#Pentiment

[edward-nb]

OH GOD

Taskmaster + Pentiment

TASKMASTER + PENTIMENT

WOW.

Starting off: as the Taskmaster (Greg Davies) and his assistant (Alex Horne)...

It's gotta be Dr. Stolz and his frenemy Baltas.

Stolz is the perfect match for Greg in that he's a vain bastard who believes himself superior to everyone (but cares deep down).

Baltas works for Alex because he's an inventor, and because he remains Stolz' friend thru the game despite Stolz' verbal abuse.

Now as to the contestants...

Obviously you have to have Artemis and Apollo as the two youngest contestants. They're both funny inventive kids and in-game they attempt to prank their local priest with a plague of frogs. That is pure TASKMASTER material.

In the role of the older man contestant (there is one every year), Brother Florian. The abbey is full of grumbly older men, but of all of them he's got the most life experience and is always the first to think outside the box.

As the wild card contestant, Vacslav. He's got Opinions that he'd probably air out on camera at every turn, but he's also a tinker, so he could be invented.

And as the older female contestant, Sister Illuminata. She's got a terrific mind but is also strong-willed. Not to mention the audience would probably love her constantly trying to justify her task solving technique with references to Biblical canon.

As for the tasks...you can BET there'd be some scavenger hunts, some "flout the authority of the church" tasks, plenty of madcap devices (Baltas did try and create a mechanical plow complete with cow and driver)...

Honestly, I'm slightly miffed this can't be a real thing, maybe as a DLC.

[dijon-mayonnaise]

Andreas Maler as Saint Andrew (also happy 2 years Pentiment !!!!!!!!!!) Comm for my bestie @faroe3 !! Commission me here!!!: 🧸

[faroe3]

look at this sign at my local monastery

[fata-vocant]

medieval backstreet boys: you are… my friar

[robot-roadtrip-rants]

Every time I see this tweet I lose my shit. YOUNG WITCH IN THE ALPS. Who is this woman. What is her thought process. I want--no, I need to know.

Also if you want an indie game set in the Alps with the same quality as Disco Elysium, Pentiment is right there???

I hope the "What if Disco Elysium was about a witch finding her cat in the mountains" post never leaves the gaming discourse vernacular. It will never not be funny to me bc it's got all the Gamer Entitlement™ levels of CoD bros throwing hissy fits about "woke" shit but instead of being couched in far right reactionism it's the exact kind of "Kingdom of Conscience" style liberal outrage at anything with conviction and beliefs that DE waxed on about. Like even chuds who get mad that the game calls you out for being racist interact with the themes of DE better and understand them more than Cat Lady did.

[sweetfishes]

16th century bavarian miku

[failchild]

pentiment + posts

[terminalthrillness]

best response of all time

[anistarrose]

[ID: art of Andreas from Pentiment. He's smiling and holding Mausfanger the cat, who looks happy. He's in his Act 1 appearance, drawn in a style reminiscent of the game. End ID]

Murder mysteries sure are scary! Thank god Pentiment is just a game about petting cats in quaint 16th century Bavaria

[jadenvargen]

i love this game, too awesome:)

[jennaflare]

So Disco Elysium is the only game you've ever really liked

I get it! It's a phenomenal game with superb art and writing, and its themes are consistent and deeply explored. It sets a high bar for video games. But there are other really, really fantastic games out there. This is a list that is 100% my own taste of things that aren't necessarily similar, other than the fact that they're really fucking good. (A lot of these are on sale for the Steam Summer Sale until July 11 2024!)

In Stars and Time

In Stars and Time is a time loop game where you play as Siffrin, the rogue of a party at the end of their quest to save the day by defeating the King, who is freezing everybody in time! But something is wrong: every time you die, you loop back to the day before you fight the King. You're the only one who remembers the loops, so it's up to you to figure out why it's happening, and how to break out.

In Stars and Time is a heart-wrenching dive into mental health, friendship, and love. It's about feeling alone, and how awful it is when the people who love you don't notice (and how awful it is when they do). It's about falling deeper and deeper into your worst self and your worst tendencies, and how to come back from it.

The creator also did one of my favorite Disco Elysium comics ever, which is only tangentially relevant but worth mentioning.

Roadwarden

In Roadwarden, you play as the titular Roadwarden for an undeveloped and "wild" part of the kingdom. Monsters roam the forests and roads, and it's your job to keep people safe. On paper, anyway. Your real mission is to find out what is of value in the area, and how to take it from its people. How well you perform this task is up to you. It's an oldschool text-based RPG, and I take a lot of notes by hand when I play.

