librarypunk - 133 - Pentiment feat. All Gamers Are Bastards

Episode Date: July 8, 2024

We’re joined by All Gamers Are Bastards to talk about Pentiment, a mystery game with an opening similar to the novel/film Name of the Rose (1986) in many ways. Time for the history boys to drop some historiography. https://soundcloud.com/agabpod https://x.com/agabpod https://x.com/kayandskittles https://x.com/laborkyle Kay’s other podcast and YouTube show https://x.com/vgatwtoe  https://www.youtube.com/@KayAndSkittles  Kyle’s other podcasts https://x.com/horrorvanguard  https://x.com/profaneshow Media mentioned Kay’s video: Two Games About History (And Why You Should Care) https://youtu.be/A1ibaKebZjo?si=wY_gStTszO9a_Uz3 https://forgottencitygame.com/ Episode transcript: https://pastecode.io/s/xiawczu3

I like that young people always find new ways to look silly. It's like a gift for people getting older, you know? It's a treat. Yeah. Yeah. It almost takes the edge off. I mean, to be fair. Old people also find new ways to look silly.

True. Don't write us up. Usually in the same way. Yeah. Well, listen, when you're in the middle, when you're not very young or very old, that's when you look normal. No one tells you that, but it's true. Yeah.

Kyle, you might be peeking a little too. Okay, you are also peaking a little bit. So we should bring it down. I over cranked? Hold on. We're over cranking. I see myself clipping. Let me reduce the crank. Are we, is this?

Can we hear me okay when I talk at this volume? You're beautiful. Sounds good? I see you. Oh, hi, buddy. I feel seen and heard. I feel very seen. I am sitting my ass down and listening.

To 16th century madrigals. Oh, fuck yeah. This is my shit. That one like, like, dude who does like the cool, like, video essays about like orientalism and music, just did one about bardcore and then actual medieval music. And I was like, yes, give it to me. Very. Yeah. I'm Justin. I am working on my masterpiece of podcasting and my pronouns are he and they. I'm Sadie. I am obsessed with the Roman ruins that are on top of the pagan ruins and my pronouns are they then. Oh shit. I am Jay. I am

currently having a little secret gaitrists in the forbidden library and my pronouns are he him and we have guests which like to introduce yourselves absolutely i love introducing myself i'm k of k and skittles they them i will be for the entirety of this podcast wielding an illegal weapon but i live in the UK so it's not that impressive my name is kyle my pronouns are he and him and i am currently uh locked inside of a room with only one window and I'm seeing crazy visions of mostly pot- um well done everyone yeah Justin always springs these on us and I'm like oh shit I have to be funny on cue and I'm not funny on cue that's when the juice happened no that's when the juice happened oh it's spiritual and spiritual of fulfillment really what we're doing is we're saying that you yourself have the motivation towards salvation and do not need to receive that from the Holy Apostolic Church. Lucky.

I think one of us might be the weird Gnostic out in the woods, though. At least. Yeah. At least. Yeah. Exchange. Yes, you still have the drop. I am reorganizing my soundboard because I cannot just reorganize it like a normal person,

so I have to rebuild it. I've got like eight of them so far. Instead, just rebalancing the audio as well. Excellent. I'm in a Discord group where we play games together sometimes, and the soundboard is entirely always sunny clips and we've filled up the alarm. Oh, that sounds fun as hell. I should get the Always Sunny intro. That could work.

That's pretty good. Also, when someone pulls off something impressive, they get the drop. I'm a golden god. You know, it's, it feels good every time. I'd want to be like wild card like gas man charlie. Yeah, ha! I thought like kicking the door. Oh, that's good. My tools. They're my tools. This is our Always Sunny podcast. Oh, yeah, we're here to talk about Always Sunny, right?

Is that not? Oh, yeah. Yeah, I'm Danny DeVito. The show that I'm slowly forcing on to Justin. You're right to do it. It's sunny in Bavaria. It is all sunny in Bavaria. You know what? Except when it floods.

Although I was talking to Kay before, NK., did you bring us any gamer news to warm up on? Oh, there's so much gamer news. So the thing about me is I keep it all. I keep it all in this sort of database that if I ever just want to have a bad day, I'll look at it. And I'm going to paint a picture of the. the database of Gamer News. It's just a list of headlines with the word layoffs in them

again and again. Different companies and different countries and different cities. Everyone's mad at Ubisoft for another round of layoffs. I think they did it in May or April and now they're doing it again in Toronto, which I mean bad things happening to Canadians. I want to endorse that, but not like this. So they can like 30 people, I think, in their Toronto studio. And they said it was so that they could reach their annual targets or whatever, which... This sucks, man. The AAA industry has been kind of caving in on itself, and I found it really interesting.

And something I wanted to hear what all of you thought about is the way that... What's it called? It's not E3 anymore. Jeff Keely cooed the whole thing. Summer Games Fest, he calls it, I think. It felt like from Jeff himself, as well as a lot of people there, there was a real push for saying, actually, yeah, the big companies do kind of blow shit. but the indie sphere is where like actual interesting stuff tends to be happening,

which is really weird because these events are normally about worshipping like five or six companies. I don't know. Do you guys have any thoughts on that? Maybe a bit of a shift, a bit of people recognizing that actually a lot of these games made by like three people are really good, which is relevant to today's topic as well, of course.

I still don't know what video games are. God, I wish that was me. Wait, why do you two know about video games? Wink? Oh, yeah. We have a podcast. It's called All Gamers or Bastars. We never promote it.

That's one of the things that we do for some reason. Well, it's the only podcast about video games and we don't want people to steal our idea. I see. You know, so we kind of keep it on the DL. We also use it to surprise take over other podcasts. Not this one, though. Y'all are cool. Just kidding.

This is a Marty O'Donnell campaign support podcast now. That's what we're about. Now you all have to talk about. doing entriism. Yeah, we're doing podcast entryism, and it's all just to support the guy who composed the music from Halo, who's running for Congress in Nevada, and it's probably going to win the primary. It's a very competitive seat in the general election, but he has a real shot of it. We've been covering it exclusively as the official Marty O'Donnell podcast.

He has not blocked us or send us any Cs and assists yet, so we're still working on trying to get that. He pays us in Bitcoin, so that means keep going, right? Yeah, yeah. And then we launder it back into his campaign in legal ways. Yeah, we try to avoid using the word launder for what we're doing. What if it's legally, though? They're just doing laundry.

I like to think of it as cleansing, which is a far less, you know, problematic. Problematic. Yeah, we're just cleansing. You're doing like a celery juice cleanse with it. That's right. That's what it's, it's good for you. It's healthy. Like, Bucpardy O'Donnell will be for the economy.

