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Rain World is a lot of things.

It's one of the most frustrating and challenging games I've ever played.

It's a game where every small success feels like a legitimate accomplishment and where earned comfort, rare as it may be, is relief like no other.

It's a game with a breathtaking world to explore. Every single area is gigantic and inspires your curiosity. Every single screen - of which there are thousands - is lovingly assembled and full of detail.

It's a game that nails its fascinating ecosystem. Animals in this game aren't just 'enemies,' they're realistic creatures with autonomy and personality. Sometimes they'll fight amongst themselves or get stuck and appear frustrated. Sometimes they'll just lounge around and seem uninterested in you.

It's a game that rewards you for being interested in its world, where you can learn things through observation and apply them to improve your gameplay.

It's a game with amazing animations, art direction, and music, which do justice to the rest of its elements.

It's a game full of small details and environmental storytelling that you could theorycraft about to no end.

But more than anything, Rain World is a game about making you feel small and unimportant.

The gameplay tells you this - it doesn't even offer you the precedent of fairness. You will die a lot, sometimes to things that seem unavoidable. The world tells you this. Its post-apocalyptic setting communicates that - even for a people much more powerful than you - this world consumes all. Their ruined architecture exists on a scale you can barely understand.

This overwhelming humility is one of the most powerful things a game has ever made me feel. It makes me sad that no other games like this exist. Undoubtedly one of the best and most unique experiences I've ever had with the medium, and one of my favorite games of all time.

Sentimentos mistos definem minha experiência com Heaven's Vault. Teoricamente, ele tem tudo o que gosto. Não, sério, literalmente eu gosto do arcabouço teórico dele.

A narrativa se centra numa disputa do que é a História e seu papel social e cultural. Por um lado, temos os detentores da "História Oficial", que paradoxalmente baseiam sua legitimidade na História ao mesmo tempo em que querem destruí-la como ciência. Para eles a história não é uma investigação do passado; ela é uma justificativa do presente e uma prescrição do futuro. Disputar a "História Oficial" é o mesmo que sedição. Em contrapartida, a protagonista acredita que a História é mais do que uma narrativa fixa. O passado é um repositório armazém de possibilidades não-realizadas, cujo horizonte de expectativas não era simplesmente o tempo presente. Esse armazém não tem um dono: é nosso legado coletivo. Só faltava o nome da protagonista ser Koselleck, sério.

Toda essa teoria é posta em prática de forma razoavelmente bem-sucedida. A mecânica principal de desvendar um sistema de escrita antigo é mais permeado de dúvidas e exige vários palpites e saltos lógicos de sua parte - e isso é bom! Realmente historiadores têm que assumir muitas coisas porque às vezes o passado parece ser agressivamente hostil contra aqueles que tentam desvendá-lo. Se corrigir ao conseguir nova evidência e ver suas hipóteses desmoronando é parte do dia a dia de qualquer cientista, e o jogo simula isso muito bem.

Outra aspecto que o jogo simula muito bem é como muitas vezes pesquisa é algo... Chato. Por mais que você tenha interesse na área, é inegável que catalogar coisas minuciosamente e ver seu progresso andar a passos de tartaruga não é exatamente algo excitante, por mais recompensador que seja no final das contas.

Esse tédio acaba sendo o Calcanhar de Aquiles do jogo. Não acho que o trabalho do historiador deveria ser romantizado, pelo contrário, a inclusão das características menos glamourosas da disciplina foi uma decisão acertada. Mas mesmo outras coisas que não precisam ser tediosas acabam, com o tempo, virando um fardo. O game é ambientado num mundo scifi semi-solarpunk super inspirado em Planeta do Tesouro cheio de ruínas de civilizações antigas e uma diversidade de planetas para explorar. E toda vez que eu entrava nos rios cósmicos ficava com um pouco de sono e invariavelmente pensava "já chegamos?". Não sei vocês, mas na minha cabeça navegar por rios cósmicos descobrindo planetoides de uma civilização perdida não deveria me deixar com essa sensação...

