Pentiment - Josh Sawyer's historical mystery narrative-driven game set in 16th century Bavaria

[Infinitron]

https://www.pcgamer.com/in-obsidans...t-expect-to-know-if-you-idd-the-right-killer/

In Obsidan's murder mystery Pentiment, don't expect to know if you ID'd the right killer​

Pentiment plays with the ambiguity of its murder investigation—and nothing's stopping you from pinning the blame on somebody you dislike.

Pentiment knows exactly what it is. The June reveal trailer for Obsidian's 16th century murder mystery declared itself "a narrative adventure most unexpected," and it's definitely not the kind of game we'd expect from a studio and director known for RPGs. But that's also exciting: director Josh Sawyer is clearly jazzed to be making a smaller-than-usual game set in post-medieval Bavaria, full of period-authentic artwork and a protagonist a bit reminiscent of monk supersleuth Brother Cadfael.

Cadfael, though, always catches his killer—Pentiment doesn't plan to give you that kind of certainty.

In a Q&A session ahead of this week's Gamescom, where Pentiment is playable, Josh Sawyer and art director Hannah Kennedy gave an introduction to the game and talked about what to expect from its mystery. There will be branching dialogues and events based on your choices, but you're not going to get a "good" or "bad" ending for identifying the true killer or blowing your investigation.

"One of the things we talked about early on is that there are a number of suspects for these murders, and it's not very clear—you don't have DNA evidence, you don't even have anything resembling forensic science," Sawyer said. "The justice system itself is pretty odd to a modern viewer. There's a lot of ambiguity here and you're put in a position where you have to pin the murder on somebody, and it's never going to be clear if that's really the person."

"You have to either use your best judgment or pick the person that you want to see go, because the punishment for murder in this time period was pretty severe. We really want you to see the consequences play out over a long period of time."

In other words: Don't expect Pentiment to tell you whether you were right after you deliver a verdict, but do expect whoever you implicate to meet a grisly end. Frogware's recent young, sexy Sherlock game similarly let you get a mystery completely wrong and carry on nonetheless. Sawyer confirmed that who you accuse will have ripple effects in your town, but there's a core story focused on your character that will play out regardless.

"We're trying to do the classic thing where we interleave the choice and interactivity within a very strong storyline," he said. "I thought it would be interesting to tell a story that's a very personal story that's about this guy, Andreas, and the community he lives in, within the historical context of the events happening around them."

Andreas is an artist at a fictional abbey and a town called Tassing, who ends up "caught up in a series of murders and scandals." Pentiment is set over the course of 25 years, so you're not going to be investigating a single murder. Sawyer didn't specify the structure, but I'm guessing one murder (or scandal) per act, with five acts making up the whole story. A multi-act structure like that would be ideal for showing how your choices affect the abbey and town over time.

A few more things I learned about Pentiment:

• You can choose Andreas' background, like whether he studied astronomy or the occult in university, and that affects both your skills and dialogue choices
• Don't expect visible meters for how popular you are with characters you talk to, but Pentiment will give you some info. "We just try to track the things that feel like characters would pay attention to, let you know when they're paying attention to them, and when they come up in conversation again," Sawyer said.
• There's an in-game glossary that looks essential if you aren't up on your 15th century religious terminology
• The glossary also includes characters you meet in the game, so you can easily reference faces and names
• Different characters' dialogue text uses different fonts, related to their social class and background
• There's an accessibility option to switch to simplified fonts for easier legibility
• If you want to buy a couple books that the developers themselves heavily referenced to brush up on the art of the period, check out The Nuremberg Chronicle (free on the Library of Congress website) and Durer's Journeys(opens in new tab)
• Watch Andrei Rublev for another inspiration
• Pentiment comes out on Steam and PC Game Pass on November 15

 

[Infinitron]

