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

[Infinitron]

 

[Infinitron]

https://news.xbox.com/en-us/2022/12/27/pentiment-soundtrack-vinyl/

Pentiment Soundtrack Available Now, Vinyl Coming Next Year​

Obsidian Entertainment is proud to announce the release of Pentiment’s soundtrack, available on some of your favorite streaming platforms — with a vinyl double album coming in 2023.

To fit the game’s art style, the Pentiment team wanted to make sure that the soundtrack reflected the instruments and music of 16th century Europe. To achieve this, the team worked with the early music ensemble Alkemie. Using shawms, hurdy-gurdies, and myriad other period instruments, Alkemie composed original music and adapted historical pieces from the 14th to 16th centuries for pivotal moments throughout the story.

Accompanying Alkemie, the talented Lingua Ignota (Kristin Hayter) composed and performed the song Ein Traum for the game’s epilogue. Kristin drew upon 19th century German Lieder traditions for the piano accompaniment and adapted a Heinrich Heine poem, ‘Ich hatte einst ein schönes Vaterland’, for the lyrics. The result is a hauntingly beautiful song to close out the game’s story.

Taking the commitment to authenticity one step further, the soundtrack features album cover art by painter Benjamin Vierling, who uses a renaissance-inspired Mischtechnik, alternating layers of oil paint and egg tempera. The artwork is a portrait of Andreas Maler that is packed with symbolic elements from the game. Using traditional techniques, it took over 20 months to complete. For full thematic resonance, Benjamin even included a pentiment of the Mithraic tauroctony under the winged bull of St. Luke.

The Pentiment soundtrack can now be found on multiple streaming platforms such as Spotify and iTunes. However, if you want to purchase a digital copy, players can visit Pentiment’s Steam page to buy the soundtrack today. In addition, fans will be delighted to hear that a vinyl double album will be released sometime in 2023, featuring Benjamin’s artwork on the cover, a gatefold with liner notes, and the painting of Our Lady of the Labyrinth by Pentiment’s art director, Hannah Kennedy, on the back.

If this isn’t enough, fans can now visit the Pentiment website to download the newly added fan kit, which includes wallpapers for players to use on their digital devices.

Pentiment is available now for Xbox Series X|S, Xbox One, Windows 10/11 PC, and Steam for $19.99. It is also available with Xbox Game Pass and PC Game Pass.

 

[KVVRR]

A double album? I barely heard music in my playthrough, I'm surprised they had enough material to fill two vynils.

 

[AwesomeButton]

Vinyl Thank you, Lord, for Microsoft being there to fulfill an aging hipster's high school fantasy!

 

[agris]

Rotating wax cylinder or gtfo.

Fucking posers.

 

[Zed Duke of Banville]

Pentiment Soundtrack Available Now, Vinyl Coming Next Year​

Vinyl Thank you, Lord, for Microsoft being there to fulfill an aging hipster's high school fantasy!

Pentiment, the photograph:

 

[ERYFKRAD]

Rotating wax cylinder or gtfo.

Fucking posers.

Live performance or bust.

 

[mediocrepoet]

Pentiment Soundtrack Available Now, Vinyl Coming Next Year​

Vinyl Thank you, Lord, for Microsoft being there to fulfill an aging hipster's high school fantasy!

Pentiment, the photograph:

Dramatic re-enactment of "J. Sawyer can't figure out why he never gets a second date."

 

[Erebus]

Dammit Ursula you stupid little bitch just because I told you half a story about a magical beast back when you weren't even two is not a good reason for you to end up getting yourself burned at the stake !

 

[rusty_shackleford]

Pretty sure medieval europe didn't have vinyl, I demand bards that come to your house.

