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

[†††]

There are no good reviewers.

 

[pickmeister]

Not expected at all.

Happy to see this is a true Darklands successor. Just as Soyer planned

 

[Kjaska]

tl;dw: Game is fairly unique but not necessarily fun. Takes long to get going. The reviewer is a bit of a normie though.


I watched the entire vid and there was only one arab looking mf in one of the screens, the rest were all whites.

I'll probably "download the extended demo", since I don't have xbawks pass. I don't think Sawyer knows how to make fun games, but I'm still glad games like this can exist.

 

[Nifft Batuff]

Mystery is the wheel that moves the world.

 

[frajaq]

I watched the entire vid and there was only one arab looking mf in one of the screens, the rest were all whites.

I'm playing it and the guy is from Ethiopia

 

[jackofshadows]

Does anyone actually play it?

 

[†††]

Does anyone actually play it?

It is even meant to be played? you could read a wiki and decide who's the criminal since it doesn't matter anyway. Boom, game beaten.

 

[Alienman]

I got the 1 euro gamepass thing for this game, but I just can't will myself to even try it. Especially after reading the reviews.

 

[Alienman]

That scratching pen sound when people talk...

 

[Heroic Liberator]

That scratching pen sound when people talk...

Soyer's virgin pen scratching vs the chad chalk-on-blackboard earrape.

 

[Heroic Liberator]

Btw, FreeKaner, would love to hear your thoughts on Pentiment (particularly from a historical accuracy angle) if you'd be willing to take one for the team and go check it out.

 

[POOPERSCOOPER]

These reviews seem paid in some way to me. Also I like how I couldn't find the thread for this game for a couple days because I was looking in RPG discussion and didn't look in adventure games. So Codex.

 

[Dadd]

These fuckers should stop stealing other people's cultures to palliate their discomfort about the history of African Americans just because they happen to look similar

 

[jackofshadows]

Seems historically accurate to me so far.

 

[Heroic Liberator]

These reviews seem paid in some way to me.

They are in an indirect sort of way. Reviewer gives positive review, dev keeps sending him review copies in the future (+/- pre-release ones which ensure more views for those that drop the first reviews for a particular title hence better monetization).

 

[FreeKaner]

Btw, FreeKaner, would love to hear your thoughts on Pentiment (particularly from a historical accuracy angle) if you'd be willing to take one for the team and go check it out.

I doubt I will ever play sediment, too many games to play before it even gets to this. Haven't even finished the other VN yet and at least Disco elysium has good artstyle.

 

[Heroic Liberator]

sediment

On that note, I swear that this game's title is giving me dyslexia. I keep mistaking it for 'penitent' (although admittedly that's due to me not being aware that the word 'pentiment' even existed before those Obsidian hipsters decided to employ it).

 

[Infinitron]

Seems historically accurate to me so far.

So that makes the game about five times less gay than The Name of the Rose?

 

[Dadd]

sediment

On that note, I swear that this game's title is giving me dyslexia. I keep mistaking it for 'penitent' (although admittedly that's due to me not being aware that the word 'pentiment' even existed before those Obsidian hipsters decided to employ it).

Hmm I wonder what that top layer might refer to

 

[Infinitron]

Tired: Combat systems
Wired: Font systems

https://www.pcgamer.com/how-pentiments-hand-crafted-fonts-give-pen-and-ink-a-voice/

How Pentiment's hand-crafted fonts give pen and ink a voice​

Every distinct font reveals something about a character's class and education—and can offer you clues to Pentiment's mystery, too.

Talking to Obsidian design director Josh Sawyer forced me into a harsh realization: I have the handwriting of a peasant.

Decades of education and the internet's infinite resources at my fingertips, and yet my messy chicken scratch would fit right in with a 16th century Bavarian peasant's in Pentiment(opens in new tab). It's some consolation that Sawyer says his would, too.

In our defense, the printing press is a bit more established in 2022 than it was in the 16th century, when your writing spoke volumes about your education, social class, and profession. That granularity is why Obsidian partnered with design firm Lettermatic(opens in new tab) to create six unique fonts for Pentiment, each telling you something about the characters you meet and talk to while trying to solve Pentiment's mysterious murders.

"Handwriting was changing a lot at this time, with different literacy levels," says Sawyer. "So a person who is a peasant and possibly illiterate, or doesn't read or write very well, uses a peasant script. Middle-class people tend to use a more refined cursive script. University-educated people, especially from Italy, use a Humanist script. The older monks, especially if they're associated with the scriptorium, use a Gothic, blackletter font. And then the printers and people who read a lot of printed books use a printed typeface."

Those distinct typefaces are just the start of Pentiment's font system. In a game largely about art and writing—protagonist Andreas Maler is an artist at an abbey in 1518 when the story begins—it was just as important for the text to feel tangible.

When "handwritten" dialogue appears it starts a dark, shimmering black, then dulls and flattens out like ink. It even bleeds a little, like it's being absorbed into parchment. Well-educated scribes write quickly and make few errors, but less-educated characters will write more slowly, and spelling errors will often appear in their dialogue. Characters who speak in printed letters will have their text appear as upside-down blocks before it's "pressed" into the dialogue bubble.

"I really wanted to capture the feeling of the physicality of writing," Sawyer says. "When you look at how dialogue appears in the game, it doesn't just slap on the page."

