The first three (3) minutes of Pajama Sam 3: You Are What You Eat From Your Head to Your Feet allows peerless insight into the mind of Sam as he traverses trough struggles of gluttony, parasocial detachment, inverted tropes, public embarrassment, and ultimately self fulfilment.

Through playing the game in question (PS3:YAWYEFYHtYF) far too many times and holding a competitive speedrun time within the any% category, I have looked WAY too far into everything about this game. This essay was greatly influenced by a similar 650 word review I made regarding the entire game that I made more than three (3) years ago on the 10th of February 2018 (https://test-steamproxy.haloskins.io/id/RobbyBobsquat/recommended/292800).

Pajama Sam 3: You Are What You Eat From Your Head to Your Feet or PS3:YAWYEFYHtYF for short, is the transformative seminal work created by Humongous Entertainment and distributed by Nightdive Studios. As a work of high art, PS3:YAWYEFYHtYF speaks into our world through it's settings and characters in order to mirror the racist, classist, and abundantly fascist undertones of modern American society through the lens of childlike innocence. A representative slice of the brilliance found within PS3:YAWYEFYHtYF can be seen within the first 3 minutes of gameplay, despite the fact that the player is still being acquainted with the world during this time.
As the player we view the world through the eyes of Sam, a young boy who is living with his mom. We live within his blue head and we are given the opportunity to walk a mile in his white pajama-shoes, allowing us to experience the world through his perception. By having the world be filtered through the view of a child we are able to approach topics and issues that may be too taboo or uncomfortable to approach otherwise in our own day-to-day lives. The aspects of our culture that may be deeply set are instead faced with a refreshing level of levity, allowing us to reevaluate our preconceived notions about those deeply set topics.
The game opens with Sam engorging himself on cookies in order to get enough cookie box-tops (20) in order to get a prize related to his role model, Pajama Man. Despite Pajama Man being a non real character, used commercially to sell more products, Sam falls for the ploy entirely. Not only did Sam purchase 20 boxes of Chok Ablock cookies in order to fulfil a parasocial contract between him and the fictional character of Pajama Man. This form of self-destructive behaviour in order to “please” or “help” a public or fictionalized figure is all too common in the modern day with the advent of publicly relatableized celebrities and the shocking rise of "YouTubers" within the world of the Gen Z generation. As Chih-Ping Chen puts it in her article “Forming digital self and parasocial relationships on YouTube (2014)”, teens online will develop and express multiple different concurrent personalities, friend group associations, and relationships. This is in stark contrast with the much smaller amount of personal segmentation and manufacturism most young people express outside of the online space. Although Sam believes that Pajama Man has his best interests in mind, that is a falsehood developed in order to become more marketable; without assessing the potential repercussions of that personalization on the end consumer. Sam’s binge eating causes him to feel sick, ultimately leading him to the Mop Top Island where he is greeted by a dance party in a room adorned with candy and sweets. In order to progress out of the dance party, Sam is required to eat a colossal slice of cake that blocks the exit, upon which point he is whisked away to jail. This sequence contrasts metaphorically with the inciting incident, where instead of Sam’s Choc Ablock cookies leading to the repercussion of a stomach ache, the rampant gluttony of Sam consuming the huge cake leads to a much more literal form of punishment, jail time. While the negative ramifications of overindulging in cookies might be obfuscated within the mind of a child, the consequences of ruining a party through personal inconsiderance is much more familiar, thus leading to the emblematic punishment in the mind of a child, going to jail. Within the jail cell, Sam is guarded by sentient bars of chocolate, forcing him to atone for his crimes against the common courtesy of the party (Not eating all the cake). Ironically Sam’s only companion within his cell of sweets is a sentient head of broccoli named Florette, this subversion of children’s positive and negative associations regarding food allows the writers to prime the observing party for the types of subversions they can expect throughout the rest of the game. Since although broccoli is stereotypically considered to be gross by children within pop culture and candy is commonly seen as being appealing to children, PS3:YAWYEFYHtYF subverts that trope by making the candy characters actively aggressive and malicious towards Sam, while the Broccoli character (Florette) is helpful and acts as a positive anchor within the confines of the jail. In order to escape the jail cell, Sam must knock down a key hanging on the wall with a chocolate bon bon, before breaking off a loose candy cane comprising the bars of his cell, using the cane to retrieve the fallen key off the dungeon floor. Reminiscent to Shawshank Redemption, our protagonist finds himself needing to apply his wits and skills in order to escape from a wrongful imprisonment and to move forward as a changed and greatly more self-actualised person. The act of using your wits to escape a grim situation acts as a metaphorical membrane between Sam’s choice to wallow in his gluttonous & self-destructive tendencies and his choice to go forward with Flowette, the symbolic interpretation of self-improvement within Sam’s life. Throughout the remainder of the game, Sam jumps from locale to locale, improving the lives of all the delegates and inadvertently becoming a more self-actualised and selfless person during the process.
That is what the first 3 minutes of Pajama Sam 3: You Are What You Eat From Your Head to Your Feet can teach us about ourselves and Sam as a nuanced and deep character.