Yeah. And for wokeness, he doesn't like, do you think he liked, whokeness? Guess again, he doesn't. He invented music. He's going to defeat wokeness. I'm not quite sure how those two things go together, but I trust the plan, you know? Yeah, trust the process from Mr. Halo. John Halo.

Don't doubt John Halo's plan for your life. That's the... I've got a quote from him right here. It says, got to get through the primary. Not that many folks in the district have played Halo. So, I mean, that's his biggest, that's his biggest, like, shit. Kyle, I didn't realize. He's going to get primaried by people who only play, like, from soft games.

Oh, man. Fucking turds. Yeah, we will, we're going to set up a debate between him and not his Democratic opponent, because he's a Republican for the record. It'll be a long time to get to the part of the article that told me what he was running on. Don't worry about that stuff. Yeah. It's a mixture of economic protectionism, border security, and by border security, we mean the space border to stay away from...

The border that's up. Yeah, I'm stalling for time to try and remember the names of the bad guys in HALA, the flood. They're trying to... That's it. Yeah. That's it. And the covenant. Then the covenants breakaway Protestant sect.

Yeah. Wait, there's Protestants in space? All right. Now, we need to go to war with space. Who else is going to colonize space? Oh. Last week was transhuman Mormons, Mormon transhumanists. And this week it's Protestants in space.

Nice. Apparently there's Mormon transhumanists and they have their own conference. Well, of course they do. Mormons love conferences. They fucking. Do you know how many times I couldn't get around Salt Lake City because of the fucking conference? I was to say the general conference is like the like all church worship session. So like twice a year or whatever.

So like, yeah. They shut downtown down. They're so organized. I mean, I get it. Franklin Covey is like a whole thing. They're so hot. Covey method. Yeah. What? That's not true. What? It's unfortunately true.

Fuck. This changes everything. I don't think we have Mormons in this country. We have a lot of Jehovah's Witnesses, which is weird. But they don't go door to door. They stand around with flyers and everyone ignores them. Oh, yeah. We have those in all the T stations here. Yeah. They don't like try to lure you in. They just stand there like stone silent and it's creepy. I would love to meet a British Mormon. He was like, yes, absolutely. I'm all about this entirely America-focused religion.

Trying not to do an offensive accent right now. And he's really into American football as well. That's got to be a racist man ever made in a lab. But what if he gets into like the some of like, because there are like, weirdly, there's like Mormon socialists. It's not going to be this one, not the British one. Yeah, no. What if it was? A British guy who's into American football is the worst vibe.

I can fathom. It's difficult to explain, but it's dark. One more cases. Is it Ed Ed Zittron? Is it an NFL's playing more in London? Sorry, Kyle, do you just say the NFL's playing in London? Yeah, they have a game in London every year. We need to put a stop to this all on.

Talking about invasions. The elections in like a few days, I think I can get on the ballot still. I need to run on stopping this. Reverse Boston Tea Party. Yeah. Now put this in, like, Nigel Farage's platform. It's like, we're going to give you all free money and ban American football. It was shit.

That would work. I think he'd probably be prime minister on that. He's the only British politician who figured out you can just lie about costs of things, and everyone is powerless in the face of the man who's invented non-costed programs. I mean, our journalists, they get mad at you if you try to talk. about the costs of things. They'll get mad at you if you don't have costs, but if you try to actually talk to them about what things will cost,

they'll be like, fuck off. What are you doing? Fuck off that nerd shit. Yeah, it's nerd shit. I get to get mad at you if you don't have it, but I don't want to hear about it if you do have it,

all right? Yeah. Normal country. It's cool. I can't wait. I can't wait for more, more Blairite extravaganza. They're going to put back up the weird,

I forgot what they call them, the weird devices that emit a sound that only, like, younger people can hear. Crickets or... It might have been a mosquito was involved in the name. I forget. I just remember that they had devices to repel teenagers, which is the most British invention of all time.

And there's no way they don't come back. It's time culturally. It's going to happen. There was a YouTuber that put that sound in all their videos so that would annoy anyone under like 25 watching them. Fuck, that's so smart. I should start doing that. Justin, no idea for the podcast just came to me.

No, we need the young gay children. That's true. We keep them from hanging out on 4chan and picking up weird vocabulary that's hurting them. Yeah, becoming weird, like, like, Catholics trying to restore the French monarchy or whatever. Just like, no, let's corral them here, I think. Just like the other day, our prime minister put out a campaign ad that used Little Dark Age. Oh, no. It was probably made by a Zoomer staffer, and it appeals to a very narrow subset of, like, zoomer fascists, which I think is awesome.

It's not like a sound electoral policy. That's not a big voting block. It's just insane as a move, you know? You're busy lying down. Yeah, they're lying down. Kyle, Kyle's showing us. Kyle, youthful, vigorous, as always, is showing us what it's like, you know. Yeah, I feel very youthful today.

Are you actually recording out of that microphone or do you have a secret microphone somewhere else? And that was just really static. That would be pretty funny if this is just were playing into nothing. And if you had one of those little tiny ones. Yeah. I hate that. I think people who make fun of that and they're like, they're like, guys, I just learned about that. And they're just talking into various different objects throughout like their video and it keeps switching.

That's what they're talking into. Yeah. Enough talking about zoomers. Instead, let's talk about Zerickers. I see. This is where my lack of knowledge of both geography and 16th century German politics is really going to become a parent. And I can only apologize in advance. The one note I did while me and Jay were playing this game was it takes place mercifully before a time when Germans were allowed to unify. That's one of the great. upsides. Oh, the golden age. Yes. Yeah. See, and I don't know history about anything. So I was like, wait, Holy Roman Empire. And Justin had to explain to me that it's not the like neither Holy nor Roman nor an

empire thing. And I was like, what the fuck is it? It's a vibe. This game was very confusing to me. I was like, what has happened? The series of church offices and Germans who hire mercenaries. Yeah. Yeah. Most of my like medieval knowledge is restricted to England or like weirdly and the Lucia and like, that's it. All I need to know is that they get taller as you get as you go. That's all you need to know with any, at any point of German history. Yeah, it's honestly, it's confusing. But I have played a lot of Crusader King.

And that's how I know all of my stuff. I have not studied any of this in a formal setting, but instead have done the more important and studious thing, which is play video game. And I know Kay also, went to the same school of gaming gaming that I had. Well, I see. Absolutely. Skittles is playing with the loudest toy in the house.

I have to take it away from her. I will be back in one second. I thought that might be Abby playing with something. Oh, no, she is yelling in the other room, though. And that I can't do any about. So I don't hear it. So, yeah, good. Hi, Abby.

I will give my best. Yeah, I did leave a bag of pellets on the ground. It was empty, but they were like, no, this is a trick. You're going to take me, you're going to wrap me up, But take me to the vet in this or something, so they have not played with it. We're on to your game. She has never, she doesn't care about that toy at all until the second I start trying to record something. She knows.