 

[laclongquan]

First a fantasy, fake-SPECIAL, heroic tale in Barcelona...
Second a murder mystery in some unknown place in HRE...
..
.
Still not sold~ We have to conclude that Holy Roman Empire is not a good theme to make commercial RPG. Nobody outside of locals would pay attention to such game, let alone playing it~

rants you dont want to hear

From the start, every details grate on my storyfags soul.
1. stone erase words? STONE? And it's too slow.
2. Latin? Man, what did these devs do anyway? Didnt they know that using unreadable text in games is a big nono? English in chinese games and chinese in english games show that this being an offended crime to players. What made they think Latin can stand outside of this rule? it's a fucking DEAD Language. Have some decency and let it stay ded~
3. Adventure text game. Anyway, this not my cuppa

 

[1451]

Latin is readable if you pick the required trait.
There are consequences to your choices, like in any proper role playing game.

 

[HeroMarine]

First a fantasy, fake-SPECIAL, heroic tale in Barcelona...
Second a murder mystery in some unknown place in HRE...
..
.
Still not sold~ We have to conclude that Holy Roman Empire is not a good theme to make commercial RPG. Nobody outside of locals would pay attention to such game, let alone playing it~

Just want to point out that Barcelona was never part of the Holy Roman Empire unless you count Charlemagne and his empire as HRE (I don't).

 

[laclongquan]

I thought Barcelona in Lionheart was counted as part?

 

[laclongquan]

Latin is readable if you pick the required trait.
There are consequences to your choices, like in any proper role playing game.

I am speaking about intro video where pages and pages of Latin floating by~

 

[HeroMarine]

I thought Barcelona in Lionheart was counted as part?

Ah, I can't remember that specific detail of the game's lore. That might explain it. In real life, Barcelona was pretty independent from the HRE like I said, unless you count Charlemagne period.

 

[ERYFKRAD]

I thought Barcelona in Lionheart was counted as part?

Bruh that Barcelona had Da Vinci and Don Quixote in the same neighborhood, your frame of reference does not do you credit.

 

[Forest Dweller]

Well, just finished it. I started it about a month ago and was actually enjoying it quite a lot, up until

Spoiler

they kill your character off and force you to play as someone else.

And yes, I know he's not really dead and comes back later, but being forced to start over with someone else from scratch really made me lose a lot of interest. Terrible design honestly, even if it makes sense from a story perspective.

Act 3 also wasn't as interesting as the other two either. Researching for a mural is again not as engaging as investigating a murder, even if, again, it makes sense according to the themes the story is trying to convey.

Anyway, overall I liked the authenticity of it. There's also quite a lot of choices to make that have impact, as well as the various backgrounds you pick; even if it's not a full rpg, it does definitely have those elements. These two things I think made the game enjoyable, in spite of the issue I describe above.

I want to mention something on whether there's a "canon murderer" each time, because there seems to be some confusion. The Thread-Puller (i.e. the person manipulating things) is canon, and is also the person who does the third murder. However for the first two murders he doesn't actually do it, he simply sends out notes to others who have a motive to do it in order to get at least one of them to commit the act. So in other words it is highly likely that one of the suspects you're presented with each time actually did the deed, but the game leaves it to your interpretation.

 

[Dadd]

"Ben, I want you to draw me like one of your indie folk girls"

 

[Infinitron]

https://www.gamedeveloper.com/design/making-pentiment-s-most-macabre-murder-mysteries

Making Pentiment's most macabre murder mysteries​

Pentiment game director Josh Sawyer breaks down the design logic behind the games' brain-teasing murder mysteries.

Obsidian Entertainment's Pentiment was one of our team's favorite games of 2022, and for good reason. It's a genuine leap forward for video game storytelling that makes the most of art direction that mimics the aesthetic of medieval illuminated manuscripts—and tells a tale that humanizes an era calcified in the minds of modern audiences by Hollywood epics.

While there's plenty of heady, intellectual fodder at the heart of Pentiment, it hangs its hat (and storytelling structure) on the format of the murder mystery. Players take on the role of Andreas, a skilled painter apprenticing at Kiersau Abbey in the fictional Germanic town of Tassing.

The team at Obsidian shared an interesting fact in advance of the game's release: most of the crimes Andreas solves in the course of Pentiment do not have a definitive "canon" perpetrator. Players chasing different investigative threads will have plenty of reason to think they've correctly fingered the guilty party, but the open-ended story serves a larger (and more interesting) purpose.

