Insert events to get desired state before running behaviour tests

I am trying to insert events before I try to execute some commands. I want to get my behaviour in a state ready for particular test, without needing to rerun all the commands, like database fixtures in regular testing.

I am using:

akka.persistence.testkit.javadsl.EventSourcedBehaviorTestKit`
akka.actor.testkit.typed.javadsl.ActorTestKit`
akka.persistence.testkit.javadsl.PersistenceTestKit

I create my test kits:

static final ActorTestKit testKit = ActorTestKit.create(ConfigFactory.load("my.test.conf"));

static final EventSourcedBehaviorTestKit<Command, Event, State> eventSourcedTestKit = EventSourcedBehaviorTestKit.create(
    testKit.system(),
    MyPersistentBehaviour.create()
);

and then I try to do:

eventSourcedTestKit.persistenceTestKit().persistForRecovery(
    "1",
    //List of my akka events
);
eventSourcedTestKit.restart();

but as soon as I try to runCommand those events I persisted aren't applied. I also had to disable serialization if that changes anything? (it wasn't picking up my custom serialization, and it was always falling back to default java serializer)

here is config I used:

akka {
  persistence {
    testkit {
      journal.pluginid {
        class = "akka.persistence.testkit.PersistenceTestKitPlugin"
      }
      events {
        serialize = false
      }
    }
    journal.plugin = "akka.persistence.testkit.journal.pluginid"
  }
}

Is this even a good way to do it?