it was so exactly what I needed, I can’t help but be happy with the time I spent in this fun little circus.

2022 is over; the GOTYs have been widely discussed, re-reeled, scheduled to be remade for 2027, doubled over in irrepressible initial praise and immediate vitriolic backlash - Elden Ring, God of War, 1001 Fortnites: here in January, they stand like Ozymandias before a sandstorm as the next New Year’s 1st comes 24 hours quicker every day. Further in the creases of the closed past year are the mites which were either praised in miniature or overlooked in grace; Signalis, Citizen Sleeper, Vampire Survivors, and the various other explosive indie-darlings that took their respective shelters in critical close-ups, let’s plays, sale prices, and at least one insufferable cultural neophyte’s, in grace before you, journal pages, but their smallness and comparatively miniature debt to market trends and hardware specs won’t keep them from wearing away under the beating sand of 2023, 24, 25, etc. Next year, everything that shone like gold in 2022 will be a humbled burnished bronze. The year after that, bronze will be a greening copper that seems less worthy to cover chapels housing gods and their pacts than was previously believed. On and on goes the cycle of games history that in 20 years, all of what feels momentous today will be scarred and ashen ruins; the scaffolding of a future which has rebuilt the past in retrograde and auburn.

Of course, ruins like these on a site like Backloggd are not inscrutable ancient labyrinths derived from partitioned alien design - they are sites themselves for a spatially derived historiographic practice, something like a map you unfold and step into. The winnowing away of time reveals the bones, beliefs, surgeries, births, burial signs of a past that has marginally garmented our present but was the progenitor of all present day genomes; it’s not just the DOOM to DOOM (2016) timeline, but the Catacomb 3-D to Neon White aqueduct.

In closer terms, what we see in future ruins here are the endless little foundations that run under well trod ground: Darklands to Wasteland to Fallout to New Vegas to Pillars of Eternity to Pentiment - the waters have run deep, shaping the hills, valleys, monument, and community settled above it today. Obsidian’s micro-team, led by Josh Sawyer, defined by his writing and Hannah Kennedy’s art, has produced, for my taste, the 2022 game of the year - they have, with their incisive and deep craft concerning this perfect niche, produced, in fact, the best game of the 2020s so far. It is a game that will extend out in perpetuity par excellence, filing in aura with regard to the lineage its writing and art direction take from Petronius, Bruegel, Eco, and Dürer; it takes its hyper-relevance to our current time and place by taking thematic sensitivities and beginning design principles from the mechanical arguments of games such as Night in the Woods and Kentucky Route Zero, as well as the sociological thoroughness seen in works such as Satantango and or The Green Knight; it reveals a deep, warmly academic respect by being a already fossilised and archived, splendorous and ruined, game that unabashedly lays in its own grave, being one of the only fictions in our medium, one of the only pieces of art made to mass release in the last 20 years, that takes place in our shared human history yet still promotes in us hope for a future we know to have already passed. It has quickly come to ruin, and unlike what has come to ruin so theatrically and agonisingly wrought in Darkest Dungeon, signalled by its infamous line wrung from the cycling death of those cursed grounds that feeds like a Dutch windmill grinding up the toil sweat out by centuries of peasants, Pentiment seems poised not to be a site of consistent archaeological investment, but the site of myth and folk-tale; the reception to Obsidian’s masterpiece was warm but it failed to appear on many GOTY lists and, from what I was able to find, topped none of them. Unlike other wordy winding works, your Torments, Discos Elysium, Citizens Sleeper even, the Early Modern murder micro-drama will not seemingly be poured over with the insight of scholarship forever. It will wind down time, seemingly, like Remus and Romulus and the wolves.

But I will never forget it, and here are a few of the reasons why:

Pentiment is the ultimate game in a branching thought I’d mulled over in 2022, a thought which has wormed through a great deal of the promising indie games that were lauded by critics and audiences alike last year that fell entirely flat for me: Stray, Tunic, Peglin, Shovel Knight Dig - these, while all having interesting design decisions guiding their creative goals, failed to create and populate a play environment that antiseptically made for exciting interaction. In all these games, the goal of play was a fun thing to conceptually head towards, but the verbs and feedback of using those verbs was tasking, arduous, leaden, and weak. Tunic’s uninvestigated combat intricacy, minimal animation depth, boring breadth of traversal option, and isometric simplicity (unlike Bastion’s or DOS2’s, which excite seeing what is around the next corner by leading the eye and rewarding with multiplicity the player’s exploration) made going from anywhere to anywhere, as well as encountering anything through that route, a hum that deafened the tidiness of its exploration loop. The play couldn’t support the play thesis, just as oftentimes in bad novels with philosophical aspirations (realised or not), bad characterisation or stunted prose can remove the possibility of a complete thematic denouement. For me, it was the same in many other games of 2022 which were heralded as excellent - and despite seeing no such announcement of a modally, and it is crass to describe this mode as such, ‘gimmick’ reliant mechanical frame in Pentiment, I found that it instigates a profoundly rich environment for its feedback loop of verb input/output. The thought which Pentiment completed was this: in Mario and Dark Souls and other masterpieces of the medium, swinging your club or jumping is simply exciting and rewarding within the action itself internally to do without any other intertextual interaction or goal necessitating the use of the game’s verbset to progress a completion. If that is the case, this exercise of verbs as good in themselves being the fundamental ideal for kinaesthetics, can more traditional forms of narrative development, herein specifically dialogue, be verbally pleasing in this same way? I’m not talking about dialogue being pleasing to the ear or well written from a perspective of not wasting words, I’m asking if it can be comparably intrinsic in its reward structure to talk to NPCs for no narrative or mechanical benefit, such as there is no mechanical benefit to hopping around the castle grounds in Mario 64, as executing kinaesthetically pleasing verbs in more mechanics focused games. In Pentiment alone thus far, for me, has this been proven as possible.