More previews:

https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2022...istorical-religiously-charged-murder-mystery/
https://metro.co.uk/2022/08/24/pentiment-preview-playing-with-history-17231754/
https://www.purexbox.com/features/p...e-and-painstakingly-researched-murder-mystery
https://gamerant.com/pentiment-preview/
https://screenrant.com/pentiment-game-preview/
https://www.pastemagazine.com/games/pentiment-preview/
https://www.cgmagonline.com/articles/previews/pentiment-hands-off-preview/
https://stevivor.com/previews/pentiment-preview-a-labour-of-and-for-historic-love/
https://www.godisageek.com/2022/08/pentiment-is-rich-with-history-and-intrigue-hands-off-preview/
https://www.polygon.com/23319825/obsidian-pentiment-preview-xbox-game-pass-pc
https://checkpointgaming.net/featur...ian-shows-us-their-unique-gorgeous-diversion/
https://cogconnected.com/preview/pentiments-preview/
https://mobilesyrup.com/2022/08/24/obsidian-entertainment-xbox-preview/
https://www.destructoid.com/pentiment-preview-impressions-november-obsidian-history-art-xbox/
https://www.theguardian.com/games/2...y-mystery-that-looks-like-a-playable-tapestry
https://www.washingtonpost.com/video-games/2022/08/24/pentiment-game-pass-art-history/
https://www.gameshub.com/news/featu...isted-without-xbox-game-pass-interview-27514/
https://www.gamespot.com/articles/p...ed-to-get-out-of-xbox-game-pass/1100-6506847/
https://www.kakuchopurei.com/2022/08/pentiment-obsidian-director-interview/

 

[Zed Duke of Banville]

What rhymes with Pentiment?

"Pediments were originally triangular gables found on Greek and Roman temples. During the Renaissance and subsequent Baroque and Rococo periods, new and more complex shapes were introduced. Regardless of their shape or complexity, pediments remain a low-pitched form."

 

[Grunker]

Who gives a fuck about the quality of the tweet. You like his Twitter, follow it, you don't, don't.

I'm asking in what possible way the content of that tweet is noteworthy enough to post in the Codex thread about the game. It's like posting a blank post

i mean

(courtesy of noscript)

Like I told you last time, what's the point? The posts are blank filler either way

 

[Darth Roxor]

it was what we hoo-mans call a joke

 

[Grunker]

it was what we hoo-mans call a joke

You should know better than to expect a dane to understand such things

 

[IHaveHugeNick]

Okay but seriously, what the hell do they add to water in California? Sawyer looks like an old lesbian on a tour of self-discovery.

 

[perfectslumbers]

Okay but seriously, what the hell do they add to water in California? Sawyer looks like an old lesbian on a tour of self-discovery.

Microplastics

 

[Zed]

Okay but seriously, what the hell do they add to water in California? Sawyer looks like an old lesbian on a tour of self-discovery.

They're out of water. God knows what they drink

 

[Alienman]

Pabst Blue Ribbon probably.

 

[BlackheartXIII]

 

[Infinitron]

Pentiment on the Xbox Gamescom stream:

 

[Alienman]

Oh no, that writing. Could it be a taste of Joss Whedon writing?

 

[Toady]

The amount of damage Joss Whedon has caused to our culture is incalculable.

 

[Tom Selleck]

Why is the dialogue 2022 Californian English and not 1500s Middle English? Josh is a poser.

 

[Ranselknulf]

First impression of Pentiment is that it looks like a flash game.

 

[Ranselknulf]

I've looked at a few of the cringe videos infinitron has posted, and while I can't conceive of this game being a success in the US, I must confess that I don't know that much about German culture.

I mean the Germans are so backwards and strange that Sawyer might be a genius for recognizing this opportunity to sell a flash game to 80 million or so Germans for $20 a unit.

 

[Zarniwoop]

I've looked at a few of the cringe videos infinitron has posted, and while I can't conceive of this game being a success in the US, I must confess that I don't know that much about German culture.

I mean the Germans are so backwards and strange that Sawyer might be a genius for recognizing this opportunity to sell a flash game to 80 million or so Germans for $20 a unit.

Dude, Germans work all day as train drivers, then go home and pay $50 for Train Simulator 2022, plus another $20 for extra train models, which they play until their train driving job starts.

