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

[Infinitron]

https://www.tumblr.com/jesawyer/700643851872911360/hi-josh-looking-forward-to-pentiment-is-there

itisnotasitoncewas asked:
Hi Josh, looking forward to Pentiment! Is there any particular reason why It is made in Unity while all the other games in development by Obsidian are in Unreal Engine? Is it easier to make 2d games in Unity?

https://www.tumblr.com/itisnotasitoncewas
Yes and there's less overhead in Unity. If you're making a small game with a small team, especially one that's primarily 2d, I think there are advantages there. I think Unreal would be overkill for a game of our scope and style and it wouldn't have been as easy for us to rapidly prototype our various minigames.

 

[A horse of course]

Infinitron should be forced to stream this on release day as penitence.

 

[Heroic Liberator]

Infinitron should be forced to stream this on release day as penitence.

And Fat Ed should review it.

 

[Quillon]

Best call at accusing and convicting the most likely suspect.

but the devs don't even know if the most likely suspect is the culprit lmao

maybe some dude with sniper rifle killed the dude from couple blocks away who is now hanging out middle of nowhere

 

[Roguey]

Best call at accusing and convicting the most likely suspect.

but the devs don't even know if the most likely suspect is the culprit lmao

maybe some dude with sniper rifle killed the dude from couple blocks away who is now hanging out middle of nowhere

He says the game doesn't tell you who it is. Doesn't mean he doesn't internally know.

 

[Quillon]

Best call at accusing and convicting the most likely suspect.

but the devs don't even know if the most likely suspect is the culprit lmao

maybe some dude with sniper rifle killed the dude from couple blocks away who is now hanging out middle of nowhere

He says the game doesn't tell you who it is. Doesn't mean he doesn't internally know.

I interpreted this as he doesn't even know

 

[Roguey]

I interpreted this as he doesn't even know

He says there the game will never tell you you're wrong. It's a story entirely of his own making, of course he knows who did it.

 

[rusty_shackleford]

unless it's randomized like blade runner, then he wouldn't' know

 

[Dadd]

"her"

 

[manifest]

Has Sawyer ever read a book written before 1950?

 

[Abu Antar]

Lol, what would be something. Find out who the killer is with this 20 dollar DLC!

There was a game that had the real ending behind a DLC, but can't remember what game it was now.

Tyranny?

 

[Alienman]

Lol, what would be something. Find out who the killer is with this 20 dollar DLC!

There was a game that had the real ending behind a DLC, but can't remember what game it was now.

Tyranny?

Could be, I never finished the game. But I remember one game that have the true ending behind a dlc. Dead Space 3.

 

[BlackheartXIII]

 

[CyberWhale]

Like Dido, we ordinary men are merely the tools in the tales of nobility. We can never be the protagonists in our own stories.

There, fixed it for the truth.

 

[ferratilis]

Look at these crazy system requirements. 80% of Codex won't be able to run this game.

Spoiler

 

[Morgoth]

Pentiment review - a sixteenth century mystery that blossoms with intrigue and human warmth​

Compline department.

Review by Christian Donlan Features Editor

Published on 14 Nov 2022

A brilliant narrative adventure that is filled with intelligence and heart.

Pentiment sent me back to dig out my old copy of The Name of the Rose, and not merely because it's another murder-mystery - of a kind - set in and around a medieval monastery. It's mostly because there's a lovely passage on pens early on in Umberto Eco's book that I wanted to remind myself of.

Here it is, nestled in the fake introduction, which suggests that this careful clockwork novel you're about to read is in fact a true story, a haphazard manuscript that has fallen into the hands of an academic, who has merely provided a translation:

"[In] almost a single burst of energy, I completed a translation, using some of those large notebooks from the Papetiere Joseph Gilbert in which it is so pleasant to write if you use a felt-tip pen."