Being free of RPG mechanics, unlike most other dialogue heavy games, allows Pentiment’s non-narrative progression necessary text to be framed within a new light for evaluation as part of a mechanical experience. Contrasting this mechanically undriven approach with the mechanically invested Disco Elysium, which has similarly profound and primordial text (although Pentiment’s is nearly entirely with character voices, whereas DE’s is split between dialogue and descriptive text, so there is a greater elasticity to the veritability in DE, which works for that game whereas the naturalistic approach of Pentiment works better internally for itself), the RPG progression and quest system of it plays into the reward structure of engaging in dialogue with NPCs - that doesn’t mean it’s less rewarding to talk to people as Harry than as Andreas, but the nature of the pleasure and the reward felt by the player is of a fundamentally different quality. Pentiment’s lack of stat trees, alternate routes, or even ‘good’ and ‘bad’ outcomes to events inset an environment for Tassing’s cast to emerge as a budding garden of pleasurable filigrees to investigate or not: it makes no difference, these conversations, to meeting objectives or rolling credits, but instead informs the degree to which your Andreas felt inhabited, just as does the pleasure of jumping exactly off the edge vs within the precipice’s borders do in Celeste.. The characterisation of Andreas - logician, rapscallion, traveller of Italy, France, or elsewhere - entices these little discussions about taxes, carpentry, foreign customs, gossip into equal parts microstory and fleshing out of your ingratiation to your individual Andreas; everytime you say something about how Socratic such and such is or how you would woo them and theirs with what, you are completing a path to a summit with your allowed verbs in the same way that you might climb a mountain in BOTW: that is, just to see if you can. It doesn’t necessarily mean anything or do anything, but it creates as broad and as beautiful a fiction to step into that video games can afford by their tools - a formation of no less expressive verbiage than any mechanical interaction in more system’s heavy games. In comparison to Stray, which thinks that games are a narrative told with fancy lighting and context sensitivity, Pentiment is Donne next to someone who thinks poetry are words that rhyme.

I want to contrast this lightly with games which are seen as narrative/text heavy, such as Night in the Woods or typical visual novels: for the former, the player chosen associating of Andreas with specific locales, temperaments, and academic colleges allows for tutorialising which ramps up the complexity of interaction without attaching stakes to it, which Night in the Woods doesn’t do by shaping entirely Mae’s backstory and aptitudes (which works for that story), instead allowing all conversations to largely have one route which is made immaterial by non-conflicting conversation diverticula, and which will resolve in a set outcome regardless of player piloting. For visual novels, and I’m mostly unfamiliar with the genre so this is a generalisation, the non-essential conversation may not feed into a mechanical advantage or systemic interaction, but often does influence a mechanical tallying stat which coincides with extrinsic rewards of extra-PC character interaction. This is differentiable from Pentiment in 2 ways: 1) in Pentiment, you don’t have sex with anybody you talk to, so the pleasure of talking carries no ulterior sexual motivation, and 2) the reward for engaging in these conversations is primarily driven by the ability to express your player inhabitation by extending the game’s verbs for expression vs. progression. Just as the reward for beating a time in a racing game against a dev ghost is different from your own ghost, the reward structure and positive feeling of ingratiation is different between the dialogue system in Pentiment vs those found as standard in visual novels today.

