Shot of Jack #38: Pentament
Hey, everyone. Sorry for the missed week last week. I’d rather skip a week than put something out I’m not proud of. The last couple of weeks have been a hard reminder that I’m still recovering from surgery. Last week included Cardiac Rehab, Physical Therapy, an Emergency Room visit, a CT scan, and more blood tests than I can count. But the good news is that I’m okay. Just tired.
In writing news, we’re entering the final installments of A Better Lie, the serial crime novel that appears in this very newsletter every Friday for paying subscribers. I’m working on publishing the hard copy. Year Two is going to be bigger, better, and won’t include me having a double bypass in the middle of it.
Over at TacomaStories, I’ve begun Year Eighteen of covering Tacoma homicides. For the second year in a row I’m writing about a Tacoma homicide every Monday in an effort to catch up after the last few record breaking years. If absolutely no one gets murdered in the city of Tacoma for the rest of this year, I’ll be caught up before 2025. But I expect the murderers and future murderers of Tacoma will no cooperate.
Okay, let’s get this thing going.
What I’ve Been Playing
A while back I stumbled upon a review in Wired for a game they claimed at the time might be the Game of the Year for 2022. I apparently stored that in my long-term memory because last month when I looked at games available on the X-Box Game Pass I clicked on Pentament.
The only thing I remembered was the name of the game and that someone had liked it. So once I started playing I did not know what to expect.
Pentament comes from Obsidian Studios. These are the folks behind games like Fallout: New Vegas and The Outer Worlds. Big games with incredible graphics and plenty of action. And so naturally, Pentament is about a 16th century artist trying to piece together who is responsible for a series of murders amidst religious strife in rural Bavaria. Wait. What?
Pentament has almost no action. It has no voice-overs. In fact, most of the game involves reading long bits of dialog as you have conversations with townspeople and religious folk. There are heated conversations about Martin Luther. I know. It sounds boring.
And yet, this game absolutely charmed me. With a laid back, almost laconic pace, the game allows for a relaxed gaming session. The graphics are simple, but because they are evocative of the era, they absolutely work for the story being told. You get to make a lot of decisions and those decisions can have drastic, sometimes dire consequences. You get to choose your character’s background, but whatever you choose may cause trouble down the road. If you choose to have a background in Greek, that might help, but not if it turns out a clue is in Latin. Your character’s relationship to the townspeople changes over time depending on your choices. And despite the time period, the dialog is fresh and occasionally peppered with profanity.
There is a lot to like about Pentament and I appreciate that Obsidian Games is willing to try something different.
If you’re in the mood for something different when it comes to video games, Pentament is well worth the while.
What I’ve Been Clicking On
One Last Thing
Right before I graduated from Goddard College, we got a new College President. His name was Dan Hocoy. He didn’t have an impressive resume and didn’t seem like someone who understood Creatives. Nevertheless they assured us that things would not change for the worse and that Goddard would be preserved as a safe and supportive place.
And now, after shutting down the West Coast residencies, after a month-long strike, after layoffs, they’ve now announced that the college is going entirely online. Supposedly it’s temporary, but hey supposedly the guy cared about the unique experience at Goddard, so I’m not holding my breath.
What I would like to do is just take a moment and say that the week-long in-person residency at Goddard College’s MFA program was life changing for me. I got to focus on my craft and work directly with professors designing my custom curriculum for the semester. But much more than that, I got to meet some of the most amazingly talented and just outright good people I’ve ever known. The photo above is most of my cohort and other classmates when I graduated. I can tell you stories about each of the people in this photo. Like I told my girlfriend after my first in-person residency, “I’m very sorry, baby, but I’ve fallen in love with thirty-five other people.”
Going online may not seem like a big deal, but as someone who attended during the pandemic and experienced the online version of Goddard I can tell you the difference between online and in person is the difference between watching porn and having sex.
I hope Goddard College returns to its old ways. And if I’m ever in a position to help make that happen, I will. Until then, I’ll just thank my lucky stars that I got to experience Goddard when I did.
See you next week.
- Jack Cameron
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