She does. Looking at me like, I'm a dick now. Listen. It's the only way rabbits look at you. So true. So true. All right. So Pentamint is a game, non-Triple-A game.

It's, if you've seen a paper Mario, it's kind of like that. Kind of looks like that, but all fancy. It's set and it begins in 1518. You're a journeyman illustrator, painter named Andreas Mailer at Kyrsau Abbey near Taseig or Tassing. And then it turns into name of the rose where a guy gets murdered and you got to do some medieval sleuthin while also mostly avoiding doing your job, which is pretty sick. Yeah. You just kind of run around, talk to, talk to village people, talk to old smoky in the woods. And that queen.

Oh, girl. He's good. Smokey's the best character. Yeah, he just gossips. I'm like, yes. And he try and solve the murder. And it's, I would describe it as a choices matter game where your choices don't matter. That kind of matter.

Like history. Yeah. Also, like, life. I mean, you get people killed. Those choices matter. Yeah. You can get different people killed. Sorry you don't care about the lives of the people around you, you know.

It's also, you know, you. You do put off your work a lot, which means a lot of having to pretend that I wouldn't love to be illuminating manuscripts with a bunch of fucking dusty ass monks in the abbey. Oh my God. That's where I need to be. Hanging out with those nuns, like being like, can I please have a book, please? And they'll say no, you make me sick. I fucking hate you. And I'll be like, thank you, ma'am.

Thank you, ma'am. Yeah, right above the book, Gloryhole, very strategically positioned. Yeah. I mean, those monks were making use of that. Let me tell you. Oh, yeah. Matias and the other one. The singer.

Yeah, I don't know if y'all, if y'all found that out in y'all's place where you observe them fucking in the library. I certainly did. That was our main quest in this game was to find out which of the monks were fucking. Yeah. I was muted, so y'all didn't just hear the unholy, unholy noise I made with. No, when Justin said book glory.

you're well, I was just waiting because they keep opening like the thing and I just wanted to wait for like the bottom one to slide open when you're talking to like Zednia or whoever.

Yeah, it's just Zednia's like skirt up like I love her. I wish nothing but the best for her. I was so sad when we didn't find out what happened to her after in the third act. Yeah, we won't be spoiling this game.

I know her rich family. Yeah. Put a spoiler note in the notes, but yeah, it's a game. It's hard not to spoil, but it's like a detective game, but it has a thesis that's kind of focused around history and layers, which I thought I haven't played this game, which is forgotten. City. And I never finished it, but I do know that that's kind of the thesis is you're going into layers underneath the city to discover the history of it. Yeah. Yeah.

It's also making a video about that. Yeah, like material culture. and like the library plays a big part in that in this game. Yeah, we discussed some of that. Like the comparison of the forgotten city is really good and something that's kind of revealed in the, I mean, from the very title of the game peniment, it's about the function of history as it sort of history, history doesn't like work itself out in like a neat line, but is much closer to like the function of human memory and that there are these series of acts of

preservation and acts of memory and forgetting that occur over a period of time that have a direct effect on not just the events of history themselves, but the way that they are, the way that they play out and then are then documented and preserved into the future. Historical preservation is this thing that is accepted understandably by the public as, you know, history is the stuff that happened. The documentation is what we used to support and verify that that thing happened. And sure, I mean, that's part of it, but the thing that is harder to describe is discourse and the way that the actual documenting of historical events is embroiled in social conflict. And so penit being a game that's, it needed to be

in the style of like Umberto Echo, right? It needed to be, if it was going to use fiction to grapple with things like memory and historical preservation and yes, material culture is a big part of it. It all within this setting. It has this very top-down, I think it's very masterful in the way that it thinks through history because it is about, it does imagine history as this living, breathing, and moving thing. It does so using technology inspired by using one of the most important, like, moments in European history, and the transition between the late medieval and the early modern period, transitions in national identity, in cultural representation in religion is a huge part.

The game is, religion is probably the most important part of the entire game. I said technology. You know what I mean? Yeah, it's a game that really understands how history is made and its own complexity. And it tries, it does that in such a way that I haven't really seen in a lot of video games outside of something like the Forgotten City. Kay, I don't know if you have anything. I think it also, it gives you this opportunity to think about questions that are obvious to

ask, but not easy to answer when thinking about history, which is, okay, so we supposedly have this information. Where did it come from? Why was this document made who recorded it under what conditions, et cetera? So you walk amongst one of the most prolific and in their way unreliable sources of sort medieval history, which is monastic sources. They wrote a lot down, especially depending on the country. I know in the Irish case, they wrote a fuckload down.

But also, I can't think of a source that's more clearly coming through like, there are things you can and cannot say. There are things that it will be, to be safe, you have to represent in certain ways and so on. And that's just in some cases what we have. So to put you in the position where you're making these people into real, you know, to characters, you can interact with. who have thoughts and feelings about the world. I just think it really enriches your ability to think about, like, reading what would otherwise

be kind of, you know, a dusty old document and actually think about who made this and how should I think about what would prompt them to say these things. You know what I mean? Yeah, I think it's really impressive to get like a lay person and like a non-history person and a non, like, archives person to be like, I got to find out what happened to the bibliographic logs of these nuns. It's really important for me as a human to find out this information. Yeah.

And that's true. Like that information is important. The kind of stuff that we put in library catalogs, right? The stuff that people are always afraid of losing, like, you know, processing notes, provenance, like, where do this book come from? Where did it get moved to? Did we sell it? Who sold it to us? And of course, with the handwritten tradition, there's a lot of fear of scribal errors and interpolations and all kinds of.

And that's a part of the gameplay design, too, is people will miswrite something and then rewrite it. They didn't go as far as like rewrite a whole sentence, which would have been fun. But the rewriting over old things was cool. One thing that I really liked, too, was that I think a lot of people nowadays don't realize that copies of the same thing are going to have different information in them. Because that's a whole plot point, too, is the history of the town, the book of the history of this town. Like the former Abbott is looking for a different copy so he can substantiate the one that the library has. You know, because what if it's a copy of the same book, but it clearly has different information in it according to the plot. So like, yeah, you wonder like what's the difference between these two things that are nowadays we would think would be the exact copy because printing is so automatic.