Another major fixture of Pentiment’s success is its manufacture of a setting that displays no mechanical advantage, as contrasted by the mechanical advantages conferred by settings on games such as Red Dead Redemption, which allows for R*’s design preference for breadth in interaction stimulus as well as emphasis on travel as opposed to traversal, or Resident Evil, the mansion being both a thematic root for the minor chord of corrupt elites being villainous with hoarded wealth and jeopardised public safety as well as providing a comical expansion on the ridiculous affordances of immoral spending. Obviously the influences on Josh Sawyer, his background in history as well as fascination with all things, not to mention ability to speak, German, coordinated a desire to set a game in this space - and after Annaud’s “palimpsest” of The Name of the Rose, this fascination delivered what might be the only chance at a good ‘adaptation’ of Eco’s work. But whereas many other design leads will think play first when factorialising trends for progression and digression in their game’s setting, Sawyer and his team impugned the fictional world for divesting itself of cultured culture: whereas other games are built like playgrounds for referential but not really interdependent gamifying (again, see RDR2), Pentiment fosters a setting which forms a playground of contrasted and commentorial ideas that are often gestured at but not reflected on in games. Historical feminism, church/state governance (without demonising either), the role of marriage as communal coordination, the functions of early governmental bureaucracy, human rights, fashion and the signifiers of pre-capitalist class roles, and more and more and more yet than can be revealed in a review (I can’t even begin to discuss how much I love the treatment of capital T Taboo in this Early Modern setting - Mary Douglas would be so proud) - the devs have talked about their including mini-games to immerse the player interactively in the world while switching up the pace, but for my salt, the inclusion of these moments detailing a world that thinks with an era and mind different from our own is the real breaking up of play (not to discount the mini-games, as we’ll see below their purpose in my evaluation).

The moment, which thankfully comes early on so you can really whet your appetite for these cherished little strands of life in the 16th century, that I want to illustrate as a choice example is the detailing of women’s roles in life and art as acted out and discussed by Sister Illuminata and Andreas while tidying the Scriptorium of loose and unreturned texts to the Abbey’s library. As the books are carried over from the stations of the brothers to the locked door of the library (keeping the sisters within and the brothers, as well as peasants and Andreas, out), Andreas and Illuminata discuss the varying roles for men presented in the tales - knight, knave, and all in between - while the figures of women, ladies love and damsels, remain stagnated and ungraspable as true characters. Not only are the arguments presented by Illuminata well written, both in voice and in content, they are also preponderent on the lives of women in that time and, remarkably, even more specific to the lives of the daughters of those who have enough means to sponsor their children in convents. Illuminata’s perspective, which wonderfully contrasts with other feminisms of other women in Tassing and Kiersau, is both an entirely personal, non-prescriptive, drive towards analytical reads of her contrasted position to others in the convent, and more specifically, of the brothers who live beside the sisters in the abbey. Illuminata is not trying to rally or convert over the Christian villagers or Benedictines; her feminism, in accord and respect to the Early Modern reality of womanhood, has a degree of fatalism attached to the position (and what’s more, that perspective remains personal but changes over the course of the game as Illuminata’s position changes). However, you can decide how convinced Andreas is by Illuminata’s description of her life - it has minor bearing on the plot, and you can not only be either a chauvinist or accept this early feminism, but you can reject Illuminata’s analysis for an entirely different feminism, one which includes different elements of life in the 16th century from differently affected social positions. And ultimately, these choices are only incumbents of immersion in the world - a process of world building, a writing skill which has become both laughably and pathetically divorced from trying to form contiguous threads of social commentary and instruction with our own world. Sawyer’s and Kennedy’s flex is not only creating a multitudinous world which affords as broad a spectrum of perspectives as our own world, but one that bears actual relevance and contains commentary on our own little history.

This small corner of Pentiment’s writing is just one of many hollows which foster ideals, either lost (for good or ill) or progenitorial, to our modern era. Nearly every character will have as much or more to say on any particular subject that fixates them than they will disclose on suspicions regarding murder. Florian will go into length at the expansiveness of early European travel experiences, funnelled through the threshing of mercenary combat, which in him presupposes a kind of Nietzschean amor fati. With one of the best characters in the game, Vacslav, you receive nearly no actual plot acceleration at all, but instead have in depth discussions on combinatorial mystic practices of early Christian splintering, pulling theological ideas from Swedenborg, Weil, as well as Buddhist ideas and Kabbalistic strains. For every character, there are discussions on polite scruples, architectural wisdom, changing literacy, fashion, and political upheaval. Nothing is left unturned, and by tilling the soil so faithfully across its cast, Pentiment grows broader and higher than most any other game developed in a decade.

Small note that’s somewhat important herein as well - other well written games with a wide swathe of commentaries on non-plot necessary subjects tend to run the border on the Northern end of where ideas become practices. For example, Torment has a huge deal to say on the nature of regret, on loyalty, on making amends, on how beliefs are fomented, on how death is abstracted in modern life. These all enrich the world of the game, of the planes as entities which must be contended with in your roleplay, but unlike in Pentiment, they are in weaker reads merely abstracted and in stronger reads necessarily contrasted to our world. Pentiment demands a direct historical continuum, one which cannot ignore the modern world as the next of kin in the Mediaeval period dying at the beginning of the game, and as the next looming death of the birth of the Early Modern.