So if there's no definitive murderer, why make a murder mystery game at all? We pinged game director Josh Sawyer last month to ask about the interactive murder mystery format—and why Obsidian stuck with it even when there was no intent to give players the satisfying answers they might crave.

A tribute to Umberto Eco​

Heads up: from hereon out, there will be light spoilers for Pentiment.

In 1980, Italian author Umberto Eco released the book The Name of the Rose: a medieval murder mystery that would become one of the best-selling books ever published (and fun fact, its influence on video games goes back further than Pentiment. An adaptation of the book into video game form called "La Abadía del Crimen" was released in 1987, and a level inspired by the book appeared in the expansion for Thief: The Dark Project).


Sawyer explained to Game Developer that The Name of the Rose was a strong inspiration for Pentiment—so strong that it's cited in the credits as a "source" for the game. "I just thought the idea of a central mystery would be a compelling one within this context," Sawyer explained.

To set up the mystery, Sawyer and his colleagues referenced the works of Agatha Christie and their many adaptations. Though Pentiment doesn't play out like a Christie mystery, it certainly opens like one. Sawyer cited the prolific author's practice of introducing the murder victim to the audience in key early scenes—along with all the people who don't like them, and would have something to gain from their death.

"That was the foundational layer in establishing those relationships in the game," Sawyer said. Andreas and the player get to witness the various parties who react to the arrival of Baron Lorenz of Rothvogel. One townsperson argues with him. A widow emerges from her home to curse his name, and the abbey's Mother Cecilia recoils at his arrival.

In this dialogue-driven, choice-heavy game, players now have a foundational set of choices they can make decisions on after The Baron's body is found under the giant mural of the Danse Macabre. Now they can begin the hunt for whoever had the means, motive, and opportunity to do the killing.

But players hoping to Benoit Blanc their way through Tassing found themselves without one conventional crime solving tool: the alibi. Sawyer explained that in designing the various murders, the team at Obsidian originally considered an option to determine alibis—if any of the suspects could securely identify that they were somewhere else at the time of the murder.

The "alibis" feature even made it into the first prototype of Pentiment, but not the final game. "We got rid of it," he explained. "All it does is exclude [suspects], and we're not trying to find a singular suspect, we're trying to rule people in, not rule them out."

He went on to say that the point of the investigative process in Pentiment is to have players hone in on the motive. Determining the "means" is relevant to The Baron's murder, but not to the second or third investigations in the game's following acts.

Putting the motive at the center of the player's investigation goals also helped Obsidian create a clear test for the player's efforts and a rudimentary pass/fail system. After gathering evidence for a few days, players are thrust in front of the Archdeacon—an official investigator sent in by the State. He's here to throw a monk accused of the murder through a Kangaroo court, but players are given a chance to convince him that a different, better suspect exists by laying out what they know about the motive.

Interestingly, Sawyer explained that the Archdeacon is "biased." The if-->then logic of the Archdeacon is not evenly balanced—it's weighted to favor convicting the widow who cursed the Baron, and against a monk the Baron might have been blackmailing.

Therefore getting Prior Ferec convicted of the murder is a more "difficult" task. (Does it say something that both me and my fiancé managed to convince him in our playthroughs of the game?)

As mentioned earlier, none of the listed suspects are canonized as the definitive murderer—and Pentiment is deliberately designed to incentivize uncertainty. Players might find some suspects highly credible, but be reluctant to convict them. "It's meant to make the player not look at it from the perspective of 'I definitely think this person did it,' because it's difficult to have that level of confidence."

"It's more to [ask] 'who do I value? What do I think is important in this set of bad circumstances, which is the least bad from my perspective?'"

The value of uncertainty in a murder mystery game​

Sawyer called the choice to leave the exact killer's identity uncertain "foundational" in our chat. "I honestly find logic-based 'one true solution' murder mystery games not very satisfying personally," he said in reflection. He also observed that in a historical context, justice "doesn't work the way you think it does," especially in an era predating forensic science.