Pra ser justo, no começo fazer isso é realmente legal. Mas o ritmo do game é deveras lento e a variedade de coisas pra fazer pequena demais pra carregar a aventura por mais de 20 horas, que foi o tempo que levei pra zerar. E o game ainda por cima espera que você zere mais uma vez para ter um entendimento mais aprofundado da história? Aí é comprometimento demais pra mim.

Se Heaven's Vault fosse uma aventura mais enxuta, de digamos umas 8 horas, teria potencial para ser um de meus favoritos. Apesar de nossa fama de falastrões, historiadores sabem apreciar o poder de uma boa síntese.

Kinda went into Pentiment expecting to have to "eat my vegetables"; its aesthetic being artistically sound, but not really the kind of thing I'm generally into, and its premise sounding intellectually invigorating in a games industry that's arguably in arrested development when it comes to making mainstream experiences for adults, but maybe not enough to keep me personally going for a playtime of over 20 hours. And well, I was pretty fuckin' wrong! And not even in the Disco Elysium way where after I got over the hurdle of the first hour or two that it finally clicked (not to say that Disco Elysium's intro isn't basically perfect in its own way), Pentiment managed to sink its teeth into me right away. The game's art is also a lot more affective and unique than I would've expected just from the couple trailers I'd seen, and despite the entire game taking place across only a handful of screens (contextualized as pages in a book), there were many times that I found myself stopped in my tracks, contemplating the beauty of a specific moment.

It's also just as real as fuck without succumbing to either condemnation or romanticization. Pentiment's perspective on history and the people who shaped it is complex without cowardly labeling every participant as a morally grey agent -- there are unabashedly terrible and evil people in this world, people who are deceptive in their self-servitude, and even inarguably cruel entities like the Catholic Church house individuals who really do want to make the world a better place in their own way and even people who are in the church due to societal forces beyond their control. Pentiment is a game that tries its best to be honest about the world. It's also a game that's absolutely more intelligent and worldly than I'll ever be, and I really don't think I can do it the full justice it deserves in my own analysis of its setting and themes, so I'll just leave it there.

And yeah, Pentiment is also just a great example of how to make a dialogue-focused adventure game fun. Like, part of that is probably because I chose hedonism as one of my skills and made Andreas into a terrible little boyslut, but you know how it is. The dialogue never bored me, every character feels truly alive -- and that's without voice acting! I actually appreciated that there wasn't any honestly, it's a double-edged sword in a lot of games like this, and it only would've detracted from the bespoke aesthetic decision to give every character's spoken dialogue in "their own handwriting", in quotes because I'm not entirely sure what the implication was for the characters that are by their own admission illiterate (but I did love that Claus the town printer's dialogue is the only one that uses an actual typeface, accompanied by the satisfying thuds of a printing press).

By the end of the game, Tassing really does begin to feel like your home as well, not only because many pivotal events in Tassing's recent history are influenced by the player, but because you've grown close to the town's citizens and watched them grow and change as well. Pentiment isn't a power trip in that sense -- you cannot save everybody or give everybody a happy ending, not that you'd want to with some of the assholes you run into honestly -- but it does manage to encapsulate the warm and fuzzy feeling that despite the world being dogshit, we can still do our best for those around us, be a part of a greater whole with honest fervor. The player and Andreas will inevitably fuck up a lot, but it's something we have to live with, something to learn from. Things like that feel self-evident in the real world and are rarely explored properly in games, but the fact that Pentiment lacks a manual save function really sells that feeling. But even if we can't meta-game Tassing into the perfect little Bavarian town suffering under feudalism and religious oppression, the Tassing we end up with is undeniably ours. I think that's probably why I might never replay Pentiment, which is rare for me, since I tend to replay games I love quite often.