But yeah, then it's like it could be the same thing, but it could actually contain very different information. Totally. Last year, I found myself reading a lot of the Florentine Codex, which is a document written by Spanish. God, was he a friar? I forget. It was a Spanish religious figure. Saghun, who wrote it in collaboration with indigenous people in Latin America, who he kind of, he had a role in their kind of Christian education. So these people kind of had a foot in both sides. And they would write these accounts. and then he would translate them into Spanish. But to the degree that we have access to their original accounts, the notes and changes that he makes are very consistent with what you would think of a Spanish Christian,

and also that, you know, they really re-contextualize certain things. So this is a document that is not just rewritten, but it's also translated very non-accurately, intentionally. And so to the degree that we have access to these different versions of it, It is in the creation of these documents themselves that you see kind of history in motion. You see the colonial perspective clashing with the indigenous account of these sort of like traditions and rituals or battles that had happened. And it's impossible to just take one of those documents on its own and say, oh, well, this is, this is about this. We read this now we know about this.

You have to engage with it as something in its historical context that's being made by people who are themselves not even able to. to speak freely. There's things this guy could not have written, or he would have been in incredible trouble with, for one, the Inquisition to say the least. And then the people under him who knows what they're prepared to tell this Spanish friar who probably had some degree of control over them. Yeah, you bring a really good point about the perceived, the sort of perceived unity of the gaze of modernity or post-modernity or post-post-modernity. I'm a gay in modernity. Yeah, several of us. Gender? What is this? Soviet Russia?

Oh, shit, that's a good one. Oh, come on, Kyle, you can bring it back. You can do this. Remember we were talking about. Sorry, yeah. We're joking earlier about the being blessed by pre-unity Germany, which is true, but also a really important point about, like, pre-imperial Germany. Imperial Germany is where the historical seminar was, like, invented, and the historical seminar is modeled after the or Bronchian colloquium, right? Loquy, like speaking together, basically. So the whole format of the way that at least universities, in the modern era, the way that we document and understand history,

is much less influx than it was in the pre-imperial German period, which is much more about church sources and official, like sources from churches from the monarchy, you don't hear as much about that's why a lot of the events. of the early modern Germany became really important, not just in the Protestant Reformation, but because of the advent of printmaking and the, it's not like an immediate decrease in official church sources. There's always official church sources, but all of a sudden there are these new sort of avenues, not just of individual expression, but of like actual practical, like,

methods for exercising agency for people who aren't doing the type of documentation that we're used to. And penimen as a game grapples with that directly, right? The, the sort of, and it does so, what I think is kind of perfect about it, it does so artistically in a lot of ways, right? It's about style and like there's an old style done by an older person and then there's a new style done by a newer person. But all of this is already becoming really dusty, right? Doing all this by hand, not doing printmaking or whatever. You can feel the sort of like the life, if you will, like the actual like living, breathing, cultural practice kind of, like you can feel it kind of dissipating as the game sort of tells you about its own environment. You realize that, oh, this thing that I'm looking at,

I think anybody can realize this is why it's such a good game. This thing that I'm looking at is a dying art and history is changing. Even if you don't understand the super important transitions out of the late medieval period, like it becomes really apparent that. And then by the time you get to the end of the game, you realize that you've already been living in the fiction, history's fictions, right? You've already been sort of embroiled in this mystery that, as it turns out, is the result of people's actual agency and the decisions that they make, the historical decisions that individual people have been making. And I think that's really brilliant. Yeah, there's a really good, I guess in the first act, you are kind of just doing a more or less by the numbers murder mystery.

You are aware that this is one of the last act of scriptoriums. You have a friend who's a printer. You meet other professionals and they have their resentments about the peasantry as do the monastics. Everyone's kind of looking down on the peasantry and you notice the peasantry is not taking that very well. As things are changing about what can you do with common land? This is a pivotal period of history where commons are being enclosed. And as the game goes on, they become, particularly the forest, becomes more and more enclosed. So you can't pick up sticks.

You can't cut down trees. Now you can't go gather acorns or herbs. And you can't graze your hogs or else, you know. And then you have like more wandering soldiers as the game goes on as well, where that militaristic control of poaching is more and more enforced. And there's more and more state control that comes along with as well. As Protestantism, Martin Luther gets name dropped a few times, mostly to annoy people, I think. It's why he's brought up.

Making dinner worse. That's what. Yeah. That's what Protestantism is. Murder motive. Protestantism. True and justified. Yeah.

I mean, Protestantism is such a great kind of looming specter in this game, right? It's this seemingly unchallengable status quo that is beginning. to crumble all around sort of everyone in and out of the Abbey in this game. And so it's fitting that one of the first, I feel like it's one of the first things that happens is you have that conversation with, I haven't played in a bit, so I forget his name, but the, you know, the fancy guy who comes to town, that's our guy. And he's like, so, buddy, what do you think about Martin Luther? Which, you know, probably would have been a spicy thing to ask someone, but also a conversation

people were going to be having. Yeah, it felt very like, so do you think climate change is real? Sort of like prompt like that like silence falls over as everybody decides how they're going to like approach this like conversation depending on the person who asked the question kind of like, yeah, it was a real, I really liked that part of it. Like Martin Luther is the specter in the room that nobody wants to address sort of thing. Because it's, it's an inherently political question. Like you might think, oh, this is like a theological question, but it's like, no, What is me, a rich man, asking a journeyman about to become a master artist about Martin Luther, what does that mean about the politics of this place?

It means, hey, what do you think about getting rid of all these monks and nuns and archbishops and taking the state into our own hands? What do you think about that, huh? Yeah, there's no differentiation between the two, right? The theological has not yet evolved in this, the like, the sort of how, like, the theological, like, becomes this sort of like boil on the, on the flesh of the enlightenment that it's just constantly having to deal with or treat or, you know, sublates in some capacity or whatever, like pushing it back in or something like that. It's the world

as it was. And I think that's a perspective that could be really easy to lose, if not for texts like this one that give us a chance to remember what it was like when the world, where the world felt so much smaller, but the universe as a result had this particular character to, I've been writing about it like, so I've been trying to write a book that deals with history and trying to deal with, to not be whiggish or teleological while still trying to grapple with the absolute of the passage of time. The idea that these people in this game, yeah, the fictionalized versions of real people most of time, inspired by real people, you know, sat under the same stars that we do for all intensive purposes, but not in such a way that invites this static

interpretation of the way that we see the world, but instead invites the idea of flux into the absolute. So history all of a sudden is like profoundly theological, and in the same way that the social is bound up in this theological stuff, because what do you fucking do besides listen to people talk about the Bible and the, you know, and, you know, the five other things that you do throughout the day, right? You know, the peasantry, you know, the presentry, unfortunately did not have TikTok so they can, you know. It's the zine maker. Exactly. Exactly. Yeah, like, it's interesting what you say about, like, theology, because like in, like, Rochfogle as this, like, rich dude comes in and it's like,