But even they wouldn't pay $20 for a Flash game.

Why is the dialogue 2022 Californian English and not 1500s Middle English? Josh is a poser.

Careful, asking these types of questions will get your posts banished to Gaming Drama by our Elite Moderation Team.

 

[Infinitron]

But even they wouldn't pay $20 for a Flash game.

This game isn't made for buying:

 

[Infinitron]

https://www.ign.com/articles/pentim...-surprise-from-xboxs-most-prolific-new-studio

Pentiment Is the Latest Pleasant Surprise From Xbox's Most Prolific New Studio​

Josh Sawyer’s narrative adventure views the complexities of history through a wonderfully weird human lens.​

Years ago, I frequented a website called The Toast that ran, alongside wonderful columns and criticism, various literary nerd gags including a recurring bit called “Two Monks.” Two Monks was written as a dialogue between the titular religious duo who were, in most of the episodes, trying to figure out best practices for medieval art by bantering about the “correct” way to depict various animals, people, and objects shown in real-life artworks. If you’ve had any experience with medieval art, you know the field is absolutely bizarre when taken out of context, so most of the conversations were along the lines of how many eyes a dog should have (seven), what wrestling is (confused hugging) and whether birds have meetings (yes, complete with a Meeting Hat).

But the best thing about Two Monks was how its attention to weird details made the real people of that era seem more like, you know, real people. Not the intangible, lofty figures that often seem to populate mainstream looks at history. Which brings me to Pentiment: a game that is far more serious than Two Monks, but reminds me of the column in its passionate embrace of the weird details that don’t often emerge in mainstream depictions of medieval Europe, and the ways in which those details chip away at the humanity of a time we can never personally experience.

I jumped into Pentiment in media res, following the murder of nobleman Lorenz Rothvogel and the understandable accusation of a monk who was found holding a bloody dagger near the body. Andreas Maler, however, is friends with the monk, who claims he didn’t commit the crime – which leaves Maler to investigate and ultimately accuse an alternative culprit. I was given the choice between three different investigative paths for my demo. Rather than examine the body or question another man who might have known something, I opted to interrogate a cantankerous widow who had been observed cursing the nobleman prior to his death.

Pentiment’s gameplay is straightforward enough. It’s largely conversational and choice-based, though I did play a handful of simple point and click minigames as I did chores for the widow, like breaking sticks and hanging things on the wall. But like a proper manuscript, Pentiment delights in the details. Words unspool across the page in distinct, flowing fonts (which you can toggle off if you like) as if a hand is writing them as the story unfolds. I loved the small, occasional spelling errors that appeared, but would correct themselves after a few moments, emphasizing the human storyteller presence behind the words. Highlighted words can be unfurled into much larger manuscript pages that offer detailed glimpses into real medieval history or fictional character background, illustrated at times with accurate figures and at other times inexplicably with images of cats wearing flaming jars on their backs.

And the choices themselves were never straightforward. My goal was to convince the widow to tell me why she had cursed the nobleman, but earning her trust proved difficult – the chores alone weren’t enough. As we spoke, I learned about her deep and understandable mistrust of the very church Maler was serving, putting him in an uncomfortable position between remaining loyal but losing the widow’s favor, or making a series of small betrayals that could jeopardize his investigation and career to get the information he needed. There were no easy answers, but more curiously, there appeared to be no right or wrong ones either. Maler’s investigation continues regardless of the amount of context and clues he gleans, and in the widow’s case, I’m left pleasantly uncertain of whether the interaction as a whole was a true pass-or-fail situation. I might have been able to learn more if I had compromised more. In this single interaction it was easy to see Pentiment’s early promise that we may never actually know who the killer is by the end, but will certainly have formed an idea of who should be punished for the crime.

All of this was punctuated occasionally by the influence of Maler’s background, which I selected at the start of the session. I was able to choose what he studied in school at different times and levels, with options like Logic, Latin, Astronomy, and Oratory forming a basis for his education and Theology, Law, or Medicine as options for his later studies. I noticed that my choice to give Maler oratory skills passively improved his ability to persuade the widow to work with him, while his theology “degree” enabled him to make considered arguments supporting the church by giving him new trains of thought that wouldn’t exist otherwise. That said, with the widow actively opposed to churchly things, that specific skill seemed to actively hinder my interaction with her – presumably there are plenty of other conversations it would have been better suited for, while a different skill in my repertoire might have made her more amenable.