Also the "third act" is pretty good! Saw some people criticizing the shift in gameplay focus, but it was a nice change of pace and was probably my favorite part altogether. Don't normally recommend games on here, but honestly, check it out for yourself. I can't really think of many demographics that'd be outright disappointed by Pentiment. It's good. :)

“All the world will be your enemy, Prince with a Thousand Enemies, and whenever they catch you, they will kill you. But first they must catch you, digger, listener, runner, prince with the swift warning. Be cunning and full of tricks and your people shall never be destroyed.”
--Watership Down

Rain World one of those games where the line of "I like it because I think it's fun" and "I like it because I respect the work that went into it" is blurred.
Every enemy has observable behavior patterns, be it hunting, pack tactics, fear of environmental hazards, or symbiosis with other creatures. Looking at the behind the scenes it's impressive how it all fits together with the AI having separate ways of tracking through sight or vision. It truly feels like I am escaping a wild animal and not an enemy with a "pursue entity: [Player]" protocol.
And understanding that is what helps mitigate the frustrations when the simulation works against you. Three camouflaged lizards camping by the one path forward isn't the devs crafting a challenging encounter, that's just where their AI is telling them to gather because they're being chased out of their usual hunting grounds by a migrating tribe of Scavenger Monkeys.
Still, this can be used to your advantage, because the lizards are territorial and don't like sharing space with one another. Coax one to assault another and they may just leave enough of an opening for you to slip past.
90% of the time it works and feels like you're overcoming the odds of a world programmed against you by fighting back with your knowledge of it.

The other 10% of the time is when the simulation breaks down. You start to see the artifice in the design and things transcend from "Tolerable inconvenience" to "Bullshit Setback."
Because Rain World still needs to be a game with a goal and path forward, and this at times is incongruous with it's measured little world.
Much of the actual frustrations I had came at the fault of the rain mechanic. You're on a timer (with inconsistent length) at the start of each day to fill your belly and find shelter, and sometimes the path to shelter just isn't the path that food has spawned on, and vice-versa.
This wouldn't be so much a problem without the karma system preventing your passage to new areas. Survive a day with a full belly, your karma goes up a level, die and it goes down. At the entrance to new areas you'll be denied access if your karma isn't above a certain level. Get rejected and you now have to remain in the area you just got through, back tracking until you find reasonable hunting grounds and survive enough cycles to get your karma level requisite.

Grinding. It's grinding. And the grinding is never fun because of the aforementioned chaos and unfairness of the simulated ecosystem. Getting through an area by the skin of your teeth feels terrific, being told to go back and do it five more times is deflating.

And it's clear the devs became aware of this deficiency, because endgame areas simply start to include farmable food and shelters right outside the karma checkpoints. Were it not tied to the game's themes and story of cycles and rebirth, I'd question if the game even needs the karma system.

The true frustrations lie in a few gimmick areas causing deaths (and thus depleted karma) far outside the control or understanding of new players. A completely pitch black network of tunnels that causes eye strain, a complex of sentient cancer and zero gravity, and fields of carnivorous grass that can only be traversed on the back of a squishy deer that can sometimes just not spawn near you (this is oddly the worst one).

But as I walk away from Rain World, I can't stay mad at it. It's too fascinating a creation. A labor of passion and experimentation.

I will, inevitably, grit my teeth and dive back in again.

My current search history:

-Rimworld beginners guide
-Rimworld how to remove corpses
-Rimworld how to destroy clothing
-Rimworld how to feed animals
-Rimworld how to get colonists married
-Rimworld slavery
-Rimworld how to cure malaria
-Rimworld how to get slaves married
-Rimworld how to farm crops indoors
-Rimworld how to knock out people
-Rimworld cannibalism ideology
-Rimworld how to set up a human farm

Uma conclusão digna da saga. Seu design é mais próximo que o de Sorcery! 2, a começar pelo fato de se passar majoritariamente em uma única cidade, e o sucesso da quest depender principalmente da coleta de informações. Considerando que o segundo game foi meu favorito, isso é algo bem positivo para mim.