hey, how about that Protestantism, huh? Fuck these monks and stuff. Which, like, that's a part of Protestantism, then I'm like, yeah. But like in Act 2, we very much get the more like bottom up approach to that where it's like, let's get a hot communist that's like we have to defend the commons and we have to take all like we basically we have the means of production and all that. But it that is still like how we say like communism is also a really kind of like in like the way that then like you couldn't separate the political from the theological. It's like act two of this game is showing what that looks. like when it comes from the peasantry instead of from like the educated aristocratic class. It's a dialectical form, right? Like it has this. We're so, historiography, not to do the inside baseball too much because it's honestly boring, but like contemporary historiography is not concerned with this way of looking like it's too grand of a narrative, way too grand of a narrative, way too all-encompassing, way,

the potential for it goes too far and you have to deconstruct and you have to talk about particularity in difference and mentalities and all this other French stuff, which like, yeah, this is an important criticism. But the point that really, I think, important point that you're making is, yeah, when the Thomas Munzer inspired peasant rebellion stuff comes in, that was in all actuality, the, like, that was itself acting as a propelling mechanism for historical change was the, the most useful example that I think lots of people have become more familiar with for some of us who beat the drum all the time is Haiti. Haiti is another example of this, you know, like dismantling the master's house with his own tools,

in that case, very literally. But this idea that some criticizing something using its own ideas is, I mean, one of the most important parts about the, the peasant's rebellion in actualities that they got slaughtered. Yeah. They like, it's a shame. Which happens in the game, too. Yeah, exactly. It like the like things people get killed shit gets raised. It gets real bad and it gets real nasty. And so now all of a sudden we're forced to grapple with the idea of defeat of something good. Like if we can point out as like an objective, yeah, people should not toil as much as they do, which we can say in our contemporary perspective as an absolute, right? I think even people with horrible politics would in some ways agree with that statement. It's what you do with the defeat itself. All of a sudden, agency and in history.

historical documentation and storytelling becomes important. If you neglect history, then the defeat is always the defeat. It becomes this kind of, it sets in as this kind of melancholy without a motivation toward, you know, you don't really learn the lesson. I think is, I think is what I think. That's also what I wanted to talk about how time changes in this book, because peasant revolts throughout the medieval period were kind of like, they had a circular nature to them. You take too much, conditions get too bad, the peasants revolt, you wipe them out, things kind of go back to normal. And this peasant revolt at the end of Act 2, so throughout this part, you're writing like a book of hours, and you see how time goes through the book of hours through the day, so Martens and

nons and everything like that. And after this peasant rebellion in which you are crushed, the next act opens with a mechanical clock. And now time goes according to a mechanical clock, and you are now a printmaker's daughter and a printer yourself. And that's kind of why this, this is the transition to the modern age because the way we start to think about time becomes different. It loses the circular quality to it and gains this modern industrial logic to the forward motion of time that everyone is sort of stuck with. And I really like with the moment I saw that the way time was depicted had changed. That was like that was a brilliant design choice. Big agree.

That was maybe my favorite sort of like subtle moment in the game. It's kind of chilling in a way as well because this. game wants you to think so much about a lot of the more quite horrific, really, aspects of this transition towards an industrial modernity. It is that enclosure. It is that new way of measuring time. And just to take a step back to, you mentioned a little while ago, I think really correctly, the class character of the conversation between the Baron and Andreas about this sort of looming Protestantism. And then, as you say, you get the peasant perspective, which is really not You know, it's very different because they're seeing Protestantism, even if it's not put into words in this way, as really the ideological shift towards this new bourgeoisie's ownership of everything and the, you know, the cutting up and parceling off of what was once just, you know, God's gift to humanity as things that dickheads own.

And now you can't hunt and now you can't fish. You can't even fucking forage or let your animals graze. And that's like, when you read what few peasant sources we do have from the era, the era of enclosure, there's a really good poet. I'm so bad with names. I wish I'd prepared that. But there's a poet, he wrote a poem, I think, called the oak tree. He was a peasant at the time of enclosure.

And when you see how these people talk about it, it's nothing short of apocalyptic. Yeah, they're like millinerists or whatever it's called. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So I'm still trying to remember that guy's name. He was like John something. English people didn't have the most excited names. I don't think so.

Wordsworth isn't until the 19th century. Yeah, no, no, no. This guy was earlier. Anyway, anyway, yeah, the entire just sort of order of human existence for so long was not just just collapsing, but being actively taken away by people you could point to and say, no, that guy is telling me he owns this now, you know? And so it's not surprising the anger that it's met with as well. I mean, Sylvia Fittorici talks about this at the beginning of Caliban and the witch, where she's talking about the heretical sex and how a lot of them are very like proto-communist and proto-anarchists and like this like defense of the commons as such and how that ties into these theological beliefs as well.

Like these aren't separate issues during this time. Yeah, if I'm a Bavarian peasant, then this is like, these developments are in such extreme defiance of God, you know? Yeah. Well, and one thing that I thought was really interesting was when the peasant revolts. is like starting to ramp up is that like Otto who's the one who's sort of leading the whole thing is like I have a signal from God that what the monastery is locking down on us is actually against like what he wants like what God wants. So it's like it's taking the religion of this town and using it for a very different purpose than the rest than like the abbot has been up until

that point in the game. And then of course at the end, spoiler alert, you find out that the signal that Otto found is actually something very, very, very different and ties back into the whole motivation of the murders that happen along the way. So, like, I thought that was a really interesting, like, twist, too, because it does speak to history. Like, Otto was, Otto couldn't read, right? So so many of these characters, how you perceive them, depends on whether or not they're, like, literate or educated. And Otto couldn't read. So he found this sign from God that, like, the commons and everything is, is for the peasantry. But then you learn later from a literate character, that's not what that was at all.

It in fact hints that the very much like deeper past of the town and the things that like the layers of history that it's built on. So like Otto was right, but he wasn't right in the way that most like he wasn't right in the context of the game. But it still is a sign from God if you think about it. But it is still a sign from God, right? So it's like the whole time I'm like, fuck yeah, Otto. Like you lead that revolution in your town, right?

But at the same time, it's like you come. to find out that like, oh, this thing that he was so dependent on that got him killed over, he's one of the murder victims, is actually a sign that the town has pagan roots. And that's what somebody's been killing, you know, multiple people to hide. And what does that mean for the town? And what did that mean for the present resolution in the end, too? So, yeah, the way that they use theology throughout this game is utterly fascinating, I think. There's a bit of a range in the game. of the extent to which different characters, I should say the extent of maybe the sincerity of their religious belief.

Like the Baron, you don't get the impression that he's a particularly devout man in any way. He's really having a very, in a way, secular political conversation with you through a theological discussion. Whereas obviously a lot of people, the Abbey, that is not shocking. Otto, there's a lot of people who are, you know, very, when they talk to you about theological subject, there's a sincerity to it, that they're not necessarily having those veiled political conversations. And that's really, I think that before this period, in my view at least before this period, it's a lot easier to attribute a pretty high level of sincerity on the basis that what else would a person really believe?