In a book with a lot of extravagant writing - the first page of the novel proper takes you from the gospel of John to St Paul's letters in a single paragraph - there aren't many obvious fireworks in that simple sentence. Yet there's a lot to love, I think. There's not just the obvious delight in the sheer sensation of writing, but there's also the way the whole thing cuts through the book's many layers and, in doing so, makes us aware of them. In a book of cleverness and concealments, this tiny riff on stationery feels like someone is actually speaking to us directly, unveiled. This is a rarity in the world we're about to enter.
A look at Pentiment.

Pens and paper and layers of narrative, some of which cannot be trusted. This is Umberto Eco's novel, and it's also Pentiment, a "passion project" from Obsidian, made by a small team who are clearly in thrall to their subject. Pentiment, like The Name of the Rose, is a clever piece of storytelling that is also surprisingly easy to fall in love with. I fell for Pentiment over the course of a week, in fact: it lived with me as I played it, and it stayed with me once I'd put the controller down between sessions.

Pentiment is a narrative adventure game set in the sixteenth century. You wander about and talk to people and try to work out what's going on and what you might do about it. But let's linger just a little longer on the act of writing. Because, really, the pleasures and the politics of text and of books are everywhere here. For example: when we first meet the protagonist, the artist Andreas Maler, he is working in the scriptorium of Kiersau Abbey in Bavaria, in the room where monks create copies of the books that pass through the abbey and undertake copying commissions for others. This room and rooms like it were once key to the church's power. They owned the books and they made the books. And they could make books disappear.

More: the scriptorium itself, like the rest of the game's environments, is rendered flat and clean-lined, brushed with water colour, and Maler himself is a jointed paper puppet, a figure from a manuscript brought to creaking life with clothes lit by a gentle wash of paint and a face scratched in ink. It's a beautiful piece of synergy, this art: at times we get the thick lines of a Durer wood-cut, and at others, when we take in a whole town commons, say, we get the babbling domestic muddle of Breugel.
Pentiment
You get to choose Maler's background and some of his formative experiences, which open up options for you in the game.

When Maler moves from one location to the next, the view pulls back and we briefly glimpse a page on which this scene is just a single picture slotted in amongst text and bizarre medieval marginalia - a hare smoking a pipe, a radish with arms and legs. There's a brisk snap of vellum as the page turns and we're off somewhere else: this process occurs so much during the game as Maler moves to and fro it becomes an all-but-invisible pace-setter for the adventure, like the turning of page after page when reading a novel.

And most importantly when it comes to text there's speech itself. Pentiment is a game conducted in conversations, and these conversations play out in medieval speech balloons, with each speaker given a font that offers clues to their world. From peasant cursive to ornate gothic fonts, the lettering is telling you a lot about the people speaking, their backgrounds, their senses of themselves. More: when they shout, the text grows agitated and shakes. When they are shocked, ink is splattered across the page. (I should add, in the accessibility menu you can still select Easy Read fonts to improve the legibility throughout.) Most movingly, some of the people whose conversations you experience as text reveal that they cannot themselves read or write. Text divides as well as unites here.

Pentiment keeps you busy early on while all this clever stuff soaks in. Maler is no monk, we learn. He is working at the Abbey and staying in the nearby town of Tassing while he completes his masterpiece, before moving on and setting up his own workshop. While he toils in the scriptorium, however, a murder is committed and a friend of his seems set up to take the blame. Maler must clear his friend's name by finding the real killer. Fine. we go into the depths of the monastery and the town beyond to talk to people, listen to what they know, what they suspect, what they fear.
Crowd scenes are a delight - Pentiment captures that elbowy kind of Breugel magic.

And so the game falls into a rhythm. Moving from Matins to Compline, we take Maler through this pocket of 16th century Bavaria meeting abbots and priests and farmers and midwives. Clues are there to be understood, codes need cracking, and yet Maler needs to eat, too, each meal a chance to sit down with different people and learn a bit more about their lives and any bearing their experiences might have on the case. (We learn more about them by what they serve, too - a tart bit of storytelling and world-building combines.)