Algumas coisas apresentadas no game anterior ganham bem mais espaço aqui e há subversões no plot e mecânicas bem interessantes. No papel tinha tudo para ser o melhor da série e, num sentido puramente técnico, é difícil discordar disso.

Entretanto, ainda acho que o segundo game da série é o melhor, e esse aqui supera os outros por não muito. O problema? A recompensa.

Desde o primeiro game, Sorcery explicitamente deixa várias "sementes" no meio do caminho com a promessa de que veremos seus frutos no capítulo final. Chegado o desfecho da aventura, o resultado é... Não muito impressionante, para ser sincero. Talvez a culpa seja minha e minha experiência esteja sendo prejudicada por expectativas que criei. Talvez eu devesse considerar o jogo sob seus próprios méritos, não a partir daquilo que criei em minha cabeça. Mas talvez também eu pudesse ser um ser humano funcional, e estamos aí.

Dito isso, mesmo colocando minhas expectativas de lado, gostei mais dos encontros e as ramificações narrativas de Sorcery! 2 e até do 3 (que tem outros problemas, mas não vem ao caso). Não que o resultado seja ruim, muito pelo contrário: é uma história bem engajante e que valeu a pena experienciar.

This review contains spoilers

I can't think of a game that confuses me more than Rain World, to the point that I doubt I can honestly give it any score at all. It defies measurement, for good and ill.

tl;dr – Rain World is a po-faced “Shaggy Dog” story in video game form that I can't quite leave alone even though I hate every moment.

First let's get what I like out of the way. It is an aggressive middle finger to the metroidvania genre (always a cause to celebrate). No upgrades, no cracked walls, no “that-ledge-is-too-high-when-do-I-get-the-double-jump,” and no Fisher-Price lock-and-key obviousness. Oh you think you'll find a treasure chest in the far-flung corner? NOPE SCREW YOU – only rain and death await thee, LOL.

Though I hate the “crapsack world” theme (more on that later), I can't deny that the world feels – alive. You don't know what it's going to do. You don't know where enemies will show up. Or how many. Are the scavengers dangerous? What about the giant bugs? There's a flicker of Subnautica's awe and fear with each encounter – that delicious tension of split-second decision: friend or foe?

The game doesn't care if three white lizards decide to park in the only viable path forward with no weapons available. This is frustrating as hell – but it's kinda real. No one designed this beyond some spawn points. It's just how it happened. I must admit this is compelling even though I'm tearing my hair out. I wish more games at least toyed with this beyond the rogue-like genre.

But Rain World's pros come with flip-side cons. What I dislike:

The rain cycle. Yes the thing in the title. It just ruins what the game has going for it. It would be more enjoyable to wait out enemies and sneak around if you didn't have a damnable ticking death clock of irregular length to stress you out. It sucks half the fun out of exploration. Why go looking into a far off corner if the Overseer's shelter hint is pointing the other way? The shelters are far and few between and food can be even more elusive. You've got to eat enough for hibernation and reach a shelter before the clock ticks down, all while avoiding predators more-often-than-not parked in the one path forward (see the flip-side?).

“But you're supposed to take your time, raise your karma, feel out the area, you've gotta coexist with it, like it's a real habitat!” But it's not a real habitat. It's merely a literalization, a words-become-worlds manifestation from the lips of that awful 'teacher' in Beasts of the Southern Wild: “YOU. ARE. MEAT!”

“But-but-but all the A.I., and the ecosystem – I saw YouTube videos about it, it's real!” Promise you, it's not. It's a crapsack world, i.e. 100% contrived. It's a thousand screens of intentional degradation and disrepair – a pathological bludgeoning of post-apocalyptic mind-numbing sameness. Yes, it's all rendered very strikingly and no doubt lovingly by the artists, and at least the color-palettes change, but whether it's the yellow-sky farm array or the pitch-black citadel, it's a dead place out to get you and there's no way to live in it. There's no welcoming Elysian field to balance the rot. At best you kind of make peace with the decay and move on before the next rain.