The goal of solving a murder like the ones in Pentiment is to seek some kind of justice—to right a wrong inflicted by a death. Sawyer observed that justice often can feel "hollow" in how it's practiced, especially when there isn't clear certainty in who did the crime. If you have any sense of doubt in a case—you're left wondering if the killer got away, and if you might have punished an innocent person.

He argued that a story where the killer is definitively identified, and they confess to the crime or are karmically punished by some kind of petard-hoisting death is "nice," but not fulfilling in this setting. Tacking away from that certainty gave players more responsibility over the dramatic events that follow the murder, and gives them a chance to better roleplay in this setting and reflect on their own values.

Maybe this dog killed The Baron.
If Pentiment did identify exactly who killed the Baron (which to be clear for those who've finished the game, is far different from who orchestrated his death), Sawyer argued that it would remove that sense of responsibility, and the punishment for the crime would just be "the mechanism of the state in action."

Obsidian's design goals here are an interesting contrast to ZA/UM's 2019 game Disco Elysium, where players drunkenly race to solve a murder with a definitive killer. Only in that game, the killer and victim are not introduced in the early hours, and the question of state mechanisms is very closely examined in its final hours.

There's value in both design styles, of course. It's then worth asking—when you're crafting such a mystery experience, how do you know you're making a case worth solving?

How do you playtest a murder mystery?​

If you're thinking of making your own interactive murder mystery, you might benefit from the process Sawyer and his colleagues used to playtest Pentiment.

The first step in playtesting the game actually began with the thirty-minute vertical slice the team first created. About seven to eight friends of the development team were enlisted as playtesters, and they were able to give concise feedback on the game's base mechanics.

The next group of playtesters came from the "friends and family" group. They were tasked with testing the Alpha version of Pentiment. Sawyer said this group was able to give useful feedback on the game's third act, when plot points from acts one and two come to a head.

"There were certain like plot threads that just were not coming through, and people were like 'I didn't pick up on this thing at all,' or 'this didn't feel foreshadowed in any way' or 'this character's death felt extremely unsatisfying and left a bad taste in my mouth.'"

Feedback like that for act three helped the team improve plot points from acts one and two. A common problem was that a character would speak to the player in act one, not appear meaningfully in act two, then have a key moment in act three. "The team never sees that stuff because we all know everything," he noted. "So we're looking at it from like a quality and functionality sort of perspective."

Sawyer said that in this stage, feedback from players also helped flag that one investigative minigame in act two wasn't very fun.

It's a bottle-shaking game where players are helping a blind nun identify what bottles a possible suspect in another murder knocked over.

The blind nun in question.
Sawyer said that this feature in the shipped game is "completely different" based on what came before, and that players initially found it confusing and not fun. In a "mechanics-light" game like Pentiment, Sawyer said the minigames weren't meant to be hard, but immersive.

Many hands make a good murder​

Chatting with Sawyer meant we mostly dived into the nuances of storytelling decisions and design choices—but Sawyer was eager to spotlight his colleagues outside the narrative or design departments who sold the impact of Pentiment's murder mystery too. He credited Cathy Nichols' animation direction and Hannah Kennedy and Soojin Paek's visual design for both bringing this abstract illuminated manuscript art style into something you could tell a murder mystery in.

Sawyer noted that Nichols had to animate between 150 to 200 unique characters, and that she went the extra mile creating unique death animations for each suspect killed in response to the Baron's murder. It's a key moment for Pentiment, since each of those deaths puts a punctuation mark on the player's decision to name the suspect of their choice.

Watching Ferenc run away from the executioner and beg for mercy before suffering a botched and bloody beheading wiped away much of the anger and suspicion I personally felt for him—and it was chilling to learn that how each other suspect dies can be equally macabre.

Kennedy was behind Andreas' finished masterpiece that's unveiled at the end of act one, and Park created the Dance Macabre mural that hangs over the Baron's corpse in Kirseau Abbey's dining hall. If you think about the great tradition of murder mysteries, it's striking visuals like these that help sell the heightened stakes of an individual death.

In a story that hangs on the work of medieval artists—filling this game with art that could strike the soul was no easy task.