Something else which branches off from this devotion to diverticula is the legitimate development of a formal practice within games that doesn’t rely on any mechanical genre. Where in the 20th century many avant-garde movements found massive upheaval in what the constitutive structure of our various public art forms said about their content, both in the McLuhanian vein as well as the Steinian, games have not yet had a strong push towards developing ‘isms’ outside of micro-niches on itch.io - and those niches are mostly a combined one or two developers making games for each other without commentary on the formal expedition of that enterprise. We’ve seen 12 tone music develop, the language poets, endless film new waves, abstract expressionism, pop art in every medium on the planet, deconstructionism in anything that has been around for a fly’s life; games have innovated, but rarely under the auspices of reinvention, rejection, or preeminent perceived importance. Pentiment puts forth such a formal argument, demanding textual inferences that allot meaning to the conveyances of narrative writing and not just those events, dates, characters, and elements else within them.

I won’t try to house Pentiment within any cinematic, literary, or theatrical schools - media theorists already try too hard, in my opinion, to define with positive qualities their basis of evaluation by borrowing criteria for promoting obvious ‘excellence’ from allergic source (which in the worst examples come from ‘literary’ malapropism supplanted into games, movies, opera, or whatever else in an attempt to prove that something is ‘smart’ or ‘complex’, despite the obvious misapplication of terminology or device when stripped from the context which reflects its respective originating existence). I won’t try to define or create new terms to put on Pentiment which would seek to gerrymander past games or previous games into associations that were never intended; these groups of artists tended to group themselves, making art which reflected highly localised, referentially dense and obscure realities which the small Obsidian team may not have been aiming to tap into, and which I certainly have no outsider insight into as a passive observer to the game and its creation. All I can present is how I think Sawyer and Kennedy thought with a focus on structure which often goes under assumed in game design, particularly to what visual structure informs on when in concert with expressive allowances.

Briefly here, I’ll try to define what I view as the formalistic qualities in Pentiment, minorly contrast them with another formalistic work outside of video games, as well as point out how the different expression of similar facets would escape my definition in other games which contain component cousins. Firstly though, for clarity’s sake: formalism, extremely generally, is a broad umbrella term for art which tends to lean into the tools, perceived bounding constraints, expressionistic qualities, and any other content containing apparatuses that, while conveying narrative, are not narrative beats or content themselves. In books, this tends to be things like syntax, page layout, macro-structure, typeface, spelling, occasionally word-choice, and so on. In opera this tends to be things like the language that is being sung in, coherency between, and application of, costumes, integration of sets, instrumental balance and orchestra makeup, etc. In Pentiment, I view the formal qualities as primarily being, but not exclusively, the integration of non-standard input mini-games, the macro-pacing, the disparity between character art styles, the previously mentioned dialogue system, and the irresolutions of the first and second acts as denouncing stagnancy and demanding advancement. These elements taken individually all carry packages of narrative content, and indeed without them in this particular game, the narrative would not be conveyed through a satisfying or even complete arc. They are formal partly in implementation, and partly by way of noticing and labelling them as formal qualities in critique. That may seem ridiculous, but consider: part of the reason that formalistic qualities have had difficulty in rising within AAA games, or even moderately prominent indie games, is that games are nearly always developed to the point of a gestalt experience; the coordinating elements of development, put together by the vision of perhaps one person but reconciled by vastly disparate creative teams, are meant to seamlessly cohere into a vision which does not stutter, slip, or drawl in how it draws attention in the lack of similitude between competitive elements, such as descriptive item text to enemy stagger animations. This type of creation, while not unseen in the avant-garde works of the 20th century, is fairly uncommon in the formalistic works from which I draw comparison to Pentiment. One only needs to compare Paterson to Elden Ring or Einstein on the Beach to Hollow Knight to understand the difference. This gestalt development is decried more obviously in other formal works from other media because of the nature of their existential property: a disparately cohered Dadaist play, at a fundamental level, needs to adhere only to the laws of physics to be stageable (and in fact, Antonin Artaud’s “unstageable plays'', such as Jet of Blood, make light of these restraints) - a disparately cohered game from any ‘ism’ at a fundamental level is just a corrupted executable. Therefore it is the work of both developer and critic to uncover the formal elements and label them as such to convince further, more daring and considered, formalistic experimentation within the medium.

That all said, Pentiment’s formal qualities: the most contentious I put forth as exemplary is that of the mini-games within. These are, if taken at that definition alone, probably the most widely proliferated verb in modern games. In puzzle games, action games, RPGs, visual novels, adventure games, even some IF - if there is a mechanical thread to pull them together, it might be mini-games. Obviously, and this was the case stated by Sawyer in interviews explaining the modes of play within Pentiment, the inclusion of mini-games is to break up the main play of the game with a totally ancillary and perpendicular play experience. Hacking is everywhere in modern open world games, and rarely do you see the verbs of the main toolset allowed to players carry over into hacking (the only exception I can think of is Shadowrun: Hong Kong). At worst, these games are monotonous, but usually short, speed bumps that interrupt or slow down the flow of the main play; this is the case for Bioshock or Deus Ex: Human Revolution. At best, they are integrated into the main work as a textural, sometimes positively frictional, addition to the main conceits of their respective games - the hacking in Bioshock 2 is a star example of this, and Quadrilateral Cowboy makes the integration of hacking mini-games and anathematic play outside of that microcosm of play the entire thrust of its design. These run from tedious to terrific, but they have in common their inclusion being designed for content purposes, being components of designers encouraging the contained elements of the game to imply diversity of possibility within the playspace but not the vastness of possibility of games expression via contrasting extratextuality.