For all the tool-savvy smarts of your controllable slug-cat, there's no way to cultivate an area or make your own shelter. I'm not saying the game should be a farming sim, but if it wants you to take your time, it needs to let you leave your stamp. It needs a Resident-Evil typewriter room. A place with a pensive tune and a trunk. A place that lets you catch your breath before heading back into hell. And the rain shelters ain't it.

Finally, Shaggy Dog time. What I loathe:

The game's story sells you a bill of goods. Your character slips from the saving grip of its slugcat family, falling down (supposedly) into the land of Rain World. Then you start the game. What do you assume your goal is? To get back to your sluggycat family of course!

This. Never. Happens.

There's not a pip or squeak about your family for the rest of the game. The intro cinematic is a lie. It feels like the developers, upon play-testing, found that players had little motivation to progress through the game (due to all the disincentives already listed), so they felt the need to set up a false motivation at the beginning.

You can speculate all you want about the fate of the family, but it's in vain. Are they alive, somewhere in Rain World? Are they in a land far above it, where your sluggy fell from? Does each hibernation or death cycle pass just a day, a month, or a year? Or is it years? Decades? Eons? Has your slugcat family been dead since the first cycle? Are they rebirthing somewhere else? Is it just the regions of Rain World that are subject to the reincarnation cycle or is it the entire fictional planet? Does any of this even matter? Apparently NOT – the slugcat family is a red herring for which you will get no satisfaction.

“But the ascended host of faceless slugcats at the end – that's kind of like your family!”

This takes us, perhaps, to what I loathe most about Rain World.

I'm not a Buddhist by any stretch, but I have a healthy respect for the psychology of the chakras, and in my opinion, the chakras are poorly used and represented in this game. What does filling your stomach and surviving rain cycles have to do with ascension? Why does becoming prey reduce your level? In my readings, the chakras are all about enlightenment and state of mind – not food chain scoreboards.

The game is a one-sided cynic's reading of Buddhist Hinduism. All self-immolation, detachment, void, and darkness – it has no room for love, home, progress, and light. No, the cute pearl quests for Looks-To-The-Moon don't fix this. A glowing tree of ascended slugcats, shown for all of five seconds, doesn't balance the overwhelming Eldritch entity reducing you to a string of gray nothingness. That's the real heart of the game (and the developers): Lovecraftian horror.

This is why I hate Rain World.

It is a twenty-hour monument to despair.

     'In a land of clear colours and stories,
     In a region of shadowless hours,
     Where earth has a garment of glories
     And a murmur of musical flowers...’
     – Algernon Charles Swinburne, 'Dedication', 1865.

It took me several years to understand my girlfriend's fascination with translation. At first I thought it was an expression of her bilingualism and that it came naturally to her. She liked to compare texts at her desk, with two books open and bookmarked. I remember seeing Jane Austen and Plutarch, T.S. Eliot and Cicero in different editions. One book she kept coming back to was George Steiner's After Babel (1975), which I later took with me. When I was younger, its seven hundred pages frightened me with their complexity, and I kept the volume only as a souvenir: the spine was cracked from heavy use, and some of the pages were slightly worn and yellowed. These marks identified her presence, her aura, her memory.

     Understanding is a translation

It was only when I was later writing notes on After Babel that I understood what she valued in translation. It is difficult to capture Steiner's theses, since they do not form a grand, all-encompassing theory, but a key idea – formative for the field of translation studies and comparative literature – is that the communication of information is a secondary part of human discourse. For him, each language colours the individual's relationship to reality in a different way, allowing them to express a situated point of view, an otherness of being. As much as Steiner represented an ideal of the Renaissance man for my girlfriend – and still does, in a way, for me – he was not without his faults. His erudition was often the result of clumsy approximations, where it was more important to keep exploring elsewhere than to specialise.