There's more to a murder than just finding the killer—that's true in real life, and equally true in spinning an entertaining story out of such a horrific act.

 

[Quillon]

Well, just finished it. I started it about a month ago and was actually enjoying it quite a lot, up until

Spoiler

they kill your character off and force you to play as someone else.

And yes, I know he's not really dead and comes back later, but being forced to start over with someone else from scratch really made me lose a lot of interest. Terrible design honestly, even if it makes sense from a story perspective.

Act 3 also wasn't as interesting as the other two either. Researching for a mural is again not as engaging as investigating a murder, even if, again, it makes sense according to the themes the story is trying to convey.

Anyway, overall I liked the authenticity of it. There's also quite a lot of choices to make that have impact, as well as the various backgrounds you pick; even if it's not a full rpg, it does definitely have those elements. These two things I think made the game enjoyable, in spite of the issue I describe above.

I want to mention something on whether there's a "canon murderer" each time, because there seems to be some confusion. The Thread-Puller (i.e. the person manipulating things) is canon, and is also the person who does the third murder. However for the first two murders he doesn't actually do it, he simply sends out notes to others who have a motive to do it in order to get at least one of them to commit the act. So in other words it is highly likely that one of the suspects you're presented with each time actually did the deed, but the game leaves it to your interpretation.

just finished the game myself and yeah it turned out I/some of us made a fuss about canon-killer for nothing tho I thought the central mystery(turned out to be the thread-puller) was gonna stay mysterious. I blame sawya for this misdirection anyway also funnily enough I didn't pick the real killers in both cases I chose the ones I didn't like, who are also made to be obviously unlikable/evul.

twas an ok game for me, coulda been a lot better if I didn't know about sawya; with this amount of self-insert he shoulda as well named the character after himself.

for act 3

Spoiler

I didn't mind playing as someone else since there is no character build/gameplay difference(also I couldn't connect with sawya's self insert with the amount of metaknowledge I had anyway) but the mural thing wasn't interesting and dragged on too long yeah.

also there was a moment in the game

Spoiler

where brother piero says "put yourself in the art", then andreas literally puts 1 on 1 copy of himself in his masterpiece, which I found funny/funnier with sawya's putting himself in the game

 

[Infinitron]

 

[Dadd]

Wow! Tumblr still exists!

 

[Infinitron]

https://news.xbox.com/en-us/podcast/pentiment-herman-miller-gaming/

SANDRO: Well, thank you. And welcome to this segment. I'm from Germany as you have heard. And today's game is also from Germany. That's why I'm here today. I'm talking about Pentiment. And I'm discussing it today with Josh Sawyer, game director at Obsidian. Guten tag, Joshua. Guten Morgen, eher.

JOSH SAWYER: Guten Moregen oder Guten Abend fur dich.

SANDRO: Dankeschon. I was really impressed when I heard that you didn't just do a game that's actually playing in Germany, but you also speak German. But let's not do this anymore today.

JOSH SAWYER: Sure.

SANDRO: Because I know most of the rest of our audience won't be able to understand it. But Pentiment, it's been out for a while now. And we wanted to record this interview a while ago. We couldn't do it back then for a technical glitch. But I still wanted to discuss the game with you in detail because I've played through it. And I have so many questions.

JOSH SAWYER: Awesome.

SANDRO: But before we start into it, do you want to give us a quick introduction? What is Pentiment actually about?

JOSH SAWYER: Sure. Pentiment is a narrative adventure game. It's set in 16th-century Ober-Bayern, upper Bavaria, in the fictional town of Tassing and the nearby Kiersau Abbey, which is a benedictine-double abbey. And you play a character named Andreas Mahler, who is a journeyman artist from Nuremberg. And he is completing his Wanderjahre, the years during which he travels through Europe, learns from different masters, and then returns home to become a master in his own right.

But while he is staying and working at Kiersau Abbey, he becomes wrapped up in a murder. His friend at the Abbey, Brother Piero, was accused of the murder. And it's up to Andreas to prove that someone else did it. And there are multiple suspects. And it's never really quite clear exactly who did it. But that one murder then turns into multiple murders and a conspiracy that spans over 25 years. And you get to see Andreas and the people around him change over that time.