You know, this sort of like pre-enlightenment, the presence of these religious views are just kind of the reality on which your society is based. And a big thing that happens around this period is you start to see that. fracturing, things that were just unquestionable facts for very long time become highly questionable. And so you start to, and I think this game is really adept at having some people who are maybe engaging more cynically in and out of the church with this than others. And I think also as historians, you're always asking yourself that. You're always asking, do I read this in full sincerity?

Do I read this from like a cynical 21st century kind of secular perspective? I think doing that often is tempting, but actually leads you astray more often than not. But I think we're starting to get into a time period where it starts to get more valuable to do that. Well, yeah, it's about our engagement with historicity, right? The depiction of history as such. So the historians have that extra step where you have to take. How am I going to? It's an interpretation.

The whole game is about the process of interpretation and sort of this another looming specter of like deconstruction. The game begins, first of all, with the game of that is about writing a story and documenting a story begins with erasure. But then also couples that erasure with one of the most like, in the beginning was the word, right? One of the most important sort of like introductory phrases in literary history. The ultimate like deconstructive phrase that sort of has indeed loomed like the in the way that the gospels themselves do. So I have. I don't know. I think I think that's all, I think that's all right on. I mean, and like, it just comes back to, and I don't have to blabber the point, because we already covered it. It comes, like, at one point, there were conflicts over the, there's always been conflicts over the sort of the quote unquote, the spirit of the social world. And from the very origins of Christianity, like, the best way to understand is through those conflicts and through that chain, because what you start to find is you start to see individual people who are,

maybe motivated by virtue, maybe motivated by profound, like theological belief, maybe motivated by politics, often by some measure of all three of those. But you find that there is indeed competition over the legacy over a particular set of beliefs or a time or a place, in this case, a town, right? So it's not just about like it, like the grand narrative gets boiled down into the small moment that like, I mean, to get like, I think, say to your, the point that you, made sort of captures that that like we like, you know, round or, you know, rounding out this sort of formalist conversation of the game, like, what is the game trying to say? And that's what it is,

that they're like, the sense of historical change is bound up in these small, seemingly innocuous conversations you're having with people that are actually filled with all of this discourse reigns supreme, I guess, is the, is the takeaway in some ways. Yeah, one of the things I was surprised about in smaller acts too was because I want to talk more about the layers that the game is focused on. But I was kind of surprised when there was a part where as a punishment for the peasants, in addition to foraging and not being able to use the forest, they lock up the shrine of Moritz so that you can't see the relic anymore, except for people who are coming there from out of town to visit it and buy trinkets. and make a religious pilgrimage. Pilgrimage, there we go. And everyone in the town, particularly the peasants, seem to know a lot about the pagan origins of the town.

And you also talk to, what's his name, Till, who is literate but can't speak Latin. But he's really interested in all the Roman parts of the city. And so he basically explains to you what the big reveal of the game is, which is that the saints' story is actually just taken from a Roman myth, which was also just taken from a pagan myth. And I just wrote down, like, Till watched Sightgeist one time and won't shut up about it. Because he just keeps talking about it.

I was like, well, you really know why all these stories come from, and Jay had a critique of that about how all of these stories aren't necessarily building off each other. There's sometimes just synchronicity, and humans make the same stories. They're not necessarily always taking from other place. but, you know, religions, religion is syncretic, and particularly Roman religion is very syncretic and Christianity is very syncretic. And so they love taking stories and going, oh, that was actually this god.

Romans love doing that. They love going into barbarian lands and being like, oh, yeah, they worship Mercury. And, you know, he's talking about Odin or something. And so I like how the peasants of the ones were kind of the most keyed into the history of the town. And the point of all the murders is to keep people from learning. that there is a Mithraim under the town and that the saints never actually in real history came to the town and you have the hand of the saint, which is funny because if you know anything about like relics, you know, there's like 15 four skins of Jesus, there's like five hands of

everyone, there's 90 million pieces of the true cross. It was huge. All right. 90 million pieces of the true cross is the actually the name that we're changing Agab to. Oh, that would go so fucking hard. Yeah. If you could put that out, I'd appreciate it for not blowing up our spot. I'm sorry, I was reading ahead in the notes.

It's also interesting that the relic is a hand, I think. I think that's very important because, again, like, so much of this story is about documentation. And, like, literally, like, even the non-literate characters, when we see their dialogue, it looks as if it's being written down. It's like the literate characters have a different penmanship. And then like the printmakers, there's is actually printed, which is so fucking cool. And then like all the monks and stuff have this like really annoying like gothic font. But like even the non-literate characters, it looks as if their dialogue is being written like in real time almost. So it's like everything is being like we are actively seeing and participating in the creation of all of this history through the process of writing.

And I really like that they drew that back just to the plot of the whole game, too, because the whole thing that kind of threads the three acts together is the idea of this thread polar who has been leaving notes for the townsfolk, right? And it's a distinct ink and a distinct pinmanship that Andreas, who is university educated and has, like, lived around the world. And Magdalene, who is the printer's daughter who has lived here her entire life, neither of them recognize the script. But the town is so small that you've literally talked to everybody a million times. So, like, where is this script coming from, right? And that's kind of the thread. Well, yeah, the thread polar that holds all three acts into like one consistent plot, which I thought was a really good twist on how they use the text in the game as, you know, things being written out and things being printed as they're being said done. I just want to say that I was right when I guessed it when me and Justin were playing.

Same with me and my wife when we were playing it. We were like, it's got it's got to be, right? That's like the only pot, right? Can we talk about ill Peter though? Can we just, I just fucking love this old bastard. He was just like. Refuses to die because he's too angry. He's too angry and too old and too sick.

And yeah, and like talks about how like you have to walk, you have to circle the house from the right to go piss in the night so the witches don't get you. And how like the previous abbot knew that that was like, like even if they were doing these old pagan like habits and rituals. Like he still knew that God lived in their hearts, which is like, right? Like such an interesting way.

Like Kyle, like you've been saying how like the older people of the town, the town knows the history if you just pay attention to what people are actually saying, right? That makes the finale so interesting because the entire, the murders and a whole lot of this, it comes down to a character is trying to prevent this revelation of the, the pre-Christian roots of the town. And when you get to that point, it can feel weird, right?