Through it all, he remained the image of a reader, eager to compare and understand the texts he encountered. My girlfriend loved translating and comparing because, in her illness, she found in it a way of travelling and experiencing spontaneously the rich imagination of texts. Compared to the simple act of reading, translation forces the reader to immerse themselves in the text, to decode its signs, to identify cultural markers and to discover the various references hidden within it. A first glance will reveal expressions and objects that refer to a more or less precise period of time; a closer look will reveal word choices and content that were in use a few decades or centuries earlier; the scansion of the text will also make it possible to delimit a style and influences. Translating means observing and experiencing these elements in order to render them as faithfully as possible into another language, knowing that the result will still be distorted.

     Un petit pan de mur jaune and the rock of the Lighthouse

To transcribe is to experience. Certain scenes, conveyed by contemplative narrators, always linger in my mind. In Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse (1927), Mrs Ramsey reads extracts from the famous anthology The Oxford Book of English Verse (1900), edited by Arthur T. Quiller-Couch: each passage, chosen a priori at random, resonates with the previous ones, allowing the reader to enter Mrs Ramsey's consciousness and the atmosphere of the house. The way she picks the verses, as if plucking petals, contributes to the strange languor of the moment [1]. In Marcel Proust's À la recherche du temps perdu (1927), the narrator fantasises about his trip to Venice. However, this vision of the Serenissima is largely altered by Proust's own readings [2] and his desire to leave a mark, however subjective, through his literary account.

Type Dreams is fully aware of this artistic and ontological strength, drawing on the aesthetics of the typewriter and transcription to instantiate moments of contemplation in the present moment. KB0 offered a sublime insight into the relationship between the physical act of writing and existence; as such, I will not elaborate on these issues here. However, I would like to point out that, beyond the systems and anachronical Victorian aesthetics that seem to run counter to technological progress, the choice of texts is part of a veritable journey into the history of human production and Richard Hofmeier's mentality. The exercises are like musical études, and their poetic absurdity contrasts strikingly with the more concrete texts. There is something deeply wistful about these meditations on existence, death, love and memory. Just as the narrator of La Recherche instantiates his life in a literary production – to inscribe it in Time – Hofmeier seems to conjure up a malaise and an absence by transcribing texts that evoke this sorrow.

There are imperfections in the texts that remind the player of their humanity, whether due to the author's playfulness or a simple typing error. These deviations from the norm force the player to grasp their mental universe and compare it with their own. The extracts from Plato's Apologia Socratis (4th century BCE) are given in the translation by Miles Burnyeat and Christopher Rowe. A long debate about the translation of the dialogue seeks to determine whether ἀρετή should be understood as 'goodness' or as 'virtue'. Burnyeat and Rowe have argued, on philosophical grounds, that the correct translation is 'goodness' – but there is no consensus on this analysis [3]. Nevertheless, the choice of this version, rather than a translation from the Loeb Classic or that of Thomas G. West, allows Hofmeier to situate the theme of death and memory within his system of thought. These long extracts can be contrasted, for example, with the inclusion of 'Seeking Feelings for Words' by Felipe Carretoni, a confidential Brazilian writer.

     And I love you so much

The prose poem is addressed to a significant other, acknowledging their presence and the lessons they have taught the author. 'It has been some time now, love, since you taught me what love is,' the poem ends. There are echoes, deliberate or not, in the text of T. S. Eliot's 'A Dedication to my Wife': 'No peevish winter wind shall chill / No sullen tropic sun shall wither / The roses in the rose-garden which is ours and ours only. / But this dedication is for others to read: / These are private words addressed to you in public' [4]. Carretoni's poem unfolds as the keys are struck, while the surroundings in which the typographer finds themselves slowly change. Starting with the empty, colourless room and the window covered by a light rain, it gradually regains its vibrancy as the player's avatar reappears. The act of writing exorcises the memories of a melancholy love. It is impossible to know what Carretoni and Hofmeier actually mean by this poem, but it hardly matters since the interpretation is left to the reader and player.

