weirdly the complete antithesis of what mcgee was going for in the sequel,, the sequel is bright and colorful but ultimately dour and overly dark in tone and story. this is one of the most dark looking games ive ever played and the map layouts for each level are so utterly confounding and disorienting, a labyrinthine hell constructed by others specifically for u to suffer during. the first is a game about growth and progression, forgiveness and regret and the pain that comes w both, the sequel is concerned w regression and ig I just don’t vibe w that as much. this belongs more to an era of game design like max payne or rule of rose where ur small and the world is big and there’s plenty of ppl who don’t want you to exist within it. the structure of every world is chaotic and dizzying and scary! I love some of the weirdo imagery the enemies can conjure up like the flying bomb dropping bugs that seem almost military like.

there’s so much being said here even w like v minimal actual words being said,, alice herself conveys sm through grunts and screams it’s actually kind of wild. a simple jump to a ledge sounds blood cur-tingling and filled w anger + desperation. idk to see her suffer so often and in such extreme ways and come out the other side (at least for this game) a better and more whole person is rlly fucking fulfilling and satisfying to experience.

part of me wishes there was a third game and a better ending to both alice the character and the series, but also I realize that this series obv took a lot out of mcgee and was coming from a place that’s maybe better left sitting dormant for his own mental health. he seems kind of happy as a retired old guy living in shanghai that’s left behind a wealth of art that means a lot to a lot of ppl and now just makes emo plushes that while don’t mean rlly anything to me obv mean something to enough ppl. I think that’s nice ^_^

it's a sad day for fighting game fans as katsuhiro harada announced the long-running tekken series would be laid to rest earlier this morning. this comes mere hours after news that competitor under night in-birth II sys:celes sold over one birthillion copies, leaving many to question why bandai namco chose to go head-to-head with the anime juggernaut

chaos later erupted at the funeral when kamone serizawa unexpectedly leapt from the casket mid-eulogy. armed with steel chair he wasted no time incapacitating michael murray before removing his shirt, shotgunning several cans of beer, and climbing back into the mahogany box. witnesses say he refuses to leave, stating it "belongs to [him] now"

virtua fighter creator yu suzuki was seen fleeing the scene and while he declined to comment on recent events, he revealed he's been hard at work trimming down shenmue's story and now expects it to conclude within the next six or seven games

when we return we'll have more breaking news on the dark side of accessorizing, the closure of ed hardy, and why some are calling this an unprecedented golden age for planet earth

stay tuned

I CLAPPED

THEY DID THE THING THAT GURREN LAGANN DID AT THE END OF THE MOVIE AND I CLAPPED

I CLAPPED WHEN JIN USED MISHIMA AND KAZAMA STYLE AND THEY PLAYED TEKKEN 3 MUSIC I CLAPPED

ALSO THEY GOT SAINT SEIYA SHIT IN THIS

IT WAS GAS

Played for a half hour and the store tried to cram a bunch of cosmetic items down my face like its news and I played the most braindead tutorial in a while. I queue into a casual game and its all bots except for like 1 other person, one of the bots is clearly cheating on the enemy team so there's no point. Somebody tries to kick me for scamming but I can't even talk in the chat to defend myself, 'Voice Chat not activated on this account' or something but at least theres no players there to vote it through. As the game continues the bots dwindle away to just me and this one other person who seems especially bad at the game so I get a few kills on them. Round ends, bots refill in the lobby, one of them is also blasting a really loud Cocteau Twins song for some reason. This is what I have to play until I win at least 10 games and then maybe possibly competitive is better.

Look usually I don't write these sort of short off the cuff sarcastic reviews but somebody is going to look through and see I hated TF2 and wonder why, this is why. Why would I put up with any of this shit when TF2 Classic is right there? It's insane I'm sitting here and reading the high praise on this game from people I respect a lot (DoctorQuark, Bojangles, etc.) and just feel totally disconnected from it. I think Valve through pure disinterest basically lobotomized the game and left a husk for at least the new player experience. If anybody wants to play TF2 Classic hmu, if anybody wants to play TF2 get your eyeballs checked cause holy shit depressing doesnt even begin to convey the buzzard picked corpse I just had to experience. Genuinely distressing, but at least TF2 Classic functions as a nice time capsule.