Because like you were saying, you probably already long since knew this. You meet characters who know this, but there's a difference between the shit that the peasants are saying and archaeological evidence. And I think it's noteworthy that actually archaeology, not long after this game takes place, starts to really, it's always been done as long as, you know, at least pre-Egypt. But it starts to really become a big feel. in a way of constructing history specifically for, you know,

those nations that are in power during the Enlightenment. And so archaeological evidence is like, no, this has to be stopped. Even if people know, there's knowing and then there's capital K knowing, you know. Yeah, because there's proof. Yeah. And well, and I think it's interesting too, because like, in the second act, the inn, the pretty much the only thing

that's really changed about the town is that the inn has been built. And it's called the golden hand. And the wife, the wife of the in-owner is one of your suspects during that app and her whole motivations are just straight up economical, right? Yeah. So if nobody, if, if the hand of Moritz is not the hand of Moritz and Moritz never actually existed in the town, then there's no reason for people to come to her in, because there's no reason to people, for people to come to the hands or to come to the town.

And that's very much wrapped up in, you know, the antagonists, the thread pullers, motivations too. Is it's not just theological. We can't have proof. that this is really a pagan myth. It's also that like the entire, he feels like he's protecting the entire town, right, from economical collapse, which is already on such, like,

such rocky ground from the peasant, you know, with the peasantry who are starving to death and all of that. So, like, there's not just theological, there's not just political. There's,

you know, the economical is also really wrapped up in it too. Indulgences, right? Right. It's the pain of indulgence and the sort of the shift of, the way that that served as a framework for the shift away from that kind of priestly authoritarian theology, which has always been super important to language and the paying of indulgences being huge parts of all.

I also, I really like The Inn, and this is maybe a more me reading into it aspect, but I love the Inn because naming it the Golden Hand, it turns this pilgrimage, this very purely religious thing into something that feels a bit more like tourism. And again, in the following century, tourism really starts to be a thing with British rich dickheads going on grand tours and stuff. And it just, it's just that little bit of, I guess the best way to put it is like, it's not, it doesn't feel as sacred. The sanctity of it declines a bit in the context of this new world. Now it's like, we're starting a business that's like playing off it, you know. And like the scriptorium has closed by this point.

Yeah. It's like the scriptorium, which was the thing that was bringing in money, has closed. And so now there's the inn that's the thing that is. bringing in money outside of the monastery. None of us can relate to that in our hometowns or whatever, right? The one super important thing isn't profitable slash good slash, you know, culturally significant or whatever anymore. So the vacuum gets filled by tourism. It's like, you can go pay too much for a pint. That's what you get now. Yeah, to go look at to go like, you know, be close to water. We can even monetize that, you know, not to get to, you know, epic communism. For lack of a better word.

But it's a familiar problem, right? We want to make something pirate theme? Do you want to have like a junk shop that's just beach hats and foldout chairs? I finally went down to the island down here in Texas. And it was the most Florida place I've seen in Texas. And I was like, this is just like Sarasota. Like this is basically just Sarasota. Like it is uncanny how every southern Gulf beach town is like,

You got a nice beach. Build your town to look exactly like this and sell the same shit. I saw a $200 pair of flip flops. I walked into the store and I saw it. I was like, all right, I'm leaving. Craziest thing I've seen in my entire life. Amazing. That was the cheapest ones.

Yeah. Kay, you mentioned something about like the archaeology aspect of this game. And it reminded me of the fact of the Miller's son, the little gay art boy, how he's like contributing to the ruins almost because he's the one drawing on right and drawing in the old salt line and everything and so there's like this like this like quote dead archaeology like these dead ruins that people are trying to hide but then there's like this history of like a person actively interacting within creating more things because when magdalena because you pronounce the ease at the end of German words like goes down gets to actually go down to the mine there's drawings down there too, right? So there's this continuation. Like, nothing ever changes. Everything's the same, but in a cool history is alive. And like, we've all been making dick jokes

since the beginning of time kind of way. Absolutely. And I feel like that sits really comfortably alongside how which maybe historical facts, for lack of a better word, are threatening or convenient at any given time. Because at this point, these Roman roots are a huge fucking problem.

You fast forward a century. Enlightenment thinkers are desperate to connect anything they can to Greece, to Rome. Yeah, like neoclassism. It gets so big that people, you know, you,

if they could have held out for a while, there would have been a lot of people who would have been hyped that there was a Roman ruin there. You know what I mean? Yeah. My hottest take is that the Enlightenment was just like proto-fascism. Oh, yeah.

Yeah. It's when the world fell under darkness. It's, yeah, fuck the Enlightenment, actually. I shouldn't know how to read right now and I'm pissed. Right,

exactly. I should be like fucking a hot communist in Bavaria. Oh, So true. Just be like, God wants me to just have my pigs rum the woods, actually. And that's, I do love that. I love the, like, the threat of religious violence, just like that scene. And last temptation was like, be careful, Zebedee, there is a God.

Just, I want to yell that at anyone who's like, just a piece of shit. It's constantly in the back of my head. But, yeah, the people who get remembered and who don't also was a theme in the game. So you see, like, the graveyard has, like, like all of these big memento moris to like the abbesses and prioress and abbots. And then you go into the salt mines and you see, you know, the writings of Roman slaves who are how you find out about the ruins underneath the city, which is the, I mean, everyone knows about that there are Roman ruins, but there's a particular mythrium that is

hidden. And that's what, you know, the string puller is trying to keep secret. and, you know, the townspeople have their own little legacies that they want to keep and the peasantry kind of do all of that by oral tradition and drawing on stuff. Well, and I like how that's reflected in the last act of the game, too, when you sneak into the broken down abbey and the dance of death mural that is in the, I forget what the name of the room is in the abbey, has been painted over. And at that point in time, you're like not entirely certain he was doing the painting, even though it's pretty easy to guess. but, you know, and you can actually see, and it's painted over with it like in the history of the peasant revolt. Like, you can actually see the characters from the previous acts in there, even though you as the protagonist may or may not recognize all of them, you're like, oh, that's that person. What happened to that person? Because you don't always find out what happened to townspeople

after the time jump. So like the dance of death, I think, was a really interesting like way to put it to, because it's just a very formal monastic piece of art with clearly a single person working through their shit on top of it, right? And that's the other thing that I really, really loved about this game. And I mean this and I truly do love, like, love this is I love that Andreas was a coward. He's a piece of shit, yeah. I love. And even with all of the different decisions you can make throughout the game and all the different

influences, like in the end, he's still a fucking coward, right? And I love cowardly protagonists because, like, you can see the decision-making that's happening, like, as you go. And in this game, you get to make the decisions, but, like, in books and other things I read with a similar protagonist, it's like, you see how they're, how they're cowardly decisions sometimes lead to noble or not-noble outcomes, like, or things that happened that weren't exactly their intention. They were just trying to, like, fumble their way through the best at the time. So, and also like- I mean, we're forced into those decisions in the first two acts. Like, no matter what you do, you send someone to death. And as a player, you know that's not the person who did it.