SANDRO: And it's been so very, very positively received. I loved it. I loved every single--

JOSH SAWYER: Thank you.

SANDRO: --second of the game. I'm pretty sure we don't want to spoil the game, the story, especially the ending to anyone. So we will probably have to keep this a bit too after the recording because I want to know what I did wrong and what I did right.

The first thing that really popped out when I started it up was the very unique art style and the intriguing storytelling. Just with text, it's actually like a book, is it? How did you come up with that? Because it's so different from what I expected, at least.

JOSH SAWYER: I had some ideas for the art style. I really knew that I wanted to rely on something that felt inspired from the Late Medieval and Early Modern period. And the 16th century early in this time was seeing the end of manuscript production, or most manuscript production that is, hand-written and illuminated books. And it was moving into the realm of print.

So I wanted to borrow elements from both of those things. And I approached our art director Hannah Kennedy, who's extremely talented. And I said this is kind of what I'm thinking of. This is the perspective I'm thinking of. These are the sources I'm thinking of being inspired by.

Then she went and she did a bunch of research on her own, gathered that reference together, and then created the art style you see, which looks very period appropriate. But it is not it is not a copy. It is a synthesis that Hannah created. And I'm very, very happy with it.

SANDRO: And it was said a lot of times that it looks different, but at the heart it's still an Obsidian game. It still has that Obsidian DNA. I felt that, but what is it exactly. How can I point a finger to what is an Obsidian game? Even if it looks completely different than any other Obsidian game now.

JOSH SAWYER: I think the things that people respond to, that feel very Obsidian in this game, are the character development. We have a large cast of characters that are really diverse in personality and background. And the way they talk, I think, feels very human. Their relationships are very human.

And you have a lot of choice within the story, in terms of how you interact with people. The choices that you make can have big consequences over time. And I think all of those are things that feel very integral to the type of games that Obsidian makes.

SANDRO: Well, I can just echo that. When I played it, I felt so much love and sometimes anger with the characters. It was really well written.

JOSH SAWYER: Thank you.

SANDRO: And the ending, we can't discuss it now. But I have so many questions. While I played it, I often asked myself, did I do the right thing? Is there a right way through Pentiment?

JOSH SAWYER: No, there really isn't. One of the things that I had found when-- I a lot of detective stories, or detective films, or detective games. But in detective games, the thing that I never really liked so much is that they feel very puzzle like, in the sense that there's a certain logical combination of things that you need to arrive at. And when you do, you find the true answer that is definitively true. There are some games that subvert this a little bit.

But I was thinking about the genre. And I was also thinking about the difficulty of determining guilt, for example, in an era when there's very little science to use. There's no forensic science, really. There aren't really even police. And the way investigations are done is really foreign to what we would understand. And the ambiguity of that was really scary.

And I thought that it would be interesting to put the player in a position where there were people that were quite plausible. But their time and their ability to really figure out the answer is extremely limited. And the best they can do is figure out the people who are likely to have done it and then make a choice and hope for the best. And that's never going to really feel great. And you're never going to--

SANDRO: I feel so bad.

JOSH SAWYER: I know. And even a lot of people, like there's one person that a lot of people gravitate towards, especially in the first act. And it doesn't feel satisfying when you see them punished for it because it's messy. And it's not the thing that you expect it to be. And you have to live with that. And the community reminds you of the things that you did. And it feels bad.

SANDRO: Yes, they do.

JOSH SAWYER: So that was the focus, was to try to make the player live with that ambiguity and accept that they're forced to do something that's just inherently unpleasant. And they just have to make the best of it.

SANDRO: Well, you did an amazing job of making me feel bad about my choices because I, actually, felt bad. Now, looking at the era and the location of the game. Being from Germany, if I was a game director, obviously every game would be playing in upper Bavaria. It's actually quite near where I live. I'm from Munich. So Tassing, even if it's not real, I say it's right around the corner here.

