#even to the degree of. pick whether you're using coloured linework or black. how are you approaching age?

[thedreadvampy]

Yeah I mean just generally even before this.......really inexplicable plot point, the game has not felt amazing to me. I feel like it suffers for me playing it right after Disco Elysium which is a lot more open and also tbh more polished imo.

I like the ideas in Pentiment but not the execution overmuch, and I feel like navigating the game felt really needlessly confusing and draggy, especially when time-sensitive events kept happening without any reminders in your notes of what Book of Hours time (bunch of unfamiliar Latin words, and nowhere on the screen are you told what time it is right now) you need to be there.

Everything is time sensitive but it's wildly unclear how much time you actually have in each chunk of the day, and so much is being unnecessarily explained that useful information gets lost.

also the other side effect of the glossary thing is that half the time it feels more like an extended GCSE Bitesize History revision game, it's like looking at an interactive display at a fucking museum. Have a bit of faith in me, the player, to figure this stuff out from context or know it already - you literally do not need to add a glossary entry for every town or saint or Latin words someone mentioned in passing. can't tell me what time it is but gonna stop to explain the danse macabre apparently.

playing Disco Elysium I got moderately stuck at times but there weren't a lot of times where I felt like the game was the problem. so far with this one I constantly feel like I know what I want to do and what I think Andreas might do but I'm wrestling against the game and it also is giving me all the wrong information because like. Andreas clearly knows stuff like what time it is and where he's meant to be going but I don't because all the game wants to tell me is who's married to who and what the expectations on me are. That shouldn't feel like new information! That takes me out of the story so hard. it's not new and revealing information pertinent to the case bc it's an obvious fact of life to every fucking person here!

like maybe it gets better but the first chunk of the game just feels like it's focused on all the wrong information. and it ends super suddenly without really having a sense of how much time you have to talk to people or capacity to balance your day. it wants to be bitter and guilty but I'm not immersed enough for that because I still feel like I'm using a kid's educational CD ROM because if I click in the wrong place you pause a vital conversation to tell me what Matins is (not when though. that would be helpful.)

obviously DE gave itself a head start by giving its protagonist amnesia. but like. even then it didn't feel like the point of the game was to give me a list of background information about the norms and general knowledge of the world. this thing just feels. more exposition than substance. it's like reading a children's history book with plot to keep you engaged, not like an engaging story that happens to take place in the 16th century. more horrible histories than name of the rose.