It's lovely stuff, brisk and smartly written, with a range of voices coming through the endless scribbling of text. By my first evening, I had three or four promising suspects, and also a list of things that I felt I wanted to understand about the town and the way it worked - the many threads, economic and cultural that connected Tassing itself to Kiersau Abbey. Over the next few days I wandered the woods, conducted an autopsy, pondered a bit of grave robbing, learned my way around the abbey's corridors and cloisters, and eventually worked out who I thought was most likely to be responsible for the murder. All very Name of the Rose. Then the moment came when I had to explain my thinking. Job done. Case closed. Game over. I checked my watch: five hours or so. Not bad.

And then I got a big surprise. This wasn't the end of the game, but rather the end of the first act. Pentiment is a bit of a Name of the Rose simulator, in other words, but it gets through a lot of that in the opening third. Then it leaps forward in time and becomes something stranger and richer. Maler returns to Tassing older and - perhaps - wiser, a successful artist with his own apprentice. Where can the game possibly go from here? Isn't everything solved and sorted away? It isn't, of course, and the game blossoms.
After my first playthrough, I'm still thinking about all the stuff I missed out on.

This is where Pentiment truly lives, I think, in the following two acts which build ingeniously on the first, the narrative stitching itself around whatever decisions your particular Maler made, and whoever he decided was ultimately responsible for the crime. And this is what I didn't initially understand: Pentiment isn't primarily interested in who murdered who - I've spoken to other people playing the game and we all picked a different culprit at the end of act one. It's interested in the impact of crimes and their punishments on a small community.

In fact, make this two things I didn't understand. Pentiment might riff on the central ideas of The Name of the Rose - and, actually, throughout its run, obvious name-checks aside it does cover much of the same territory too - but it's set two centuries after Eco's book. The Name of the Rose takes place in 1327, deep in the medieval world. Reason always gives way to dogma, and the protagonist William of Baskerville's links to a progressive figure like Roger Bacon make him suspicious to a lot of people in the church, who are always on the lookout for witchcraft.

Pentiment, meanwhile, begins in 1518. Its world may look purely medieval, but in fact the Renaissance is well under way in both Southern and Northern Europe. In 1518, Leonardo had only a year to live, while Durer had already completed his Melencolia. Much of the world may have seemed the same to one Bavarian farmer as it might have looked generations before - this is an idea Pentiment gets a lot of bitter truth out of, plus ca change etc. - but for some people in society things were actually changing pretty fast. Empiricism was on the rise, Martin Luther - much discussed in Pentiment - was challenging the existing church, and print was transforming the intellectual life of Europe.

Look deeper and you see this last point particularly clearly in Pentiment. The abbey's Scriptorium is one of the last ones still operating, and when it goes, the church's control of books and information will be gone for good. In the town of Tassing there are already printers working, allowing ideas to travel faster and further. On a certain level, this is what Pentiment is really concerned with: who gets to decide what is true? Who gets to write it down, and what lies beneath those words?
Pentiment: Behind the ink.

And what is the cost? This might be the game's masterstroke. When my Maler returned to Tassing at the start of act two, I realised that my experience of him had changed. The first act had been a youthful blur, and it had given me room to make childish mistakes with Maler that were not forgotten. In fact, I would have to revisit them, and navigate by them, for the rest of my Maler's life.

From that point on Pentiment goes both forwards and backwards - forward through Maler's life and its new challenges, and backwards into the world of Tassing, in search of deeper, more fundamental mysteries. What lies beneath? Pentiment asks, and only at the very end of the adventure did I feel like the game faltered a little. An experience that was all about making up my own mind suddenly decided to do a bit too much of my thinking for me.

Does this matter? Not really - and maybe I just need to think about the ending some more anyway. There's an awful lot to think about in Pentiment, after all. I'll carry memories of the afternoons I spent in the woods with a local gossip, of the secret passageways I discovered, the ghost I may have seen, and the night I lingered in the tavern surrounded by people I really started to feel like I knew.

And this is the trick, isn't it? The same trick that The Name of the Rose plays. Eco's novel is dense and complex and theoretically slightly off-putting. Do I really want to read a 400 page novel that spends so much time banging on about Thomas Aquinas? A book that has footnotes in Latin which it doesn't bother to translate? But you give it a go - a page or two - and the complexity reveals itself to be a kind of inviting richness. You get drawn in despite yourself to a treatise on semiotics that is simultaneously a great detective novel and a treasure hunt.