In Pentiment, while the mini-games do offer a new interactive element to the quite restricted playspace, if compared to other Obsidian games, they offer a grander expansion on the vision of possibility within the storytelling capabilities of the setting, an element of design which blurs the line between form and content, as well as the storytelling capabilities of juxtaposing verbs from those of an established set. Each of these mini-games foreground an experiential quality of newness, to the player obviously but more importantly, to Andreas, something which reinforces the strangeness and parallactic presence of an outsider in the village (a tact which gets inverted in act 3). Their respective play elements counteract the intuition of the main components of play, largely being restricted to time management, traversal, and conversation - each mini-game itself is a new verb, yes, as well as diverting, but are more importantly to the argument for formalistic transgressiveness in Pentiment, they are new ways of detailing important elements of the mystery within the possibility of the setting. Compare this to What Remains of Edith Finch: that game is entirely new verbs being presented within the various short stories of the Finch family members. However, the main verb of the game is walking from within a first person perspective and interacting with context sensitive button prompts. These are the exact same interaction elements that comprise the storytelling possibilities of the various stories - the lack of dissimilarity, of focus on the formal components of the storytelling, bleeds through the narrative elements of the game and blur all the contrasting experiences of what are very ostensibly different people (a point dully made by their Andersonian mono-interests). In fairness, the one standout story within Edith Finch, you know the one, does break up the play by introducing a new set of interactions to reinforce a different perspective, only to place play back within familiar controls at the concluding sequence of the epitaph so that the player may feel both narrative and mechanical sympathy more strongly.

For finding a beautiful cousinry, take Gloriana by Kevin Huizenga, which is for my salt the best formal work in 21st comics. The various juxtaposing elements of traditional comic form, from the bordering, gutters, qualities of ink, page layout, information allowed with thought balloons, even the actual shape of the book itself, tell a broader story about life in suburbia than any of the narrative components within that we would see traditionally make up narratives of Gen X adulthood. When Huizenga transitions from a panel of a bowl falling, across a gutter and page turn, we are not merely seeing the collapse of time, but the discontinuity of timeline, connection between husband and wife, ironic plausibility with the reader, and sequence of events as they have been built up; all done by using a formal element instead of a narrative conceit. Pentiment’s comparative usage of such wizardry can be seen in one of its mini-games, most prominently those which have Andreas traversing the maze at the centre of the narrative. Not only is it performing the traditional role of such diversions within games, but it is also informing us of the various possibilities of the skin allowing reality to breathe, shuddering and breaking at the embarrassment of history’s actors, of the possibilities of travel (something which, again, is alerted and transgressed in act 3 by changing progressions and accessibility paths). This is a move of formal storytelling, and one which could not be inferred by either any other medium nor traditional narrative construction.

I’ve gone on longer than I intended with this review. It’s rare that games have so much to say, so much possibility in what they can convey. It’s rare that games feel like you are being talked up to, asked to consider the variability of our relations with ourselves as players and as actors utilising time we are allowed to use this interactive medium as a valuable way of seeing the humanity in our existence. How often do you get to play a game that inspects and values the work of Aristotle, Aquinas, Avicenna, and Albrecht, only to go on and consider the player to be of the same species and collar of them.

I don’t really have closing remarks. Pentiment is one of the best games I’ve ever played, and while many people will not like it, much less love it as much as I do, I think it is a masterpiece of human storytelling and compassion. And also Ein Traum is one of Lingua Ignota’s best songs, I kind of wish she’d played it at her show in Montréal.

There’s a lot of charm in Thirsty Suitors; like many games that have bubbled up in the III 2020s game scene, Suitors combines a streamlined old hat form of gameplay with a degree of nuanced and unconventional, for the medium, storytelling that seeks to both direct audiences towards investigation of the mechanics which we see has, at this point, having no real origin or persuasion of consequence as well as to investigate the storytelling potential of these mechanics which were previously associated with the water-sealing of narrative via a gamified rhythm: instead of simplifying a eventage down to systematised components which abstractions, many of these indie games abstract the narrative via the mechanical persuasion which is the accepted grammar of the medium. Less now are we to see the turn based combat of Cloud and Barret as stand in for a quick and scattered skirmish, and more we see Jala and Andile performing that calculus in their minds, when during a fight with an intimate, that will most calculatedly burn the person they are opposite to in the conflict.