Right. Or you don't know if you don't know if you actually have all of the information to solve it. Yeah. Like it never tells you. Like the townspeople believe in whatever decision you as Andreas have made. They believe it later as. Well, because there's the thread puller, but then there's the people who actually do what the threadpuller wants them to do. Exactly.

And so like in the final act when like you learn and this is again, big spoiler, you learn that Andreas didn't die in the fire at the end of the second act. You learn that he's actually been living in the ruins for 18 years because he was too fucking depressed to figure out what to do next, which I think is a- You don't want to go home to his bitch wife. And his dead and his dead son. He was, you know, like and I feel like and then you know, you have Andreas's internal reprimals. of Beatrice and Prestor John and the fucking jester in that. And I think it's like, because overall, like, the game is really about the town and the things that you can like learn and discover, you know, under this sort of murder mystery plot. But like, then there's also that point where it's like, oh, you learn that Andreas is making these sort of decisions that you can't get out of. Like, you only have so many choices because he's fucking depressed. And all of the things and his fame that he's gathered since like the first act and all of this, like, none of it really

changes the outcome of things. Because in the end, no matter what you do or what you decide, he's still going to like hide for 18 years under the distra-under a burned down library, only to emerge at the very end. Homes to amongst us. Yeah, Humes de Montes doesn't desire that. But like only for at the end for him to emerge in like the 11th hour, finally deal with his shit only to see the people who also had to deal with his shit die at the last second, right? So like, it's not just this sort of overarching, like, historical thing, but there's also the very personal narrative of Andreas in there, too. And then what Magdalena can sort of do with that legacy moving forward to, right?

I feel like that's where the decisions that you make throughout the game actually matter. I've only done one play-through, so I don't know how much influence it has in the end. But it's really about what Magdalena decides to do after everything is all said and done. So I think it's a really good sort of personal journey for the people who may or may not be interested in the historic parts of the game who might actually be able to tie into like that sort of personal narrative that is also going throughout. So I thought that was really well done as well. Yeah. Like I felt so powerless playing Andreas because it's like I didn't want him to have this weird. Like I wanted to make him like a gay little like artists who went to Florence and hung out. But like it kept trying to force me to be like my bitch wife about like his wife. And I was like,

no, I don't want that answer either. Like, it just kept forcing us to, like, feel like, like, Justin said, so many times, like, we'd be going through, like, a dialogue tree and we'd, like, pick something very specifically. And at the end, it still made us eventually wind back around to say something we didn't want to say. Right. I was like, no, we didn't want to see that one.

Sometimes you have to. It's Rodney Dangerfield time, you know? Yeah. Well, and yeah, how much is history like that, like, no matter what you do, that outcome, you know, on a personal level, the outcome turns, is always the library burning down and is always If I had been at the library of Alexandria, it would have been different. Yeah. Things wouldn't have gone down like that.

But I'm different. There was one thing after the game, because I didn't finish the full playthrough, so I just watched kind of the end. And I, the playthrough I watched, you decide to tell the truth about the myth realm and whatever's under the town. And then after the game, you pull away from the book that you started with and you are standing in the town meeting place. I forget the German word. And you see that there is a family tree that's been added by Andreas in the years that he's lived in the town. And one of the ones shows like a kid that you didn't meet. And he's like stolen the relic from the shrine and like presumably never

came back with it. Good. Was it Andreas or was it the kid that was named after Andreas? Oh, good point. I'm pretty certain that it's a little baby. It's Paul, the gay little Miller's artist, son's son that he named after him is

the one who's so funny. Yeah, so, yeah, no, which I thought was an interesting touch. And that's one of the things that I wonder how that family tree or that changes depending on the things that you have decided throughout the game. So like, but yeah, it's like, you start as an artist, you continue as an artist in like the way that Magdalena is like a printer's maker and does woodcuts and stuff. And then you see this artist's amateur artist kit become the town artist. So how art also just sort of continually flows throughout the whole game and ends with it as well. Well, it's looking like we might have to wrap up soon. And I'm realizing that I could talk about this game for fucking ever.

Yeah, we barely started. I know. I feel, fuck. I'll. I'll. How is it? I looked at the clock and went, we didn't even talk about the lequarium. I actually have something to say about the lequarium. Say it. All right. So one of you noted that the lecarium is not in use, really.

It doesn't do anything in the game. And I thought that was wonderful. First of all, less important reason, obviously this is Kirissu Abbey is heavily based off of a real-life abbey of St. Moritz. And so that might just be there because it's there. But I think it's there because lecarium is a place for monks

to discuss freely. It is a bit of like a common area. And I think it's really appropriate that it's in disuse because I can't think of anything more dangerous at the time this game is taking place for a lot of these monks than to be speaking freely if you get what I mean. Isn't also where they can speak with the peasantry or like the common like the lay people as well? Absolutely.

And because of the divide, it's it's better for the monks not to be talking to the peasants like for the monks own safety a lot of the time and possibly vice versa. The fact that that room is distinctly empty and largely pointless, I just, I love that. I thought that was great. Yeah, I did have a good running joke where I would just run across like several screens because there's no fast travel on this game, which has been like one critique I saw is like there's a lot of wasted space sometimes. But I would just be like, hang on, got to check something.

Run across like four screens and then go into Lookwear and be like, anybody look waiting in here? All right. And then just drum back out. I was going to do this one time like right when I think Act 2 started. I was like, how badly do I want to annoy J right now? So I was going to run across the entire map and do it from like the village farm to the aquarium. Hang on, I got to check the map.

It's the little opposite end of the map. But I didn't do that. I thought about it really loudly, though. We were running out of time. Yeah, yeah. But it is a good game if you were like me and like to check every corner. because that's kind of where the game is, is just talking to people.

Like, there's no speed running this game. It's really like, just you piece it all together through all the conversations you have. And so it works perfect for someone who plays like me because I'm like, don't miss anything. Check every corner, talk to every person, get every dialogue tree. But that takes forever to get through a game when you do that. All right.

Well, then we'll wrap up. Kay Kyle, thank you so much. I'll have links to All Gamers Are Bastards. And you should check out their Patreon for even more episodes about people in video game sound design who are running for elected office. And I've linked to Kay's video about pentament and forgotten city, which I forgot that pentament was part of that. I only remembered the forgotten city part. And so when you were like, someone should do a video on that, I wasn't, I couldn't remember if

you were being sarcastic. And I went to grab the link and I was like, oh, that was, I hadn't even played the penitimate. Yeah, that was a dick and interrupted you by accident. You completely forgot that that was what the video was about. So link to that. And yeah, go play Fentiment if you haven't. Yeah, it's fun.

All right. Yeah. Yeah. This is our podcast now. I was going to make a joke, but I ran. He did. Deflated immediately.

I know. And video game now. Behold, the atheist's nightmare. Good night.