Obsidian even simulated the effect of dipping a pen in ink for the cursive script. "We try to replicate a mechanic that says 'I'm going to run out of ink, and then I'm going to dip again in the ink, and then I'm going to start writing,' says Pentiment programming director Brett Klooster. "You can actually see that process represented in the font as it gets a little bit lighter and a little bit thinner."

I knew that Pentiment was doing far more with its fonts than most games, but I still underestimated how meticulous their creation ended up being. Riley Cran, the founder and lead designer of font firm Lettermatic, told me that Pentiment was a special case. Lettermatic designs most fonts to support a variety of weights and widths (light, bold, etc.), but there are tricks to speed up that process. For Pentiment, "a much, much higher amount of those drawings were created individually. It was someone sitting there actually drawing it by hand," Cran says.

A Pentiment font isn't just 52 glyphs (aka unique versions of a letter, like lowercase and capital). To replicate real handwriting, many letters need to be drawn in multiple ways to reflect where they appear in a word, or to add subtle differences between the writing styles of different characters. Creating those minute variations just wasn't going to work digitally.

"If you want to have two letter 'As' that don't match in the sense that they look like someone's hand drifted ever so slightly when creating one of those strokes, drawing that digitally is going to fight you more than help you. So that's why we had to do this analog process," Cran says. Lettermatic drew the fonts on paper and then scanned them digitally to capture the effects of pen on paper.

Each hand-drawn glyph was then supplied to Obsidian, along with a "ductus diagram" that explains how each letter was formed: how many strokes comprise a letter, the order those strokes are made, even what direction the pen is moving. That may sound absurdly detailed, but think about a letter as simple as a lowercase 't'. How do you write it? Do you start the vertical line from the top or bottom? Do you draw the horizontal stroke from the left or the right? Which comes first?

That was vital information for Obsidian's designers. They created "stroke masks" for each glyph, which allowed dialogue to appear not just one letter at a time, but stroke-by-stroke. After attempting to automate that process, they eventually went with what Sawyer calls the "John Henry" approach. "We literally just stroked every single character manually," he says.

There ended up being 2016 of them. "Every single letter for the five non-printed fonts, every single letter had all of its strokes hand-masked, so that when you see them drawn out in-game, they come in in the correct order. Which is crazy, but it looks cool."

Pentiment's fonts are vital texture, but they also provide clues about the characters you're talking to—a scribe who makes lots of errors, for example, could actually be an impostor. As Andreas learns more about someone's background, their writing style can change fonts. But the fonts are only ever offering redundant information, in case you choose to play with Pentiment's more accessible easy reading mode.

It wouldn't be a Josh Sawyer game without an optional hard mode, too. This one turns on historical characters like the "long s" that looks like a cursive "f," and some ligatures that connect letters together with some extra flourish.

"We joked about having a hardcore mode where every ſingle thing in the game iſ written in the fancieſt font, which iſ probably too nutſ," Sawyer laughſ.

 

[Dadd]

The top layer of this game (analogous to a painting) is the "retro-fascist" interpretation of European history that Sawyer complained about on twitter. He is removing that top retro-fascist layer to reveal an underlying retro-neoliberal interpretation of European history, which he probably regards as the more realistic history.

 

[luj1]

I hope his next game is about cookie baking in 14th century Florence

 

[rusty_shackleford]

The top layer of this game (analogous to a painting) is the "retro-fascist" interpretation of European history that Sawyer complained about on twitter. He is removing that top retro-fascist layer to reveal an underlying retro-neoliberal interpretation of European history, which he probably regards as the more realistic history.

there's no such thing as historically accurate after you go back a couple centuries.
libtards use this as carte blanche to rewrite history as they see it rather than as it was passed down by their mum's mum's mum.

 

[Lovecraft's Ghost]

Is there any remaining doubt that one can with utmost accuracy predict the quality of a game by the physiognomy of the developer? There can come nothing out of Sawyer that is not within Sawyer. Unlike the Estonian he does serve the metropolis of capital, and there are plenty of gewes around to produce this culture for. When I say for I mean on behalf of, not for their consumption. Our resident shill has assured us that this game is, as the kids sometimes say, based since there aren't any homosexuals or negroids jammed into it to the brim, as they tend to do these days. I honestly can't tell if he is really that slow of mind, that he thinks he can go back to those times when the historical subversions were actually trying to convince people, by baiting them with feigned familiarity, or perhaps he thinks us gentiles very dull indeed. The issue was never the negroids themselves, but their use, and as far as the liberal post-modernist rape Sawyer engages in that is far worse. No, the pretence of historical accuracy does not redeem it but condemn it. Under this false veneer there is the wretched same old. Of course as it stands he has managed to cram in the Imperialist LGBTQ+ and the tiresome American melanin mania anyway judging from developments in this thread.

Whereas the Estonian case was sad, for to be marinated in and propagate the very thing which strangles you and has robbed you of culture, life, vitality and authenticity is tragic, Sawyer collaborates with Satan knowingly and willingly. There was nothing to rob in his case, he never had a soul that could be corrupted. As this game is of Sawyer, Sawyer is himself of liberal metropolis. Perhaps it is worthwhile to briefly contemplate what games such as these are then. A rectified quote from the philosophaster Guy Debord suffices.

Once society has lost its myth-based community, it loses all the reference points of truly common language until such time as the divisions within the inactive community can be overcome by the inauguration of power. When art, which was the common language of social inaction, develops into independent art in the modern sense, emerging from its original religious universe and becoming individual production of separate works, it too becomes subject to capital and power. Its declaration of independence is the beginning of its end.

 

[Dadd]

Say that in one sentence or less.