Pentiment works the same magic. Five minutes in I was wading through a tense disagreement on Martin Luther and wondering if this game was for me, but Obsidian draws you into this world by making it human, and by making it funny and kind and surprising and awful. And more: while I played Pentiment, the richest man in the world was muddling about at Twitter like a bored cat with a ball of crumpled paper, and this 16th century narrative of who gets to decide what is history, of who controls the flow of information, seemed surprisingly timely.

"Intelligence and heart."

 

[Morgoth]

Karak didn't like it much, but commends the effort anyway.

 

[Dadd]

retro-neoliberalism

 

[Morgoth]

Pentiment review​

A brilliant murder mystery that understands class, community, and the march of history.​

By Joshua Wolens
published 22 minutes ago

Need to know
What is it? A narrative-driven mystery set in a 16th-century Bavarian village.
Expect to pay $19.99/£14.99
Developer Obsidian
Publisher Xbox Game Studios
Reviewed on Ryzen 7 3700X, GTX 1080 Ti, 16GB RAM
Multiplayer? No
Link Official site (opens in new tab)

There’s blood on the walls of Kiersau Abbey. Beneath a long mural of the Danse Macabre (opens in new tab) lies a jewel-festooned corpse: A visiting nobleman has been murdered behind the monastery’s doors, shattering years of monastic peace and jeopardising the surrounding village of Tassing, Bavaria.
It’s 1518 and Europe is teetering over an ocean of blood: Martin Luther is threatening a thousand years of papal dominance of western Christianity, Tassing’s peasants chafe loudly under onerous taxes, and the rich and powerful are—as ever—guarding their riches and power with rough men ready to do violence on their behalf. If there’s ever a good time to find a dead aristocrat splayed across the floor of your monastery, this isn’t it. To make matters worse, the most convenient culprit for the powers-that-be to pin the whole mess on is the person that found the body: Your friend and mentor.

“You” in this instance is Andreas Maler, a journeyman artist who has taken up temporary residence in Tassing to work in the abbey’s scriptorium—a room for the writing and illustration of manuscripts and a relic of a bygone age, long since surpassed by innovations like the printing press. Andreas, as a relatively well-to-do outsider with little motive to bludgeon a blue-blood to death but ample reason to save his friend, takes it upon himself to find the true killer. You have too many suspects and not enough time to gather the evidence you need to convince the adjudicator—and yourself—that one of them is guilty. However you choose to spend your time, there are going to be stones left unturned and questions unanswered.
Better choose wisely then, eh? That’s the heart of Pentiment, at least on a mechanical level: Making your choices and watching the ripples spread out over the course of the game’s 25-year timespan. Yes, you have to solve the noble’s murder, but that’s only the first of a few scandals that unfold over the course of the game. This is still Obsidian, after all, even if the game was developed by a skunkworks division of the studio made up of 13 people and headed by Josh Sawyer, director of Fallout: New Vegas and Pillars of Eternity.
It’s not an RPG: You won’t pour points into character stats at any point. But don’t worry, if anything that just leaves more room for narrative choices to agonise over and regret over the game’s 20-hour runtime.

The Art of Murder​

The bulk of those choices revolve around how you’ll spend your time. The people demand justice and lack patience. You’ll have to serve up a suspect in a matter of days, which means every hour counts.
That’s not as painful as it might sound. There’s no ticking clock. Exploring the town—which is rendered in an evocative style reminiscent of the era’s illuminated manuscripts and woodcuts—and most conversations don’t take time at all. Instead, each part of the day (divided into the major and minor hours of prayer, naturally) concludes when you make a significant decision. That could be exploring the old Roman salt mine on the edge of town, it could be sitting down to dinner with a suspect, but the game almost always makes it clear when you’re about to push time forward and, possibly, sacrifice an opportunity to pursue one of the other big leads you’ve uncovered.
It works well. You’ll always be left wondering what you might have uncovered if you’d picked option B instead of A, and the game is never so kind as to tell you if you got the right culprit. I remain convinced that the person I eventually served up to the headsman’s axe was just unlucky. I happened to focus on them instead of one of my other suspects and collected more evidence that pointed to them as a result. It’ll take multiple playthroughs and a lot of different choices to paint a full picture of how all of Tassing’s possible suspects really relate to the nobleman’s murder. Cold comfort to the poor guy I sent to lose his head before a baying mob.