At the end of my demo session, I got to play a brief round of a card minigame that involves betting on whether a randomly drawn card will match yours or not. The rules were simple, but the real excitement lay in the card table conversation. Between rounds, the characters I was playing with seemed to discuss the latest village gossip, making comments on people I hadn’t met in my demo session at all. It’s hard to pinpoint exactly how useful this will be in solving the nobleman’s murder, but the flavor it added to the village I had thus far only had a glimpse of made me crave round after round (it didn’t hurt that I was getting filthy rich off them, too).

Pentiment is catnip for history and literary nerds like me, and I expect that the final product will live and die by its writing and story since the actual gameplay interactions are fairly simple otherwise. But thus far, said writing and story have proven intriguing in their illumination of complicated, weird, but grounded human beings – no surprise given director Josh Sawyer’s resume, which includes Fallout New Vegas, among others. The handful of characters I met were raw, troubled people with dire problems and imperfect solutions, but it didn’t take too much digging through their woes to find plenty to sympathize with. I am drawn in especially by the ways in which Pentiment illuminates the role of a narrator or storyteller in characterizing the meaning of interactions, both through the ways in which Maler’s background impacts his view on a situation and, more subtly, through the visual storytelling in written dialogue and the detailed manuscript backgrounds. Just 30 minutes left me with plenty of opinions on the circumstances that led to the nobleman’s murder – I can’t wait to spend hours with these grim, quirky villagers and find out what other secret crimes they, and I, might artfully commit.

Second Opinion - by Joe Skrebels​

In my own separate hands-on, I chose a different path, heading to the local abbey to examine the body. Aiding a monk who had taken up the cloth after working as a mercenary, my role was to help ascertain what had killed the noble by discussing his wounds (with Maler drawing the grisly details as we spoke). Despite its grisly contents, the scene was unexpectedly pleasant, with both Maler and the monk taking tangents to talk about their lives and experiences, before discovering a wound that seems to tee up a bigger mystery to solve.

Most excitingly from a gameplay perspective, my chosen life experience for Maler didn’t just offer me single extra pieces of dialogue to choose along the way, but could seemingly dovetail together into longer chains. In one section, the men discussed how the victim seemingly suffered ‘The French Disease’ - syphilis. My Maler was a hedonist, and seemed to have… intimate knowledge of how it spread, but when I brought that up, I was presented with a follow-up that drew on the medical training I’d chosen for him. It was a glimpse into the sheer level of extra choices Obsidian seems to be offering based on your decisions.

 

[Ismaul]

while I can't conceive of this game being a success in the US, I must confess that I don't know that much about German culture.

Sure, but who cares about germs?

People like us who like RP systems should welcome experimentation in the field. Sawyer is one of the only guys doing so, so we get what we get.

I'm very interested by the game and its systems in theory, I just hope we won't have to suffer through overly long and boring writing to get to it. I'm expecting lore dumps and no humor except of the "hahah hemorrhoids / syphilis" type. Game looks meh too.

 

[Ismaul]

This game isn't made for buying

You mean the game isn't made for Feargus or to keep a studio afloat. Well who fucking cares?

Oh right, useless to shill. What will you do?

 

[IHaveHugeNick]

Where's this experimentation exactly? In this video they're all giddy about flavor dialogue changing based on background and class, but that is literally the least experimental thing you can do in an RPG.

 

[Delterius]

Where's this experimentation exactly? In this video they're all giddy about flavor dialogue changing based on background and class, but that is literally the least experimental thing you can do in an RPG.

i see you remain an optimist

despite the last 30 years

 

[Aemar]

The kind of run-of-the-mill text-based game that wouldn't get any marketing exposure anywhere if it wasn't for Sawyer and Obsidian.