I think movies have gotten to the point where they are reflective about the inherent danger and evilness of the camera. reflective about the bad shit they’ve been responsible for and the evil they’ve brought into this world. I saw it this year with pearl and nope and fabelmans, I don’t think any of those necessarily are intentionally about the evils of the celluloid camera, but maybe being so in love with film is the same as kind of despising both the medium and the industry. and I really don’t care about movies anymore, I used to watch about a hundred new releases per year and hundreds of older movies every year but tastes change and so does the medium. for a while it was disheartening to see the a24fication of indie films and the marvelfication of blockbusters, everything has became one homogenous blob of certain tropes and certain beats to hit, it’s easier to just not care. it’s easier to just hang up ur hat and accept that after a hundred years this medium died, it was inevitable wasn’t it? it died a sad and uneventful death. I guess that comes off as very cynical which I really don’t think I am nor am I trying to be. I’m just trying to be realistic, that something I once cared about and was passionate about is more or less dead. I’m fine with that, I still saw several new releases I really really loved, saw some older stuff like 1981’s possession and 1985’s smooth talk. this review is all over the place but mostly my thoughts boil down to the fact that Sam Barlow is as in love with the medium of film as he is critical and hateful of it. more than any other movie I’ve seen since maybe 2002’s autofocus and reflections of evil, immortality understands the destruction that films have left in the wake of people who worked on them. it’s impossible to not think of weinstein or spacey or baldwin or morrow or lee when playing through this. how many lives have ultimately been fucked over by this monolith of an industry. whether or not intentional the ‘22 movies I mentioned understand this. pearl with both its exploration of exploitation of young women in the industry and how ultimately escapism via movies is some of the most dangerous escapism. nope with its commentary on how most every movie ever made is built on the suffering of minorities, how it’s an industry built upon this that works every day to put people down. fabelmans is directly about how movies stop people from coping directly with their trauma, a very expensive distraction. immortality is all of this, it’s every piece of criticism on the film industry that’s ever existed, condensed into one of the most beautifully dense things I’ve ever experienced. doing things that are only possible in this medium, not the medium of film but the medium of games, because ultimately this does not work as anything but a game. maybe it’s really cynical of where movies are at and where they’ve always kinda been but at the same time it’s ridiculously hopeful of where games are and where they can go.

(scattered thoughts because I just slugged down a fig apple redbull and wrote all of this in my hour before work lol.
crazy that Barlow actually wrote a competent and not fetishistic portrayal of women here, the story here almost comes off as an apology for how he wrote and treated femininity in her story and most likely everything else he ever worked on.
just insane to see the wide range of influences that Barlow cops from here, I have no real issue with this as it’s just as much an exploration of the problematic themes that the directors he’s borrowing from exhibited as it is a homage to rollin and friedkin, etc.
fucking love how truly skeletal this is, ripped away from anything complete makes this feel much more realistic than her story which worked almost entirely on the gotcha of the plot. stripped away from trying to be cinematic and showing the bones of film production makes this more cinematic in the long run.
I like the costumes ^_^)

-game for girls who keep their anxiety meds in a macaron pill container so that when they inevitably have an anxiety attack while out they can feel cute even though they’re mentally ill lol
-literally just kept thinking lol it would be so funny if someone did fancam for this game but it was set to that awful one republic oh this is gonna be the good life song
-I think this is like a masterpiece about being delusional and the power of like repression. like idk I’m lucky to be able to trick myself into thinking the things that happened to me in my adolescence didn’t actually happen. or at least lucky enough to be able to shove it to some far off corner of my brain where it can’t hurt me. but of course it always does and ur just kind of delaying the inevitable, still though probably better than the alternative! I think the ending does a fantastic job of conveying that, lock all ur trauma away and hope and pray you don’t have to think about it too often lmao
-this is like a top five game of all time tbh, very rare that I actively seek out what a creator of a piece of media that I love has said about their work and this made me do that despite the fact that there is very little in terms of behind the scenes info on it
-theres a very funny european (?) newspaper from around this games release w a screenshot of jennifer and brown on the front page and off to the side it says in big text THE ARMY APPROVED ABUSE OF PRISONERS and above it FOOD FRAUD
-Hi, Emily, you don't have to play
You are not her, and he is not me
Emily, you don't have to play
You are not her, and he is not me :)))

