Better than nostalgia – there’s genuine affection for how the internet used to be before the forces of social media, ad sales, and consolidation ground everything up into pink Nazi slime. And the affection is clear-eyed, gently suggesting that all we ever did was swap one flavor of bullshit for another. On top of all that, the relentless dedication to its aesthetic goes toe-to-toe with any Kingdom Hearts game you could name. A few puzzles slightly miss the mark towards the end, but whether or not you were around for the AOL days, this shouldn’t be missed. The mods have always been useless tyrants, the teens have always been cringe, and the people running the whole thing have always been dipshits. May the zoomers (and everyone else) forgive us.

I don't have a deep history with Sonic, I just really appreciate the direction the series has gone lately. There's such a sincere joy Sega seems to have rediscovered in these characters, from Sonic Frontiers to the Sonic comic stuff to this. Its what this franchise needed for a long time.

It would've been so easy to do a cheap "dating sim" joke that devs keep making on April Fools, but they committed to a delightful adventure. And you can tell the devs actually care about visual novels and understand the history. If you try to submit your name as "Ushiromiya" or "Phoenix Wright" the game MC politely says "we don't want to get in trouble." It cares about this genre and isn't looking for a cheap gag. They love these worlds, they love this medium, and they have genuine artistic talent behind it. Its really admirable.

It’s important that you treat Pentiment with the same scrutiny and scepticism that you (hopefully) do with any other historical source. Most media, not just videogames, are, politely put, atrocious at dealing in good faith with the settings and themes that Pentiment tackles, to the point where it’s probably reasonable to call it one of the most authentic games ever made in this regard. The flip side of this is that it makes the things Pentiment gets wrong feel more conspicuous than they would be otherwise.

If that last part has your guard up, you can safely lower it, because Pentiment’s small handful of inaccuracies are pretty minor in that they don't affect the plot overmuch. I won’t say what they are specifically, because this is the type of game where any and all details ought to be discovered yourself, but among other things, they include at least two cultural events which are unambiguously Christian being misattributed to Alpine paganism of some description, as well as one figure who was (to my knowledge) neither pre-Christian nor worshipped as a goddess being described as a pre-Christian goddess.

There are a couple of reasons why these don’t overly strain Pentiment’s believability and for which it deserves to be given the benefit of the doubt. For starters, relative to the vast majority of media set during the early modern period and (in this case, just after the) Middle Ages, Pentiment’s immensely tactful to the point where I'm (almost but not quite) inclined to think these kinds of mistakes were intentionally included, on the part of its characters rather than its writers; that it avoids the common error of misattributing the origins of Christian saints to pagan figures further suggests this. More broadly, it’s unreasonable to expect anything to be perfect in terms of accuracy and – on exceedingly rare occasions, in exceptionally talented hands – inaccuracies can be advantageous. Excalibur’s a more visually distinctive and symbolic film for featuring armour which is about 1000 years too advanced for the 5th/6th century AD. Shadow of Rome’s a more memorable game for making you fight a ~15ft tall Germanic barbarian whose weapon of choice is a marble pillar. Likewise, in a meta sort of way, Pentiment’s central idea of historiographical truth being difficult to pinpoint is arguably strengthened by its own shortcomings in this respect. Ideally, this’ll encourage players to be more wary of any historically-themed media they engage with, including Pentiment itself.

Any such grievances are further obscured by the mostly impressive weight Pentiment lends to your decisions. I had the fortune of playing through Pentiment concurrently with my brother, and when we’d walk in on each other playing it, we’d do mutual double takes as one of us was in the middle of story events that the other didn’t even consider would be possible. Speech checks being affected by past dialogue choices encourages you to constantly, properly pay attention to and think about what you’re saying in a way I personally haven’t seen done since the isometric Fallouts or Vampire the Masquerade Bloodlines. Although its time limits (while appreciated) aren’t implemented as organically as Fallout 1’s, an advantage Pentiment has over even those titans is that it also autosaves after every single action you take, lending everything a degree of permanence that few other RPGs can offer. If you were feeling particularly cheeky, you could go as far as to say that Pentiment can be counted alongside the campaign of Black Ops 2 in the pantheon of games which actually are what everyone pretends New Vegas is.

I call it only mostly impressive because Pentiment’s key weakness is the linearity of its third and final act, which even if you’re being charitable can only really be called overbearing. Not to bang on the choices-don’t-matter drum too hard, because nobody can ever seem to agree what choices mattering in a game really looks like, but you’re much more likely to wish you were able to say or do something other than the options you’re given in the last act than in the preceding two. Potential twists and turns you might hope to direct this chapter’s plot towards are often snuffed out by blurted out variations of “actually, I was only pretending to want to do that” that you rarely have any control over. This isn’t to suggest that Pentiment ends on a sour note – the ending itself’s quite lovely – but from a decision making standpoint, the whole last stretch’s noticeably more limiting.

However close it comes, this is never enough to distract from Pentiment’s visual splendour. Jan van Eyck paintings and The Tragedy of Man are the only other media I can think of which incorporate so many different historical art styles into one cohesive package and so skilfully. Sebhat being drawn in the style of Ethiopian Coptic Orthodox art’s a particularly inspired touch, but in general it’s no wonder that the art director and animators are the first names to pop up on the opening credits, because it’s like a playable manuscript. Rarely do you come across a game where you can legitimately say that the visuals are a selling point in and of themselves.