I think that’s what Thirsty Suitors is trying to accomplish. The cataloguing of emotional lashing out is there in the turn based combat, skateboarding’s reinterpretation of town architecture away from its traversal by spheres of adults who could not possibly grasp your higher ordered comprehension of spaces and uses (much like a cult’s layered cognizance of societal order, at least so goes the cult narrative with Soundie and his acolytes), the cooking as purely a confidence game which is nitpicked for process instead of product. These all seem to gel to the various narrative sectors which Thirsty Suitors puts forward. Much like in the desperation gambling of Citizen Sleeper or the rearrangement of narrative moralia by mere placement of component parts within Storyteller, I respect the investigation of stories unfamiliar to games with mechanics which seem well trod at this point. It’s a necessary act in how games and their developers come to actualising the art in more holistic ways.

However, the play of these new grammar-mechanical investigations in Suitors is just so tedious and turgid. The combat is simplistic and rote, the skateboarding is unexpressive and cumbersome, the cooking is useless to the game item economy and overlong for the pay out. Every moment of sitting with the game’s characters is cheapened by sidling them into mechanical expressions which simplify their agency into horrible fetch quests conveyed from mote to mote by ‘knock off Antonio Eagle’s Amateur Skater on mobile’ level traversal, traversal which culminates in repetitive and reductive combat with characters who are not lent any illumination by the interplay of the caustic conflict at the heart of Suitors central mechanical metaphor. I’m no fan of Undertale, but for a game to come this long after that game’s elegant solution to turn based empathy and still fail in this regard is shocking.

I adore the representation of trans and queer characters here, and I love that there’s basically not a white person in this PNW American town. But I also find it a bit insulting that to find this representation, representation which legitimately treats the experiences had by POC and queer people as fundamentally different than their counterparts (looking at you, every CRPG ever), gamers of this demographic are constantly roped into games which simplify mechanics unto nothing demanding rigour, either in skill or consequence, requiring no actual engagement beyond pushing buttons as if the simulation was a child’s speak and spell.

I have nothing much to say about the design, history, artistic merit, thematic resonance, or any plumbable topic of depth with which a person trying to conceive of something meritorious inherent to Mario, Bowser’s Fury specifically but the general statement stands, which may be drawn on for fuelant to inspire criticism. 3D Mario games generally, with the elsewise brand expressions being as a whole still encompassed but to a lesser degree, move me not at all to thrill or agonise; they do not deposit me to a prolonged convalescence from rapture nor a disappearing into mist that arises some self doubt; the antics in do not put before me a self which I can see as bettered or worsened. I can think of nothing in myself to pull from play to paper other than surmising that games, with their inset holding of many excellent offerings of Mario, which are so consistently fruitful and nutritious, showing in their prodigious production no sign of overflowing the cellar nor going bad in storage, are still in a period (which they may never leave from either external pressures or internal transfigurations) of such infancy that there manages a dominant hold of an entire orbiting shape of their format, medium, expressionistic vocabulary - however else expressed - which is composed of an idea which is sterile, contained, utterable only in relation to itself, and which controls the traffic of anything which has sprung up in the ecosystem it has hardened to externalities but softened to itself.

In the wake of the Mario movie’s enormous success, dwarfing likely any other single Mario property’s profits by a daily increasing margin, the comparative draw on the dire shape of film audience ability to be met en masse and the enormous accessibility of games to the PC game demographic has, for me, been recast. Whereas The Mario movie has now made more money than the entire filmographies of some of the greatest filmmakers (possibly even more than the entire film industry in some directors’ countries of origin), the film industry, with all its structural and cultural issues, has been able to establish the bedrock for possibility and what contrasting heights and lows are possible outside of any singular name or film; the Mario movie dwarfing in recognition Jonas Mekas by a margin of ∞:1 is not offerable as any miniscule shred of proof as being superior or in anyway equally significant to the artistry possible within the medium. In games, that may never be possible. To talk about the entire etymology of not just the verb titles, but the actions possible in describing those verbs outside of the magic circle, cannot be divorced from the IP which dominates its form’s facade.

Good or bad, Mario is Coca-Cola, Kleenex, Band-Aid, and Kraft Dinner.