-wanted to play this since it released,, its fucking bad
-man fuck swery, dude is kinda very problematic. like Ik lots has been said about the deadly premonition games but it’s even bad here. anyone who isn’t the main character is written as a stereotype of their gender/sexuality/race. mf went to the david lynch school of writing and his fans went to the same school as david lynch fans ie excusing a weirdos actions bc of some thin veneer of irony on the creators parts. idrc if it’s supposed to be campy or whatever that doesn’t excuse one dimensional writing and forced mysteries lol
-sucks that the machismo brainrot of early 2010’s action games infected auteurs overseas too. idk u can see the kind of gross nu metal sexism infect work that seems interesting like this and metal gear rising and shadows of the damned to the point that it’s just this hollow irony poisoned campy thing but made for straight men
-literally looks like foodfight…
-music here is very often rlly good and an actual standout!! there’s a very good vocal track buried in here but there’s also this horrible irish/celtic punk song in here because seemingly if this got more episodes it would’ve ripped off the departed
-the bald evil guy looks and sounds exactly like joe biden it’s fucking crazy
-WHY the Boston police department called the BPD lmfaooo

last weekend I was supposed to work at my job both days both closing shifts but instead I went with my boyfriend to go visit his family. his family are at this point in my life basically my family, they’ve taken me in in every way and treated me as one of their own, regardless of my faults or shortcomings and not even taking into account that I’m not blood related at all, they are my family. on Sunday night me my boyfriend and his youngest sister went to the beach at sunset, me and his sister shared a salad and all of us afterwards kind of retreated into ourselves as we sat on the beach. I just laid down in the sand and listened to the waves and the people talking, a child came up to us and asked if we wanted our future told, in moments like these I feel surrounded by God, I feel surrounded by life and like I am actively being looked out for by someone or something that I can’t wrap my head around fully. I never would have imagined that this would be my life, I thought my life would be a lot different and I thought I would be much more important, but apparently I am important in my boyfriends eyes and his family’s eyes, my family’s eyes, and I think I am important in God’s eyes.

I don’t want this review to come off as overly preachy or without some level of context. I am not a devout Christian, I believe organized religion is by and large evil, I believe religious people in general contort their beliefs to harm others, I believe the church has done more harm than it’s done good, I believe that Pentiment believes all this too. so it’s definitely a bias I share w the game. I have not stepped into a church since I was a kid, I haven’t prayed in years. that’s not what religion to me is and that’s not what faith to me is, that’s not what god to me is, God to me is the wind I felt on the beach and the relaxation I felt overcome my body.

every conversation that my boyfriend my sister and me had that weekend ended up circling around the same topic. how hopeless and how bleak everything feels right now, how truly boring this life is. I was born post y2k and pre 9/11 to a father and mother who were too immature to have me, a mother who told me that if abortions didn’t go against her religion she wouldn’t have had me. I was born into uncertainty and so were the rest of my generation. and as soon as we started to find our footing then Covid happened and that did kind of set everything back in lots of ways. there’s another recession about to happen and inflation is awful and everything feels so uncertain for children of a certain age, all three of us have several years in between us but all are temporarily stuck at this crossroads waiting for the world to get better before we make any big plans. but at least for me when sitting on that beach that anxiety was lifted off me, and I think off them too as no one really spoke for the time we were there, everything felt right.

I would feel weird talking this personally about a game without giving some context as to my religious background. up until my tweens I went to both a religious fundamentalist school and church, it terrified me and instilled within me a deep religious paranoia that’s only exacerbated by me having obsessive compulsive disorder. throughout my teens I did not think of religion or spiritualism at all especially given the fact that my mother became more of a religious fanatic and I would often see her awake at 4 am knelt down praying. I wanted nothing to do with it esp. considering the fact that it brought my family no solace or comfort seemingly, that it only made them more bitter and resentful. later in my teens I would become rlly religious and almost holier than thou in a way that now seems rlly cringey and lame and now I have just settled into some loose Christianity flavored spiritualism than anything else. I realize that religion, esp, western judeo-christian religions are smth for privileged ppl. despite plenty of problems w my biological family I rlly am a privileged girl, I haven’t known that much struggle in my life. my bf on the other hand is wildly different from me in that way. his entire family was very standardly catholic, not in an overbearing way just very middle of the road catholicism, but with coming from a poor family and having to deal w the fallout of Covid and just worsening financial situations they are no longer rlly a religious family. and I don’t blame them, religion like all hobbies or all beliefs or ideologies that ppl spend too much time pooping thought into are for the privileged and the wealthy.

