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!

I took a week after 100%ing the game to think about it, and in retrospect, I'm more disappointed with it than I was at first.

There's a very unfortunate tendency in game writing that seems to pop up when a game wants to be "about" some Big Idea. Almost every time that Big Idea is some variation of existentialism, "we make our own meaning," so on and so forth. This tendency is to start reading Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy articles at you, couched in very poorly written original prose. There are, I think, a few obvious problems with this.

First and foremost is that a well-written game very rarely has to tell you what it is About. This is one of the reasons I actually think I enjoyed the demo a lot more -- the general idea that our actions literally changed who the princess was and how we perceived her and that reality was a mutually created spiral was already obvious without a single word being written about it. Unfortunately, it seems like the creators didn't really trust that audiences would Get It, and thus they leaned much deeper into the explicit conceptual stuff in the full game. The full game is so bloated with the internal cosmology that it seems to have no room to actually substantially explore anything.

Secondly: Listen, no disrespect, but laymen (I am one of these!) trying to explain philosophy at you pretty much always goes poorly. To communicate your Big Idea well, you need to be internally precise and clear about what your Big Idea is, and know how to put that precision and clarity into words. If all you can really accomplish is a string of mixed metaphors that vaguely hand-wave towards an idea, it does make me question if you even knew exactly what you wanted to say. I don't think this game really did -- some sort of mashup between "you make your own meaning" and "change is inevitable" and "you experience the world and yourself through other people," all of which are generally very broad and potent ideas that have been explored a ton through various works, and none of which this game really seemed to explore beyond a surface level of just Informing You Of The Idea. It's a very Nier: Automata approach to Big Ideas.

Finally, maybe a bit of a personal gripe, but I don't even think that the "reading an SEP article at the player" approach is necessarily bad. I'm open to the idea, but if you're gonna do it, I'd at least like the article you read at me to be a little more novel? Hit me with some weird-ass niche stuff that I'd struggle to read and make it more interesting! Be a weird little guy that explores weird little ideas and pelt me with that shit! I love learning about new stuff. I think it's inherently interesting. But dear god I cannot stand having games just tell me "hey! listen! did you know... we make our own meaning?" on repeat. I got it! I understand!

All that said: I don't think Slay the Princess is bad. I liked the voice acting a lot, the art was neat, the writing was (at first) a less insufferable and more clever version of the Stanley Parable kind of writing, and generally I'm always excited for new things from this dev team. Scarlet Hollow is one of my favorite VNs, it's just excellent on all fronts and I always highly recommend it! It's just too bad that this game got deeply caught up in a poorly crafted conceptual structure rather than leaning into the strengths of this dev team (very good character writing and slow burn spooky vibes).

It could have been a lot worse. They could have named a giant robot Nietzsche. Thank god there aren't any games that do that.

Lies of P copies from Bloodborne and Sekiro like a child does from his friend's homework, it has all the answers but it doesn't understand the assignment.

Developer Round8's main takeaway from Dark Souls is that you die a lot, and everyone seems to really like that about it. After all, it's telling you to Prepare to Die right in the title, so clearly that's what people show up for. Well, Lies of P would like you to die too, only it's not so invested in making anything about that loop fun. Round8 has not read deep enough to figure out what makes Dark Souls so engaging and has produced a frustratingly clumsy imitation for it, one that is at times mean-spirited and cheap because that's what Round8 assumes Souls to be.

Lies of P's combat system places a significant emphasis on perfect-parries, which are initiated by hitting the block button a few frames before the enemy's attack lands. Against normal field enemies who throw out one or two attacks at a time, this feels pretty good. Bosses, however, love to initiate absurd 15-hit combos full of staggered animations and straight up fake-outs intended to trip you up and punish you, and that's where I start to fall off with how Lies of P operates. The speed at which your parry is initiated and the level of precision involved makes this system unreliable against flurry attacks, and a severely neutered dodge roll gives you little to fall back on. The game also takes a very Dark Souls 3 "poise for me but not for thee" stance, so I hope you don't mind watching Timothee Chalamet slowly get his wooden ass back up until you save enough Quartz to upgrade his P-Organ so he can dodge while prone.

Perfect-parries, fable arts (see: Dark Souls 3's weapon arts), and charge attacks are all necessary for quickly building stagger damage, because of course this game has a stagger mechanic. It also makes no attempt to convey when you should be pressing the attack or playing defensively, because it obfuscates its stagger meter for absolutely no good reason. Almost all bosses have a second health bar, too, because they all want to be the giant monkey from Sekiro so badly. At this point, I think Sekiro's impact on game design has been a net negative.