Not to sound like a parrot - or worse: a comparative bore - but Jumping Flash! really does promote a singular devotion to an alternate future which, unlike speculative fictions or realities magic, is exciting without valuating the differences between what we see in it vs. what we see in the later art that took none of its influence. It’s difficult to totally comprehend how different 3D platformers would be (or if that would even be the genre’s name had this game been the tree of fruit and mana at the centre of first gen polygon rendering’s garden) if Jumping Flash! were as culturally revered as Mario 64, but it’s fun to tread in buildings evincing how little of a blueprint was drawn up at the time of M64 and JF being new colleagues. Although the priorities differentiating the two on a second by second play analysis reveal hugely different design aspirations, what grabbed me most by my collars and frills was less what the differentiated attempts at features show and more what the acceptable losses in their respective plough plots bely. The two are not so different as to be any more the other’s opposite as one side of a coin is to its reverse but nonetheless, it’s exciting to think about. JF’s precision sacrifices expression, and M64 chose to go directly opposite, reinforcing the playground feel of childhood with the associated energised clumsiness of newly grown muscles. While they both abstracted level design, JF went for an extension of 2D platformer design - funnelling play through a series of challenges meted out to incur play stories as opposed to the verisimilitude of a travelled world; M64’s abstractions are indicative of an attempt to round out the character of the various kingdoms, the space’s differences of imposing challenge, and the abstractions imbed flavour to the wireframe of mechanics instead of honing that wireframe to its purpose. Of course the first person v third person perspective is the most significant difference: if first person had prevailed in being top seller, we might be calling the genre DoomJumpers or something akin. It’s not easy to totally quantify how this changes game feel from JF M64, as the idea of control, while comparable in object, is taken for different granted positions. If anything, I think JF probably can only be lumped into the genre post-hoc. If the designers believed they were making a statement for future game design, I think they would have attempted something more cohesively representative of what the strengths of their ideals forcefully communicated, and in that manifesting, they would have made a less fun game. So idk, Jumping Flash! is the bomb and also very weirdly out of time.

I’m not sure what stage of Soulslike influence the current design sphere is in right now, what with Elden Ring’s entirely saturating the market with basically everything the genre’s playebase could want, be that the combat, storytelling, world design, player expressibility, or some combination therein. It’s possible that with FromSoft’s most recent outing that Soulslikes will go the way of Doom Clones and take what iteration the last decade of the type has gone through over the last decade and completely turn it on its head - what would the Deus Ex or Portal of Dark Souls even look like? However, that’s 2023; for a while, it seemed like the goal was less for games to take initial inspiration from FromSoft’s soft series and more to produce facsimiles of that style of game as quickly as possible with the serial numbers filed off. The obvious examples are the fast follows, Lords of the Fallen or The Surge, Nioh perhaps as a more successful variation or Salt and Sanctuary as one of the first “Darks but ____” games , but there were small enough changes made to many of this type that, while necessary to qualify their status as ‘clones’, they were worth relating back to Soulsborne games as something which was in a mutual conversation with Miyazaki’s ethos and not merely mimicking its expression.

Mortal Shell is certainly one of those games, and also certainly for the worse. It breaks off from the Souls conventions in many ways, but those ways are almost exclusively to the detriment of its systemic interactions and balance, leaving a mishmash of things which have the silhouette of Dark Souls (or really, more Demon’s Souls) without any of the refined features. If anything is unique in this game, it is a uniquity of extremity made from a childish lack of acknowledgment concerning blossomed restraint, utterly convinced that things are mature when they are simply more than they had been: Dark Souls was opaque, Mortal Shell is without form; Dark Souls was slow and methodical, Mortal Shell is leaden and finicky; Dark Souls was fantastical, Mortal Shell is maniacal. It is devoid of not simply new ideas, but of ideas at all, creating a mess of a game which promotes no excitement at progressing through any of its design axes - where Dark Souls had eureka moments of combat, building, exploration, storytelling, Mortal Shell is pages on pages of deluded beats admiring themselves for the semantic freedom, refusing to acknowledge that a sign which can mean anything means nothing, and if it is surrounded by shit, it is crowned the signatory of waste.

I realise that I was overly general in my summation, so here are just a few concrete examples of things which nip a player’s heels to bone over the course of a playthrough:

- Enemy attacks proc in regard to player proximity alone and calculate hits from that proximity, which I imagine was designed to increase use case for the hardening so that players might ostensibly have a longer period of reaction, but this proc does not consider terrain. What this means is if there is a slope between an enemy and the player, the enemy will begin an animation at the top of a slope, have the distant foreshortened because the decreased exponential distance between enemy and player, and warp to the player to compensate what the game thinks is the animation completing sooner due to proximity. Nearly every big enemy in the game has this behaviour. In every area, I would be about a 5 second run from a big bad type enemy who has begun an attack only to have them begin a sword swing that started at the maximal difference and ended .3 seconds later through my torso.

- The area design across every portion of the game world is 1) entirely a single primary colour with a minor highlight (and highlight here is roughly analogous to the way moles highlight skin), so differentiation and personality drawn from the disparate areas is nil, and 2) the architecture, both in terms of the plausibility of intelligent habitation in the world design and the traversable space afforded to the player in the level design, is laughable, literally worst in class, something that would be weakly made in Halo’s Forge mode. The game is without a map (because Dark Souls didn’t have a map, duh), and I cannot stress enough how frustrating navigating the game is when compared to, as it so desperately wants to be, Dark Souls’ masterclass in influencing navigation. The majority of the game will, even if you look at fan made maps, be spent running around in circles in a monotonously green forest fighting idiotically arranged enemy encampments, because bad level design begets bad encounter design, and the game will not reward that investment with either a systemic mastery of space nor a narrative understanding of the space’s purpose.

