Penthesileia

The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there. Take Achilles, for example: pride of the Achaeans, the premier warrior of a heroic age, one whose divine blood destined him for glory, and a glorious death – and, if you read the Iliad at age 11 with only a weak understanding of the cultural context, a giant douche who gets his best friend killed because he’s sulking about not getting to assault the sex-slave he’s got his eye on.

It’s this Achilles about which the plot of Penthesileia revolves: although the setting is a modern neo-fascist state reminiscent of the Handmaid’s Tale, he remains much the same, an egotistical tyrant anxious of his status and with a taste for nonconsensually dominating his paramours. That paramour, however, is not the Iliad’s Briseis, but instead the eponymous Amazon, who comes from a now-lost sequel to the canonical epic (it’s not just the MCU that doesn’t know how to let a good ending alone), where she’s slain by Achilles as the interminable siege of Troy wears on. Unlike her mythological counterpart, though, the game’s Penthesilieia – the viewpoint character – is brought back to life after being killed in a raid on the resistance, resurrected to perform a robotic mimicry of wifehood. Some of the most effective parts of the game allow you to either accede to, or resist, the pageant of matrimony Achilles has constructed: you’re meant to start each day by waking him and asking “has anyone ever told you how handsome you are?”, then busy yourself in pointless housework – you rearrange the furniture twice in one day – before greeting him again and performing gratitude as he brings you a gift as he returns from his important work serving the Prefect (the gifts are all, of course, slinky dresses). The prose is simple and concrete and fillets Achilles’ pretensions without pity, appropriate for a story centering on the brutalism of tyranny:

"Achilles fills the twenty-minute car ride with the sound of his own voice. Electronic billboards flash past. They leave stars in your eyes, the vague impression of children laughing and women dancing."

Penny (as he calls you) is an appealing figure, but she’s a bit of a cipher, suffering from the double-whammy of being an IF protagonist whose actions are dictated by the player, and an amnesiac who only slowly understands the nature of her existence. The choices are engaging, but your resistance is guaranteed: what’s up to you is the extent to which you play along publicly while pursuing your own agenda sub rosa, versus making your dawning revolutionary consciousness visible to Achilles (I mostly kept quiet: this is praxis). While the general shape of what’s happened is clear from the get-go, the game hits its thriller beats effectively, marrying Bluebeard-style domestic horror to righteous fight-the-dystopia sci-fi. And Achilles is a compelling figure throughout, dangerous but also petty and pathetic in his obsession with small slights, the way he takes his anxieties out on you because he thinks you can’t fight back – given the times we’re living in, I especially appreciated this portrayal of a fascist whose position certainly allows them to inflict harm, but who is obviously a craven and contemptible piece of shit.

That modern resonance, though, is what makes the ending I got unsatisfying: (Spoiler - click to show)After walking a high-tension tightrope, I was able to uncover some of Achilles’ secrets and broadcast them to the nation, triggering the downfall of the regime. But these secrets were just the quotidian brutality in which authoritarian regimes marinate their subjects – the fact that the tyrant’s flunkies gun down innocents in their efforts to suppress dissidents surely isn’t any sort of surprise to people. True, sometimes one incident among many others can be the trigger for mass uprising when the conditions are right (witness George Floyd or the Woman Life Freedom movement in Iran), but the way that Penny’s single act of rebellion catalyzes such large scale consequences smacks of wish fulfillment. Would that it weren’t so, but sitting here eight months into the Trump presidency, I don’t buy that the reason we have fascism is that people just don’t know what’s being done in their name.

With all that said, it’s hard to complain too much about a game with such an effectively withering portrayal of the sad, flaccid excuse for masculinity that powers the backlash against equity. If the ending feels too pat right now, God willing in a few years we’ll be able to look back on it and say yes, that’s exactly how it was, that’s all it took to overthrow these people who pretended they were invincible warriors, whose heels were the biggest targets you could hope for.