this is a theme throughout each act of pentiment. the balance between devoutness and wealth. we see this through food and the meals the player character has with npc’s, brothers and sisters of kiersau abbey who are much more willing to chastise u for speaking out of turn or saying anything that can be misconstrued as sacrilegious have large bountiful meals that often times aren’t even finished fully while the ppl down below in tassing go hungry. but meals with the townsfolk and peasants of tassing oftentimes go much more smoothly and it seems like they’re going out of their way to secure both ur spot and ur comfort at their dinner table. my biological family very rarely had meals at a dinner table, most times we all fended for ourselves, made our own meals, ate by ourselves. but when I am with my boyfriend’s family I always know there’s a spot for me at the table, to have a meal with them, to share a memory with them. the first year or so that I was around them I didn’t know how to go about this, it made me uncomfortable to eat in front of them, now I look forward to it and see the table as smth communal rather than just someplace to eat. this is echoed not only in pentiment’s dinner scenes but also in fx’s the bear and any anthony bourdain series, two things that that pentiment’s dinner scenes often reminded me of in the way all showcase the passing of thoughts and ideas and beliefs and heritage through sustenance. at some point in act 2, a character that was rude and haughty in the previous act now is hospitable and offers you some of their good apples. it reminded me a lot of a recent episode of American dad where the smith family end up on a deserted island with no memory of their past lives and no idea on how to escape, they’re stuck w a tv that only plays an ad for gold top nuts. through this ad they’re able to bond and through past cultures they’re able to build the base for a new culture and a new society, the episode ends w them fully understanding who they are and back at their house, unable to give up on tradition they again share a dinner of gold top nuts and make a promise that they’ll put out their good nuts for each other.

at the heart of pentiment is exactly what the smiths were doing by rewatching that ad over and over again, the passing down of thoughts and customs and beliefs and ideas and ideologies from one society to make an altogether new one. it’s a sentiment similarly echoed at the end of guns of the patriots when solid snake says “We can tell other people about - having faith. What we had faith in. What we found important enough to fight for. It's not whether you were right or wrong, but how much faith you were willing to have, that decides the future.”, that is the core of what pentiment is saying as well but with twenty additional years of history behind it. everything that’s happened between 2001 and 2021 is here, present and accounted for, every significant historical moment from 9/11 to the Covid pandemic makes its way into the subtext of pentiment. it’s a game about the history of the 1500’s but viewed through the lens of the 21st century and informed through everything that’s happened in the last twenty years.

games critic and essayist noah Caldwell gervais said in his resident evil retrospective It Takes A Few Years For The New Rot To Settle In Though. It’s a quote that I was haunted by throughout every act of pentiment, an idea that is always at play when examining how exactly did andreas mailer end up in tassing, what led to these terrible things and why must these terrible things repeat and repeat and repeat ad nauseam, much farther than when act 3 ends and much farther than 2023. we have built our towns and our cultures and our lives on the backs and the buildings and the bones of others and they all always come crashing down and we always rebuild them back on the same rot and decay.

constantly I was also thinking of otessa moshfegh’s lapvona and the adult swim animated series moral orel, both of those are also about religious towns and how religious communities function. all three are very much so tragedies as well though, humanistic and very loving tragedies, in these stories there aren’t evil per se. just ppl that are cruel and misguided and blind and who contort words that are supposed to be meant as comfort to bring harm to their towns. none of these pieces of media spend time damning the worst ppl in these towns, instead all of the time is spent making sure u understand how these communities sprung up and how they allowed for ppl to take control and turn them into smth quite fascistic. instead we spend time sympathizing w ppl ur supposed to hate and learning ugly truths about ppl who at first glance ur supposed to love or be endeared by. hope is what allows ppl to keep living after being wronged and it’s also what allows ppl to continue wronging others.