The people demand justice and lack patience. You’ll have to serve up a suspect in a matter of days, which means every hour counts.
One qualm, though: While the game almost always gives you fair warning when you’re about to sacrifice a chunk of time or a potential line of inquiry, I did run into a couple of occasions where I only realised I’d made a choice after I’d made it. Not often, and not major, but frustrating in a game that revolves around your choices and their consequences.
There’s the odd minigame—including a variation of the card game Lansquenet (opens in new tab) that I liked so much I lost all of Andreas’ money on it—but don’t be fooled, they’re more about taking a break from interrogations than posing a real mechanical challenge. For the most part you’re going to be exploring, chatting, and experiencing the game’s rich and textured collection of fonts.
My god, the fonts. Never before has a game made such conscious and incredible use of fonts. With no voice acting (beyond a few achingly authentic bits of hymnal music), everything in Pentiment comes down to the stroke of a pen. How Andreas perceives someone’s status, social position, level of education: It’s all encapsulated by the font the game uses to represent their dialogue. Priests speak in an intimidating and laborious gothic script, peasants in a variable scratch, the highfalutin petit-bourgeoisie in a mess of serifs and curlicues, and people like Andreas in a sober and readable humanist style. Unpretentious, maybe even progressive, but distinctly an outsider.

About the Artist​

But when you’re solving a murder, an outsider’s precisely what you need. Not long after the game starts, you’ll get to make decisions about Andreas’ past before he came to the village. Where did he spend his gap year? What are his hobbies? What did he study at university?
In an effort to reflect myself in Andreas’ character, I made him an insufferable dweeb: a logic-minded bookworm who studied imperial law and oratory, and who spent his gap year flouncing about in Italy, meaning he could speak Italian. I could just as easily have made him a hedonistic occultist who spent a year in Belgium, or a petty criminal with a mind for Roman history.

The choices you make about Andreas’ background add new options in conversations and decisions later in the game. My skill in oratory let me make impassioned, flowery pleas instead of straightforward requests, my bibliophilia gave me multiple chances to make borderline-worrying declarations about the sanctity and beauty of books, speaking Italian let me, well, speak to Italians, and so on. Those choices can cascade and give rise to new traits, too. My bookworm Andreas agitated so hard against the destruction of a heretical text that the authorities eventually let him keep it to shut him up. A few years later, he was wandering around with a new trait and some dangerously mystical ideas in his head.
There aren’t RPG-style speech checks, though, and it’s not always the right choice to default to clicking the dialogue option you unlocked through a character trait. By choosing imperial law as my main area of study at university, I may as well have ticked a box marked ‘Pretentious blowhard’. Every single time I showed off my legal knowledge, I annoyed the person I was talking to so much that I incurred penalties on subsequent persuasion checks, which work by totting up your positive and negative interactions and seeing if you cross a certain persuasion threshold, rather than by rolling dice or checking a character stat.
If you want to convince someone of something, you have to take into account their character and the context of your conversation. Sometimes the trick to persuading someone to help you out isn’t the super-special unique dialogue choice you got from your background, it’s one of the plain-Jane options that everyone gets, but sometimes the reverse is true, too. It’s a much more nuanced and rewarding system than dumping points into a speech stat, even if I was unjustly punished for my love of the law.

