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This review contains spoilers

I generally try to avoid spoiler reviews, but for something as narratively focused as Pentiment I just don't think that's feasible. Even revealing the game's structure is somewhat of a spoiler and I can't really mention my primary critiques without at least acknowledging that structure.

Pentiment is a game in three acts. For the duration of the first, the player inhabits Andreas, a young artist earning his keep in a small village through work at the neighboring monastery's scriptorium until he can finish the piece that will make him a master when he returns to his home city. This routine is disrupted by the murder of a visiting noble, and Andreas takes it upon himself to clear the name of his friend and mentor, the accused.

After Andreas has presented his findings to the relevant authorities and brought about the execution of his chosen suspect, Pentiment does NOT inform the player of their correctness. Whomever Andreas dooms, they claim their innocence all the way to the grave. At no point will Pentiment confirm or deny their guilt. This is an idea that has intrigued me since I first heard that one of the Sherlock Holmes games allows the player to be wrong and simply continues. In Pentiment however there is no wrong answer except the one that motivates the investigation in the first place. Act 2 operates in the same way with an aged up Andreas some years later. However, once the player figures out that their choice of suspect doesn't really matter, all tension is swiftly deflated. By removing the player's ability to be wrong, the stakes are reduced to nothing. It could promote replay value by keeping the other choices "valid", but a player is likely to see most of everything on their first playthrough and to put it bluntly, their choices really don't matter. Despite this, both of these thirds of the game are rather exciting and the sheer commitment to historical accuracy makes for a refreshing and interesting setting. Act 2 in particular is a highlight, as I'd say that Andreas' inner world at this point in his life provides the game's most powerful writing.

Act 3 on the other hand goes for something riskier, and I don't think it was worth the cost. The start of act 3 sees the player in control of a totally different character. This is always an interesting narrative trick and it's cool here too, but this is an overarching mystery plot and the previous character doesn't manage to pass on what he knows. As a result the investigative slate is wiped almost entirely clean and the player spends almost all of act 3 gathering knowledge they already have and has no clear bearing on previous intrigue. To say that act 3 is a pace breaker would be quite an understatement. Not only does the narrative mostly drop its ongoing threads for several hours, the gameplay suffers as well. The tasks and plot are more mundane, yes, but the investigation necessary to perform them is also far more linear and controlled. rather than choosing a path to focus on and digging up whatever you can in the time allotted, in act 3 you must find everything. There is a choice to be made at the end of each phase of this investigation but these choices have no narrative consequences, only aesthetic ones in a single cutscene at the end of the game.

Ultimately I have to describe Pentiment as "a mixed bag." There are some flashes of greatness and it's clear that little more than this was possible with the given budget. It's an enjoyable time and the product of good work, but it's nothing I'm willing to call a "must play."

I think that to truly love something, you have to go into the deepest depths with it. That's exactly what I've done here. Mega Man for DOS feels like a freshman's legally distinct computer science project, because that's not terribly far off from what it it is.

This is kind of interesting in that it was developed entirely by Stephen Rozner, an aspiring young developer who was acquired by Capcom for development of this title. Rozner somehow left Capcom during official development and, through a vaguely interesting legal loophole, was still able to release the game. Because of his departure from Capcom, Rozner completely drew up the assets and code for this, from scratch, on his own. In that way, Mega Man for DOS is among the earliest examples of a fan game.

Pretty interesting story, right? Unfortunately, that story is much more interesting than this game. It's about as amateurish as games get, with enemies that are either too short or too fast to properly land hits on, practically nonexistent level design, and 3 Robot Masters that have, luckily, been confined to the annals of history—"Voltman, Sonicman, and Dynaman." This doesn't even have music; in fact, it may not even have sound, although that could've just been the DOSBox emulator acting up. I can't finish this, as I'm neither compelled to nor am I convinced that it's possible to. I'm actually convinced that this game is fundamentally broken by design.

Shout out to Stephen Rozner, the only man whose idea of sticking it to your ex-employer is to make something completely meritless.

How long will he keep on fighting? How long will his pain last? Maybe only the X-Buster on his hand knows for sure…

Mega Man comes roaring into a new generation with the seminal Mega Man X. For a lot of people, this is as good as this series ever got, and it’s very easy to see why. The graphical leap from Mega Man 6 to this (in under a year) is patently insane. A darker storyline, fantastic boss weapons (shout out to Storm Tornado, one of my favorite weapons in this entire series), novel upgrade systems, stunning setpieces, level design firing on all cylinders, and a ton of new tricks up the player’s sleeve ensure that Mega Man X is a fixture in the minds of millions.

I had thought Yu Suzuki was an infallible genius, but it turns out he likes Queen...

way more than a meme - a statement on the fallibility of memory. and it does it way better than most commercial narrative games do.

For a long time fighting game developers, and game developers in general have tried to reach out to a broader audience by simplifying core mechanics, on the surface this makes sense, a lot of really popular games are also really simple. But if you think about it for two seconds it's actually fucking stupid, because a lot of really popular games are also utterly byzantine to a normal person- DotA, LoL, the entire genre of MMOs, anything that Europeans push to the top of the steam best sellers, etc. And many more games pretend to be complex to cover their simplicity, such as every single game that is the subject of jokes like "increases semen retention by 2.5% on a Tuesday" or has a skill tree that unlocks basic abilities that should have been in the toolkit by default. Capcom decided to make SF6 an order of magnitude more complex than their last game, their accessibility tool is forcing you to choose between two radically different control schemes with far reaching gameplay implications, and a practice mode with a dozen pages worth of settings to tweak for every conceivable scenario so you can skip "training" and jump right into human growth hormones. Naturally they've been rewarded for this with a wildly successful game.

Fromsoftware at last has atoned for their sin of codifying the "wait and press the i-frame button" action game. The proactive, aggressive movement and positioning action game, resurrected by the studio that killed it, nature is healing. (And in fairness they killed it by making really good defensive/reactive games that everyone blandly riffed on, you don't blame the GOAT for their herd)

the one thing Bethesda had going for it was their near seamless little handcrafted diorama worlds, so naturally they decided to replace that with loading screen gated proc-gen. Apparently you're supposed to play the main quest first so I tried that but I nearly puked when I was asked to weigh in on a debate over "science, or dreams"

The acceptable shape of "hard games" has grown small. They have lock on, they have generous I-frames in the form of a big dodge roll, they have little 6 pixel platforms surrounded by spikes, they have big flashing symbols telling me the dangerous attack is about to hit, they have little 30 second checkpoint loops so that I don't have to waste my time replaying a section i beat, they present all information with absolute clarity, they make sure I have enough resources so that I don't need to think about it. These things are not bad but they are so common it becomes limiting. If a game breaks the formula, it's fake difficulty, fake difficulty is when the game is difficult in ways I don't like, making it fake.
Ninja Gaiden has enemies who will grab you for blocking too much, the grab has almost no tell, you simply need to be aware it's a risk. Ninja Gaiden has enemies who will pelt you with exploding knives for daring to be in the same room as them, that's not their only attack it's just a thing they'll do. Ninja Gaiden gives you a dozen attacks that'll insta kill just about any goon in the game if you know where to apply them. Ninja Gaiden does not have a lock on, it would simply cause problems. Ninja Gaiden remains thrilling even as your expertise grows because it demands you remain mindful of enemies that you understand perfectly. I forgot to make a punchline for this one.