There should be more games like Pentiment. It represents two things we need more of – big developers putting out more niche, experimental titles, and historical media which isn’t riddled with self-congratulatory 21st century arrogance that spits on the memory of everyone who happened to be born before an arbitrary point in time, in which characters actually believe what they say and aren’t one-dimensional caricatures of the past. Be thankful it exists, whatever its issues.

Persona 4 was probably the most miserable I have ever been while going through a main storyline in a video game in recent memory. Coming fresh off Persona 3, a game that I adored greatly for just how character focused its main story was (it wasn’t even my favorite video game at the time of starting P4), and hearing the sheer amount of praise this one received on Twitter during its re-release on Steam, I was shocked at how mind numbing this was as an experience.

Despite the intriguing premise, the main narrative is something I could only describe as factory produced. It quickly establishes a basic formula, that greatly detracts from both the emotional depth of the themes the story attempts to portray and the intricacy of the murder mystery, to create a predictable, repetitive slog of a campaign. Outside of an incident towards the end of the game, there’s little to no tension as you go through arcs with the exact same structure ad nauseam. Once the cast decide to devote themselves to catching the killer after the first arc, the “mystery” element quickly devolves into basic, deductive reasoning with no creative input required.

P4 decided to change from P3 how it would handle the time between each major event within the story. In P3, this time was filled with the cast’s introspection regarding their current circumstances and the further development of their characters arcs. In P4, this is replaced with wacky, anime high schooler hijinks that dwells more on the overall vibe between the cast rather than the individual journeys of each character. And this approach isn’t necessarily a bad thing. I can respect the greater focus on an upbeat tone, as I actually think it works pretty well and distinguishes this game from any other in this regard. And I can see why this is something that’s endeared countless people to this game. To its credit, I can say a lot of these moments do help the Investigation Team feel like a genuine group of friends. My biggest issue would lie in the fact that many of these scenes are unfunny at best and blatantly problematic at worst.

Whether it be the camping trip, where we see Yosuke blatantly accuse a sexually confused Kanji of planning to “do things” to him in his sleep solely because he’s potentially interested in men. Or in the next scene, where Yosuke pressures his female friends into wearing swimsuits so he can gawk at them. Or the cultural festival, where Yosuke signs them up for a swimsuit competition without their consent, despite the fact that one of them has made it very clear that they are extremely conscious about their feminine body... ᴵ’ᵐ ⁿᵒᵗᶦᶜᶦⁿᵍ ᵃ ᵗʳᵉⁿᵈ ʰᵉʳᵉ...

In conjunction with my lack of care for the goofy antics and the narrative’s lack of focus on organic characterization, it leaves the main story itself feeling incredibly vapid. You may be thinking “god fucking damn, he hates this game. 3/5 stars? Stop lying 😭” and yeah, I think that myself sometimes too. But I do have to remind myself that the underlying qualities of Persona 4 are really fucking good.

I think most social links do an amazing job at genuinely pushing the messages the game wants to communicate. In particular, I think they fantastically highlight the importance of self confrontation; the difficulties of acknowledging our own faults, the pain that comes with, and the betterment that we attain as a result. These stories contain the exact heartfelt writing I look for in this franchise, some of them still being among my favorites to this day. Shoutout to Dojima and Kanji in particular. My fuckin beloveds.

And I find the atmosphere, while not being something I personally clicked with, is still something I greatly respect. It’s what you’ll hear literally everyone praise this game for and for a damn good reason. A comfy small town is a genius idea that heavily contrasts with the typical big city environments we see from this franchise. The game does a good job at occasionally meshing the setting of Inaba with the motivation of individual characters and other elements within the story. And the upbeat J-Pop tracks of the overworlds sell the feel-good nature of the game’s tone perfectly.

Talking about Persona 4 makes me realize that it’s just… hard for me to talk about this game without comparing it to other entries within the series. It's hard to look back in retrospect without thinking about how this game represents everything I dislike about the series and its current direction. Not made anymore easy when recognizing that this is still technically a follow up to my favorite game ever. It turns many of Persona 3’s captivating ideas that were used to push its unique themes (The Fool’s Journey, the calendar system, the overall gameplay loop) into formulaic elements to craft a narrative that has little in common with Persona 3. And this is something that I find continues to plague the series, as Persona 5 occasionally falls into the same trappings. But at the end of the day, it’s still important for me to recognize the strengths of Persona 4. With the charming atmosphere of Inaba and consistent character writing, I still find it to be a competent, standalone game. And regardless of my faults with what I think is a flawed approach, I can still see why this could be someone’s favorite game ever.

I plan on revisiting Persona 4 some day, but through the original PS2 version. I’ve seen many discussions online regarding how Golden’s added scenes heavily detract from the atmosphere of the game. Mostly through how Inaba is now seemingly only an hour drive away from the biggest attractions in Japan. And the added padding in general is something I never really cared for. It’s important to me, as like I said earlier in the review, Persona 4’s atmosphere is something that I didn’t really click with, despite how much I respect the approach. I hope that playthrough helps me focus on this game’s strengths, as this is something that I want to like, despite the constant complaining I direct at it.