So Many Faces​

But Pentiment’s real triumph is Tassing itself. As you traipse around town and butt into the lives of the village’s families, you’ll end up forming relationships with all of them. Over 25 years of chats, shared meals, and evening masses, you’ll watch children turn into adults, adults enter their dotage, and the elderly fade away (or stubbornly hold on, in defiance of natural law and common sense). That makes it all the harder when you want to condemn a family man for a crime he might not actually have committed.
The villagers too are shaped by your choices. Buy an encyclopaedia as a present for a precocious youngster and they could grow up to be an incorrigible nerd. Just don’t get them into imperial law if you want them to have any friends, I suppose.
It’s great, but it’s also related to my biggest issue with the game. While Pentiment is very good at defining all its weird, early modern terminology—you can hit the back button when pretty much any unfamiliar term pops up to get a quick definition—I found myself regularly losing track of Tassing’s myriad characters, especially because they kept inconsiderately getting older and changing appearance. You can hit the back button when a person’s name is mentioned, but all that shows you is their picture (which is extra unhelpful if it’s an adult picture of a character you’ve only known as a child). For some people, maybe that’s enough, but I certainly couldn’t keep track of the whole village based on their appearance alone, so I spent a lot of time rifling through the game’s character index to figure out just who the hell “Martha” was.

The game’s era and setting aren’t set dressing, an early modern aesthetic to drape over a murder mystery that could have been set wherever, whenever. Tassing is a town riven with the contradictions of the 16th century. The peasants resent the priests, the priests are suspicious of the peasants, the town’s tradespeople vacillate between the two and absolutely everyone hates the stuck-up miller on the edge of town, who represents the first green shoots of a capitalism that will, a few short centuries hence, come to obliterate this land and its way of life entirely.
It’s a historical materialist style of storytelling that completely justifies the game’s quarter-century timespan. The people of Tassing make their own history, but they don’t make it as they please. The engine of class struggle churns away beneath the surface, accelerated by events and choices like the murder in the abbey and slowed by others, but never stopping. Tassing is still very recognisably Tassing after 25 years, we’re not talking the Scouring of the Shire (opens in new tab) here, but it’s been marked indelibly by history just like it has been a thousand times before, just like it will be again. The future arrives inexorably, but it only paints over the past. A pentimento, in case you’re wondering, is when painted-over elements in a work of art reemerge later on down the line.

Layer Upon Layer​

Pentiment is a rare beast: A relatively short, gameplay-light narrative adventure from a studio renowned for its lengthy, mechanics-heavy RPGs. Even stranger, the team pulled it off with aplomb. Yes, there are some mechanical quibbles, and it did take some coaxing to get me to accept the central mystery’s final resolution, but Obsidian’s tight grasp on its subject matter and thorough understanding of exactly what it wanted to do with Pentiment has produced a game that I wanted to launch again just as soon as I finished it. I want to see what happens when I pick a different constellation of background traits, pursue different leads, and pass the persuasion checks I failed (and fail the ones I passed).
At 20 hours, Pentiment is a short game compared to some of the hundred-hour titans we've seen this year, but it's a game I see myself replaying a lot in the years to come. I get the feeling that I'll need to spend a lot more time in Tassing before I even scratch the surface.

The Verdict

88

Pentiment
A beautiful and beautifully-written narrative game that makes masterful use of its early modern setting. One of Obsidian's finest.

 

[ferratilis]

Oh boy, Josh is now a darling of tranny reviewers. IGN gave it a 10. At this point, I hope PoE3 doesn't happen, just let it rest in peace.

 

[Abu Antar]

Seems to be getting positive reviews in general. Will get in a bundle in a few years.

 

[Rieser]

It's pretty good. Reviewed it in my native tongue. Well, pretty good assuming you go in knowing it's a visual novel with a couple of very simple puzzles thrown in. Has a couple of throwaway dialogues that echo fminist crap, but is otherwise by and large surprisingly mature and historically accurate. Also somewhat surprisingly does not shit on christianity.

Also, no fucking voice acting.