Both Apologia Socratis and 'Seeking Feelings for Words' remind me so much of my teenage love and the boundless affection she left me. Sometimes it overflows without knowing where to go: Type Dreams, in its mechanically contemplative approach, channeled that flood by conjuring up the virtues and lessons my first love left me – or what I imagine she left me. Over the past few years, I have spent long hours rereading and transcribing the many letters we exchanged. It was a way of reliving the feelings I had once committed to paper, of instantiating her presence once again. I have not done this for a long time, partly because the tenderness and lost love that surrounds me is painful, and perhaps because I have found other ways to honour her memory. Nevertheless, Type Dreams has brought back all those feelings and bared my heart once more.

Type Dreams is an unfinished work. The campaign for the game is not available, as Hofmeier interrupted the development of the game for personal reasons, and only a summary gives an idea of the themes addressed: 'The world's two fastest typists fall in love just as a new century is born'. A love that has nowhere to go and lives only in the imagination. Like Cart Life (2010), Type Dreams touches on everyday feelings with great humility. Typing the various texts with their distinctive tastes was a gentle stab in my chest: I felt the rustling of the trees, the kiss which tasted of the sea, the mysterious photograph by the lake and the walks on the beach all come back to me. And I cannot leave out the words we always used to close our letters.

And I love you so much.

__________
[1] Virginia Woolf meticulously constructed this atmosphere, which echoed her own vulnerability. In On Being Ill (1925), drafted while she was bedridden, she wrote: 'We rifle poets of their flowers. We break off a line or two and let them open in the depths of the mind, spread their bright wings, swim like coloured fish in green waters' (Virginia Woolf, 'On Being Ill', in The Moment and Other Essays, Hogarth Press, London, 1947, p. 19). The hermetic aspect of a poem is increased tenfold by a patient who hallucinates an entire universe.
[2] Proust was greatly influenced by the writings of John Ruskin, especially The Stones of Venice (1853). Ruskin denounced the effects of industrialisation on the Romanesque and Gothic heritage and became a leader of the Gothic Revival, an aesthetic that had a lasting influence on Proust. As such, '[his] Venice is an old provincial town, full of medieval vestiges, where intimate, parochial life is magnified; but it is also a fabulous garden, filled with fruit and birds of coloured stone, blooming in the middle of the sea that comes to refresh it' (Georges Cattaui, Proust et ses métamorphoses, Nizet, Paris, 1972, p. 26, personal translation).
[3] For example, see Joy Samad, 'Socrates’ Pragma and Socrates’ Toughness: On the Proper Translation of Apology 30b 2–4', in Polis, vol. 28, no. 2, 2011, pp. 250-266.
[4] Thomas S. Eliot, 'A Dedication to My Wife', in Collected Poems, 1909-1962, Faber & Faber, London, 1974.

Pentiment reminds us that reading is an act of necromancy.

THE LETTERS MOVE! Even as you read the text in this game, it shifts and rearranges itself underneath your eyes. It is text as a living, breathing entity, and I am positively shocked in retrospect that no other game has done anything like this. Great innovations, I think, rearrange the world around them. They seem like the obvious solution in retrospect because they are so overwhelmingly right that it seems a travesty for any other solution to be used in their place.

Pentiment loves writing. It loves text, it adores the written word, and it is obsessed with the act of reading and being read. It makes every single other text-heavy game look worse by merely existing with such passion for this medium. How am I supposed to read a VN, play a CRPG, wander a walking sim, when the entire time I am now acutely aware of just how dead those texts are? They are cold and unfeeling, just a tool used to get across words to the player, and nothing more.

The text in this game has mechanical depth! I don't just mean the writing, which is a strong contender for the best prose in the entire medium, but the text itself -- the ink bleeds to life in front of you, filling in the outlines of the words as they appear. Several handcrafted typefaces populate the dialogue of this game, each of them accompanied by the scratching of a pen on paper or the satisfying clunk of a printing press, like the voice beeps of a visual novel on steroids -- it turns the act of reading into an awareness of the act of writing, intimately coupling the consumption of the text with the creation of the text in a way that somehow makes the characters in this game feel even more real and human than if they were fully voiced.