- Narratively speaking, of course, the game has mostly gaps which are meant to be filled; Souls never tells the story straight, so why would its imitators. The number I’ve seen thrown around for how much of the narrative is explicitly within the text of the Souls series, which here specifically does not include Bloodborne or Sekiro, is about 70%. That means that while the game can progress mostly with a majority understanding of the events imparted, major inferences must be made to complete the cycle in a player’s appraisal. Mortal Shell can’t really be described as 70% or 40% or any percent because the narrative is less a cohesive progression of events or thematic happenings and instead a boss rush with dialogue. The goals are insipid, the mummery of the PC is pointless when compared to Mortal Shell’s influences, and the flavour of the cast is unsalted and boiled. It promotes no discourse on the value of such a world with such inhabitants, and the goal of the game, when accomplished, has less textual or emotional bearing that “you played a great game”.

I usually find it quite simple to read out my plaudits and detractions for a game, being that the personal proof of experience, which isn’t to say objective fact but perspective solidified, is able to grasped by something so plain as, “the jumping mechanics feel bad to me because this repetitious action hadst be performed with this infelicitous navigation of physics, physical manipulation, and physical space, which sums herein endlessly to this reified proof.” There are always people who can, by their own personal experience, take those exact parts and make the claim opposite to yours, and sometimes with adequate persuasion and passion in turn reveal an underlying gratification that went uninvestigated in the personal play which led to the negative expression in the first place; I think this is, for many people, the experience of games such as Rain World or Loom (or Bioshock Infinite if one is to look at this process mirrored). This is a foible of design, but it’s quasi-state is part of what makes game design, and games criticism, such a delightful pairing in the medium: the experience is shown to be as interpretable as any classical text, yet has a greater breadth of variation than most static art objects. Sometimes designers produce things which are taken on their face as they are hoped; sometimes they are taken as done poorly the thing which the game rebuked is in itself rebuking; sometimes the game stumbles ass backward into a rebuke that is taken as sincere by players that the developer did poorly: the critical masses will accumulate, discourse, and try to win out all varying ‘proofs’ - and although there will never be a truth utterly determined in it, a great deal of beautiful things will be said, and a great deal of games will have promoted those beauteous statements with obvious stimuli.

The Sexy Brutale seems to me, and being such as it is, makes it difficult for me to read out my feelings with exactitude, a type of game which has that solidified perspective by design of the devs to be creating all components poorly to produce a poor thing so as to rebuke… the idea of logical deduction? Detection as a mechanic? Cohesive level design or play feel? It’s difficult to say; the murky sloppiness all comes across as very intentional, and the intentional outcome seems to be nothing less than arduous gawking at the stupidity of figuration, but that is so counter to the ideals of indie game development that it feels wrong to add it all up to pure pissantery from the devs to the players. Typically, or at least in the games which have come to rest at an upper register of indiedom, these smaller projects interpose a vision of an undug mechanical or thematic interaction that has glinted in the past mass excavations of AAA games, something which has hinted at complex degree but has only been used to forward a bland, unexamined platter of all flavours unsettled by mutual orgy between them. Such is this the tutorialising in Cultist Simulator, the scene to scene editing in 30 Flights, or the ‘difficulty’ in Getting Over It. What completely confuses me in The Sexy Brutale is its seeming garmenting of the syllogisms quietly supposed to systems of inquiry in games like Witcher 3 or L.A. Noire, which will proclaim detectives of the cast and the player but lead unto all discovery the play by way of checkmarks and button prompts. It brings this insulting brand of irrigation towards deductive fruiting, rightfully pointing out that for detection to be a game model, the player must be able to detect that which does not control their FOV, and instead of implementing a model of true P.I. playing, says “fuck it! why should any deduction be a trail of clues leading unto a discovery?” None of the murders solved herein are in any way characterised by intentions, by predilections of the character, nor by circumstances which they implicate themselves in unintentionally: they are instead rube goldberg contraptions that an askew painting starts and a rogue skewering magic routine ends. It has long been said that a good mystery will have its pieces laid out for the audience, and instead of assuming that those pieces should fit together into a picture of what occurred, the devs of Brutale thought they could just scatter those pieces across a mansion so that they might be assembled into a vorticist portrait of Sherlock’s member.

My other complaints are those which are obvious and presumably not contentious: the movement speed of the player is far too slow, the time travel mechanic is ridiculous and poorly implemented given how the devs lay out their world, the UI is counterintuitive to both typical conventions and the game’s own accommodations, and the horrible parody of cabaret from the 1920s is sickeningly uninvestigated (which I suppose reinforces the thumb up ass method of digging around) and kind of insulting in how its pastiche pays no homage whatsoever to the roots of how those aesthetics came to be, and how they ended up being ushered out by right wing populisms across the globe in the 30s, 40s, and 50s.