 

[Morgoth]

Review: Pentiment​

Posted 21 mins ago by Eric Van Allen

A historical whodunnit​

Real history is an interesting setting for games to use. Pulling in actual world events to tell a tale can be tricky, but Pentiment does it in stride.
Pentiment is a passion project from a small team of developers within Obsidian. It’s set in the tiny town of Tassing in Bavaria, in the late 15th and early 16th century. It’s a town with clear divides between the peasants and their fields, the townspeople’s crafted goods, and the double monastery looming just down the lane.
Every villager, sister, and monk in Tassing has a story. Each family has branches that grow out and interlock. It might seem too small a place to keep a secret. But as protagonist Andreas Maler soon discovers, those appearances are deceiving.
It’s a combination of history and detail, alongside a fantastic commitment to art direction, that give Pentiment a true sense of place. It’s a role-playing adventure that fills its houses with details to discover, and difficult choices to make. Because someone has been murdered, and it’s on both Andreas, and you, to figure it out.

Pentiment (PC [reviewed], Xbox Series X|S)
Developer: Obsidian
Publisher: Microsoft
Released: November 15, 2022
MSRP: $19.99

When in Tassing​

The story starts with Andreas waking up in the town of Tassing on a normal day. He’s a journeyman artist taking up residency in the local Kiersau Abbey. He works on commission for the brothers there, at the abbey’s scriptorium, while gradually putting together his masterpiece. Once it’s finished, he can head off to Nuremburg, where a workshop, wife, and future await.
Most of Pentiment is played in a point-and-click adventure fashion. The player, as Andreas, can walk around town and interact with the locals. It’s dialogue-driven, though a few puzzles and minigames pop up here and there. None of them were particularly difficult, and mostly served a narrative purpose; whether it’s snapping sticks for kindling or solving a code, nothing seemed too dense or felt like a fail-state.
Rather, the drive is towards learning. Part of this is gaining info from characters. At first, it’s just getting to know your neighbor. And later, after some events have transpired and a body is discovered, it’s about learning what your neighbors might be hiding.

Comparisons to games like Disco Elysium are easy to make. There isn’t as much role-playing here though, at least in a hard dice-rolling sense. At the beginning, you get to select some origin story information for Andreas. If you’re like mine, you can make your Maler a medical school dropout who liked getting into fistfights. Or you can have him be a learned theologian, or dip into the occult. Different areas he’s traveled to can influence what languages and customs are familiar to him.
These don’t really block off access in any way, but do offer options for extrapolation. Sometimes, that means an extra dialogue choice, and even in one case, an alternative puzzle solution. Most of the time, it added flavor to the experience. My Andreas had a history before arriving in Tassing, and it affected his stay in many small ways.

In Paradisum​

An average slice of Pentiment, once the discovery period has begun, will see Andreas running around the town and inquiring with locals. These usually eat up time, and that time is precious. Doing some favors for someone might get them to open up to you. But it might also put you in a disadvantageous position with others.

One early example puts Andreas between a rock and a hard place. He can help someone with their housework, but also assist in some mild blasphemy in the process. While this might endear him to them and get them to open up about why they intensely dislike another character, it might also put you out of favor with the local reverend and the abbey.
Pentiment is full of choices, big and small. And they’re rarely easy, too. I had to abandon any hope of a “golden route” fairly early, as that doesn’t seem like the goal here. Instead, Pentiment centers much more on how you decide to spend your time, what you do with it, and how that affects the people around Andreas. Several decisions I made weighed on me until the credits rolled, and Pentiment doesn’t pull punches in dealing with both the short and long-term consequences of your actions.

The world at your door​

Being historical fiction, Pentiment is also deeply steeped in its lore. It’s a major part of Pentiment’s up-front appeal, and the team at Obsidian went into incredible detail making sure Tassing feels like it takes place in the right area and era.
The divides in wealth fester over time, as do long-held grudges between the church and those old enough to still cherish Pagan practices. Dialogues about an upstart named Martin Luther, different translations of classic texts, and the power dynamics of the town place Pentiment squarely within its time period. An in-game glossary helps keep everything in context too, if you need a refresher.