Roadwarden explores exploitation and industrialization by making you look in the face of your potential victims. You can only learn what your bosses want you to report on by getting close to the residents, after all. There are mysteries to be solved, secrets to be gathered, and hearts to win.

The Longing

The Longing is an adventure-idle game where you play as the solitary servant of a sleeping king. Your task is to wait for him, for four hundred days. Time in the game passes in realtime (for the most part). There are caves to explore, books to be read, and drawings to make.

The Longing is about loneliness and depression. It's about whether or not you decide to stay in that hole, and if you do, what you do with yourself while you're there. Maybe you'll wander. Maybe you'll stare at a wall. Maybe you'll just sleep until it's all over.

Papers, Please

Papers, Please casts you as a newly hired customs officer in a country that is rapidly tightening its borders as its fascist government tightens its fist. This game is stressful. Sometimes you intend to help out the revolutionaries when they asked, but then you got so stressed out trying to make your quota so you can feed your family and pay your bills that you didn't notice the name of the person they were hoping to contact while going through their papers. Sometimes someone puts a bomb in front of you and expects you to defuse it. Sometimes someone suggests you steal people's passports so you can get your family out, and with the horror you see daily, the idea tempts you more than you'd like.

Papers, Please is all about hard choices and testing your moral fortitude. Everything you do has consequences. Being a good person in this game is hardly ever rewarded, but not in a way that feels overly cynical. Papers, Please asks you what kind of person you want to be and what you're willing to sacrifice to get there.

The Return of the Obra Dinn

From the creator of Papers, Please, The Return of the Obra Dinn is a game where you play as an insurance investigator for the East India Trading Company. The ship the Obra Dinn has just floated back into port, its entire crew missing or dead. It's your job to figure out what happened aboard the vessel. For insurance reasons.

I don't know how to go into the themes of this too deeply without giving away too much, but the mechanics of the game itself make the game worth playing. You have a magic stopwatch that allows you to go back to the moment of a person's death, allowing you to try and figure out who (or what) killed them, and how. And the soundtrack is extremely good.

Outer Wilds

In Outer Wilds you play as an unnamed alien, and it's your first day going to space! Your planet's space program is pretty new still, so there's still lots to explore and discover on the planets within your system. There are ancient ruins from a mysterious race that once lived in your system, long before your species began to record history. Why were they here? Where did they go? How are they connected to the weird thing that keeps happening to you?

The fun of Outer Wilds is in the discovery and answering your own questions. The game never tells you where to go, and it never outright tells you anything. There are clues scattered through the system, and it's up to you to put them together and figure out your next steps. It's about the way that life always goes on, no matter what, even when it seems like the end of everything, forever. I'd recommend NOT reading anything else about this game. Just go play it. Seriously, the less you know, the more fun this is.

If on a Winter's Night, Four Travelers

In If on a Winter's Night, Four Travelers, you explore the circumstances of the deaths of four individuals.

This is a short one that took me about two and a half hours to play. If for no other reason, play it for the stunning pixel art. The game explores sexism, racism, and homophobia in the Victorian era and leans heavily into horror themes. Best of all: it's completely free!

Pentiment

Pentiment takes you to the 16th century, where you take the role of Andreas Maler, a journeyman artist working on his masterwork in the scriptorium of an abbey. When someone is murdered, Andreas takes responsibility for finding the culprit.

The game is set over 20~ years and you get to watch how Andreas' actions affect the village in various ways (who's alive the next time you come by, have people gotten married and had children...). It's an exploration of how the past affects the future, and what parts of that past we choose to keep or discard. It has beautiful art, and fans of both Disco and Pentiment often compare them.

Other games you might wanna check out

Night in the Woods, Dredge, Oxenfree, A House of Many Doors, Inscryption, Slay the Princess, Citizen Sleeper, Chants of Sennar, Loop Hero, The Cosmic Wheel Sisterhood, The Pale Beyond, Where the Water Tastes Like Wine, Elsinore, Her Story, Before Your Eyes, Pathologic (not delved into above because the venn diagram of Pathologic fans and Disco fans is basically a circle)

[shripscapi]

The darkness always ends, Magdalene. We must remember that.

[catebees]

It's finally time to reveal my piece for @palimpsestzine!

This was the first zine I ever participated in and I couldn't have asked for a better experience. A group of amazing and lovely artists coming together for a great project <3

If you haven't yet, go check out the full zine on itch.io! Donations will be open until the end of the month and all funds will go to Librarians and Archivists with Palestine. You'll be able to access some extra content and find out about the creative process behind it, too!

[dorindameddler]

Pentiment (2022) dev. Obsidian Entertainment

[dijon-mayonnaise]

Brother Sebhat ✨✨

[swagwizards]

has this been done yet