Round8's rote copying doesn't end there, however. The door knights from Dark Souls 2, giants from Dark Souls 3, sawtooth blade from Bloodborne, and animation for attempting to use an out-of-stock consumable from Dark Souls are all here. A veritable greatest hits. Round8's wholesale theft isn't limited to Fromsoft, however. Skip this next paragraph if you don't want to spoil some late game character beats and reveals:

Lorenzini Venigni, a friendly NPC who upgrades your Legion Arm (think Sekiro's shinobi prosthetic), is an orphan turned playboy millionaire whose parents were murdered after watching a fantasy-adventure film with their son, leaving him in the care of his faithful butler. The identity of his parent's killer? The King of Riddles, of course. Italian Riddler saying "riddle me this" is as funny as it is brazen, but the biggest laugh Lies of P's borderline-litigious character writing got from me was the post-credits reveal of Giangio being a double agent, which is presented in an extremely Metal Gear-esque way, complete with a "Mr. President..." level name-drop that sets up a potential series of public domain Souls-likes.

Doing something new with something old seems to be the overarching theme of 2023, and Lies of P plays hopscotch on that thin line between inspiration and mimicry. Thankfully, Round8's attempts to recontextualize Carlo Collodi's Adventures of Pinocchio do often result in success, and a strong emphasis on narrative helps pull together borrowed and original ideas to tell a cohesive story that builds upon its primary source material in interesting ways. I was way more invested in the lore of Krat and its inhabitants - yes, even Italian Batman - than I thought I'd be, and some solid art direction and excellent music left me flirting with the idea of a second run.

I also had a great time with the crafting system. You can strap a gigantic blunt wrench head to a pole and use it like a spear, which is exactly the level of stupid I want out of something like this. Hilts determine scaling and attack animations, while blades affect speed and raw damage. Being able to configure a greatsword that's usable on a dexterity build made me feel more inclined to try out weapons without ever feeling like I built my character wrong or locked myself out of something. It's also nice that throwable items remain viable throughout the game, meaning I always had them in my kit whereas I typically phase them out pretty early in most Souls games.

I'm sure this game will attract some annoying people that are very good at video games who will insist Lies of P is beyond reproach, where every flaw is in fact borne from a lack of skill, asserted in a way that reads more as veiled self-aggrandizement than serious criticism. Par for the course with Souls games and the "get good" crowd they attract. I firmly believe that Lies of P is a deeply flawed and derivative game in dire need of re-balancing and new ideas, regardless of how long it took for me to realize I needed to continually dodge left to beat the King of Puppets.

Anyway, I should've stolen Larry Davis' review and changed one or two things about it. Really give you all the true Lies of P experience.

it has come to my attention that Astarion is basically a tumblr sexyman who women think is very hot but i'd like to clarify: i am NOT like the other girls. Astarion should NOT be dominant, dangerous, or powerfully sexy. Astarion, to me, isn't a character whose appeal is having a really cut physique and an overwhelmingly domineering presence - he SHOULD be reading Garfield comics in the dentist's waiting room because he forgot to charge his phone the night before, he should be doing sketch comedy that never takes off, he should be saving memes of Spongebob being 'cunty' onto his phone, he should be begging to eat pussy politely, and he should be singing along to broadway musicals in the shower.

Investigator: Where were you last night at 10 p.m.?

Suspect: /looks left, looks right, takes a deep breath, violently throws up, cries for his mommy/

Investigator: Something's a little off about this guy.

Darkest Dungeon 2 might be one of the worst sequels I have ever played. For some reason, the game wants to be Slay the Spire instead of an evolution of the previous game. Even if I don't mind it not being an actual sequel, I can't dismiss the current state of it.

>No Reyunald

>Pointless carriage flavor walking forward with nothing to do might as well change the game to dots walking upward on a map

>No watchtower early? good luck getting rng dropped into 50 encounters or roads that destroy your carriage

>Carriage broke? you will now fight with less than 1 character which doesn't even make sense because you have to kill ALL enemies to progress. You can't stall to escape when a character IS CLEARLY ACTIVELY REPAIRING THE VEHICLE.

>No proper explanation of candle upgrades. Game induces you to waste them with dogshit useless rng items/trinkets when later the game allows you to PERMANENTLY UPGRADE CHARACTERS with them, and even if you argue that was the stupidity of my part, devs having the audacity of making this awful reward even available when there's an actual use to the candles is just laughable.

>Game appears to want to focus on the character's backgrounds but doesn't deliver at all? At first, I thought a character story having gameplay on only 2 of the five levels was an early access thing, but then the game was released, and that was just it. It wasn't fascinating

>Abysmal UI, and everything was too convoluted to navigate for 0 reasons. It offers little to 0 explanation of the stats and items that show up. Having to scroll a in game wiki up and down the game, 50 pages of guides doesn't suddenly make it intuitive at all

> The stress system is somehow worse that the first entry. If enemies have horror, I hope you have enough stress-healing items and a stress-healer-focused character

> No Reynauld

Just don't say It's supposed to be unfair garbage or steep to learn the first game is 500 times more fair AND FUN than this shit. But HEY, I get it. It's still early access, and the Epic Games contract forced this fake full-game release. It's self-evident.