Each typeface refuses to just have one variant of each letter, but instead several varying versions of letters are used depending on where they are contextually located, causing the text to bleed and run into itself in a satisfying and natural way. The letters change as you read, but not in a lazy and random way, instead carefully handcrafted for effect. The speed of the changes is just so that, for those within an average range of reading speed, you won't so much notice the exact changes of the letters as they happen, but instead you will always be right on the tail of the rearranged characters, noting their presence in the corner of your eye and by the stains left beneath the newly written text. This is, of course, the titular effect, and it says everything about the historical and cultural themes explored in this game -- but that is for another review to discuss. For our part, we are here solely for the text!

In far more obvious ways, the way that characters write their dialogue reflects who we understand them to be, whether it's in the choice of typeface, the frequency of spelling mistakes, or the ways in which alternate colors of text are used. Some characters wield red text as if we are reading a Red Letter Bible, and other characters hold completely different things to be significant and holy, and thus represent that with red text instead. When characters are impassioned, or tired, or terrified, their text is filled with errors and rapidly changing letters. We get a sense of who they are without even reading the words that they have to say!

Pentiment is all about uncovering the vibrant life in that which we view as dead, permanently separated from us, and hidden by layers of dirt and centuries of distance. It argues that even the very words in which history resides are alive -- and if the text is alive, how can its contents not be? In a world of digital text and mass alienation, is all too easy to conceptualize of a relationship between us, the author, and the text that looks something like author --> text --> reader. The author creates a text, its own standalone object, and we consume it. Pentiment rejects this entirely, and reminds us that the relationship has always been that of a conversation! The act of reading cannot be separated from the act of writing. When we engage with a text, we are fundamentally engaging with its author as well, and by doing so reaching across continents, across millennia, connecting two living persons even if it means that we are resurrecting the dead to do so!

I did not think text could be something that I would find this beautiful. This is what the medium of gaming deserves, this is what it's always been capable of, and it is a joy to finally see the medium's potential fulfilled in such a loving and thoughtfully crafted manner.

Play this motherfucking game!

Sorcery! 3 continua a fórmula dos outros dois, mas num mapa bem maior e mecânicas mais complexas. Isso não é algo inteiramente positivo. Se as Baklands são maiores que Kharé, também senti que são menos interessantes de explorar. Particularmente, as várias micro-decisões e caminhos alternativos que você fazia tanto no jogo anterior parecem ter tomado uma abordagem mais linear aqui, e tive bem menos ânimo de tentar rebobinar ações e ver as diferenças possíveis. Kharé era mais enxuta, mas também mais densa e com vários eventos e personagens que atiçavam bem mais minha curiosidade.

O foco do 3 é menos nas pequenas decisões e mais numa trama e objetivos maiores, que o jogo deixa bem claros desde o início: encontre e aniquile as "Sete Serpentes" em seu caminho até Mampang. Algo interessante é que no final de sua aventura o jogo acaba subvertendo um pouco esse próprio objetivo, fazendo-lhe refletir sobre as ações que tomou no decorrer da jornada - dependendo do caso, você pode até ser motivado a refazer a aventura toda só para ver se consegue um caminho mais otimizado, ou realizando menos sacrifícios.

Inclusive, eu chegue a fazer isso, resetando o game depois de minha primeira playthrough para ver se conseguia um desempenho melhor. Mas isso foi muito mais motivado pelo receio de me arrepender no jogo seguinte do que realmente um desejo intrínseco de jogar mais, e aí mora um grande problema. Apesar de ser bem interessante, no final Sorcery! 3 acaba sofrendo de um problema parecido com o primeiro jogo: há muitas escolhas, mas as consequências estão reservadas para o game seguinte. E se Sorcery! 2 conseguia contornar esse problema criando uma subtrama para a cidade de Kharé bem fechadinha e interessante, aqui a sensação ao final é incontornavelmente de "vamos ver o que vai acontecer no jogo seguinte".

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