the poster for this game I find so clever and so beautiful, the body of the player character is detailed and hard at work, but the face is deliberately clouded. a messy brushstroke that hasn’t been filled in yet. your andreas is not my andreas and vice versa, he is someone that’s shaped by your own personal feelings on god, nature, religion, love, art, family, friends, sex, the church, and the future. he is a blank slate at the start of each new game and to each new player but over the course of the game he becomes his own person due to decisions and backgrounds u have locked him in to, some things are unable to change, some things happen regardless. if u quit the game halfway through there are things that still happen regardless of how u played andreas or how I played andreas. the abbey stays almost identical in between the chapters, the monks and sisters that live up there greet you still with the same mix of hate spite love and righteousness, but the town changes and the ppl within the town changes. decisions u make still affect everyone years and years down the line just as they do in real life.

you see characters in act 2 and act 3 that almost function as what you, the player character, could’ve ended up like if u made different decisions and if some decisions u weren’t locked into from before u even press new game. brief glimpses of who u could be playing as if Andreas in act 1 wasn’t written in such a purposeful way, if he wasn’t born to a life of privilege, a life where it’s okay to be an artist, where it wasn’t okay to play Andreas as u did. brief glimpses of the non player characters and how that could’ve been your fate. you might’ve ended up like Paul or Casper in act 2 or Anna and Ursula or even some of the younger sisters of the poor Clare’s in act 3. it reminded me a lot of a scene from the last season of six feet under where the youngest child of the Fischer family and the only artist in it Clare goes to an art exhibition put on by her old art school friends. she hasn’t seen them in months, she dropped out of school and she’s working an office job, she hasn’t picked up a camera in months, things feel uncertain for her. I love this scene and I love these characters in pentiment that act as a mirror to the player character, It made me reflect on how my life did not need to play out like this and how if I did anything differently or took different paths maybe I would’ve ended up somewhere completely different and maybe I would be someone completely different. in my senior year of hs almost every single day I was working on a project of some kind with several different people. I made what felt like very big very important connections that would get me to the next step. everyone told me I was rlly good and ppl younger than me treated me as a mentor and ppl older treated me as someone on their level. I had made it in my head and then randomly on a fluke I gave it up, I became uninspired and I became jilted and I gave it up. I’m 23 now and I don’t anything to show for it artistically, in the past couple years I’ve made peace with that, I’m okay and even happy with that. I’ve seen and kept tabs on the people I used to collaborate with and work with, all are still working and almost all have improved their talents. but I’ve done almost nothing creatively since high school, but I’m happy. straight out of high school and just a little while after turning eighteen I moved in with someone I didn’t know that well and I’ve been here ever since. And I think to some extent the fact that I’m doing much better now in all ways has smth to do with having faith, not even faith in god or a god but just a blind level of faith.

For the past three years hbo has put out a rlly delightful documentary series called how to with John Wilson. each episode is about how to master a new topic or hobby but also it never ends up being rlly about that, but instead about how to form connections and how communication works in a world where that’s all but impossible. The season that’s currently airing will be its last and this Sunday’s episode felt like both its darkest and most uplifting. throughout the episode Wilson is reminded that he doesn’t rlly matter, doesn’t matter to his alma mater or to hbo or to the next generation or to the art world in general. there’s a really sad fucking just depressing moment of him standing outside of the Elon musk time magazine party and looking down at the streets below as he records a billboard for his own show, he narrates how he’s worked hard for this and ultimately it doesn’t mean much to him and hasn’t made him feel the way he thought it was gonna make him feel. instead after that he winds up at a competition for the largest grown pumpkin. after an entire episode where he seemingly is feeling down on himself and where he is artistically he winds up at a gathering of ppl where there’s a real sense of community. the entire show has been for me about the growing disconnect there is between us all esp. post-covid. that one of the only places he can find a real sense of community and belonging is at a pumpkin growing competition. it almost feels cyclical to the pilot episode where he tries to learn how to make small talk. in one of the only pre-covid shot episodes of the entire series he meets a man on a trip to Cancun, everyone else is having fun at spring break but John Wilson and this man are disconnected in a culture of disconnection and through that are able to bound by breaking down the barriers of what’s considered small talk.

it will be harder to have real conversations with ppl than it already is. we will be further and further disconnected from everyone as years go by but I think as long as there are days like tassing in 1545 cancun in 2019 or the beach at sunset in 2023 that there will always be small moments of genuine connection w other ppl