The art direction emphasizes this as well. All of Pentiment is displayed in a gorgeous, classic illustrative style. But my favorite touch is the way conversations are displayed. Every character’s dialogue is shown as different types of communication, whether flourishing script or simple lettering, to even a stamp-and-press type-set for the local printer.
Everyone has their own assigned type, and they will even change as Andreas learns certain details about someone’s background or education. Typos will be made and fixed on the fly, letters stenciled and colored in, and holy phrases left for the end, as they require differently colored ink. It’s a wonderful detail that never got old through my roughly 20 hours with Pentiment. Though if the fonts prove difficult to read, there’s a wealth of accessibility options to fine-tune them.

Long-buried secrets​

All of this layers up an incredible historical foundation and sense of place, which Pentiment then wields to tell an honest, emotional story. The murder mystery is an initial draw, but Andreas’ own issues, and the woes of the townsfolk, are also key components. Characters like Sisters Matilda and Illuminata, Brother Piero, Otto, Claus, and more are intensely memorable, with storylines that deeply resonated with me.
Without giving too much away, the story of Pentiment shows how decisions and choices play out over a period of time. And how, over the years, both internal and external strife put pressure on those living in Tassing in different ways. No town lives in isolation, and Pentiment shows how issues that seem far from your door are much closer than you’d think.
Because of this, the writing and story of Pentiment are an absolute highlight, and some of my favorite beats of the year. The world and its inhabitants grow and suffer, and deal with so much over the course of time that you become endeared to them. There’s some really poignant discussions and writing on faith, belief, power, laws, and rights. My screenshots folder is littered with snippets that made me stop and pause for a moment, whether for a thoughtful reprieve or an emotional gut-punch.

Danse Macabre​

Where Pentiment sometimes struggles is getting exact info to the player, and communicating time investment for certain leads. Often, characters will let you know if a certain action is going to eat up a segment of your day. But looking into other leads, or diving into some side tasks, won’t eat up a segment of your day.
When the clock is ticking and Andreas is up against a deadline, this can lead to some indecision. Locating everything is another matter, too. While the in-game glossary holds maps, character info, and even leads, it doesn’t tell you where certain characters are. During some parts, I’d just find myself running circles around town, trying to find a specific person and determine whether talking to them was going to be a quick chat for some extra info, or cost me a chunk of my day.

Mouse and keyboard can feel finicky, especially when trying to click on a glossary term within a choice. It was sometimes a careful dance between looking into a term and making a choice, and I had to jump back out and in to undo some decisions I didn’t mean to make. Pentiment also uses just an auto-save feature, meaning that if you’re not careful, you can lock yourself into certain choices. That’s nice to prevent save-scumming, which felt a bit antithetical to the story’s focus, but less so when you’re just trying to roll back an accidental selection. They’re small frustrations, but one’s I did run into more than a couple times.

Tangible history​

As I think about my time with Pentiment, I keep going back to one moment. One frequent gameplay section has you choose who Andreas shares a meal with for the day. These moments offer a chance to gain some insight into certain families. Understanding their dynamic can inform your investigation, or just sate a curiosity.
Through much of my early time, I ate with peasant families. As conversation proceeds, you make a selection of which food item to eat. In one case, the family puts more in front of you than themselves. It shows a bit of character, in that moment, as you’re given a tangible feeling of both their struggles and perseverance in spite of them. They maintain hospitality, even in the face of tightening taxes and pressure.

Then I ate with the abbot, who tried to tell me about his own hardships, in front of a lavish spread. And Pentiment asked me how I felt about the church’s role in the current struggle. Boy, did I have opinions.
Pentiment is a compelling narrative adventure that pushes you to make decisions, and then see how those consequences play out. But it also has a dedication to showing how the people, as much as the town and ongoing intrigue, have to live with everything that goes down. It’s a murder mystery, but it’s also a decades-spanning story about people trying to make a life in a little town called Tassing. It’s gorgeous, crafted, and will certainly fit the bill for anyone seeking some historical intrigue with a complex but earnest heart inside.

9​

Superb

 

[Morgoth]

Sounds like a good playthrough read during the Christmas days with some mulled wine.

 

[Dishonoredbr]

MAJOR JOSH W.



https://opencritic.com/game/13960/pentiment