But you're not from Munich. You're not from Germany, Josh. You're from California. So why are you so interested in this time period in the location and, also, why do you speak German in the ad?

JOSH SAWYER: Well, I'm actually originally from Wisconsin, you can see the flag behind me, which had a lot of German immigrants. And my grandmother was born in Bavaria. And her father was in the Bavarian infantry in World War I. And so we have a lot of family roots in that region. My mom's side of the family also was from other parts of Germany.

So I was interested in our family history. And I did a lot of research into that. And then as I got into college, I initially went to a conservatory of music. And I studied-- and was really interested in singing Liebeslieder, romantic music from the 19th century, a lot of it by Schobert or Brahms with Goethe lyrics and things like that. And so I got really interested in romantic poetry.

And then I switched over to getting a history degree. And I studied German history. And German language was kind of necessary to engage in that. And then I just continued speaking German after I graduated from college. I traveled to Germany many times. Role-playing games are a genre that is quite beloved in Germany.

And so I just continued that interest. And when I had the chance to make a game that was historical-- I know a fair amount about other parts of Europe, but the Holy Roman Empire and Germany and Bavaria are pretty central to what I do know about.

SANDRO: Well, I can just say, continue the work. We need more that are situated here in Germany. I was really fascinated by the details and how rich the history actually was and, well, I assume how detailed the everyday life of a 16th-century villager was depicted, not only the village, but also the Kloster. I forgot the English term for it.

JOSH SAWYER: Abbey.

SANDRO: The Abbey. Right. So how did you research that? And what went into all of the research?

JOSH SAWYER: So some of it came from my pre-existing university education and in getting a history degree. And I had a fair amount of knowledge there. But then I went back to a lot of the old texts that I still had. I still read history books. I tried to expand my knowledge there.

And then, we had three historical consultants in different areas of expertise, Dr. Christopher de Hamel, who's a world-renowned expert in manuscript production. And I talked to him about the end of manuscript production and how an artist might work and what was plausible and what wasn't. And then, Dr. Edmund Kern, who was actually my advisor in college, who knows a lot about the Holy Roman Empire and Austria, more specifically. And he was able to inform on a lot of legal issues and cultural things.

And then, Dr. Winston Black who was a classmate of mine when I went to Lawrence University. And his area of expertise is medieval medicine. And even though we're entering the Renaissance in the 16th century, a lot of the medical practices were still fundamentally medieval for decades and decades until progress or knowledge started to be uncovered by people doing new research.

So that was extremely, extremely helpful. And if you want to see all the things that we referenced, you can go into the bibliography in the credits and see all the works that we referenced.

SANDRO: During your research, what was the funniest and craziest historical fact that you dug up during the research? Or is there anything in the game, now that people have probably played it already, that you would point out people to look at a specific piece?

JOSH SAWYER: Oh, certainly. And it's funny because I talked about it. And there were people who were surprised about it. And there's a very mild spoiler here. So if you're really worried about spoilers, don't listen to the next thing I say. But the character of Martin Bauer in the game is based on a historical figure named Martin Guerre who was a French, or really Basque, man in the 16th century.

And I don't want to get into the details about it. But it's a real story. It's real thing that actually happened. And it's incredible. But it there's a whole record from the jurist that presided at the trial of the man. And there's a French film of it.

The consultant for it, Natalie Zemon Davis, wrote a pretty brisk-reading history book called The Return of Martin Guerre that is, I think, a really, really excellent history book, even if you're not really that into history. And I would highly recommend it because it's hard to believe, but it happened. And it actually happened multiple times.

SANDRO: Well, that's fascinating because that's the one story that I wouldn't have thought that was real. It felt so crazy.

JOSH SAWYER: Absolutely.

SANDRO: But now thinking back about it, totally makes sense, at that time at least. Cool. I've heard that one of the things that really made Pentiment special for me was the sound and the soundtrack. I will be honest. I, sometimes, I love just going into the game and leaving it there as a background sound.

But now I've heard that you're also releasing soundtrack. What can you tell us about the soundtrack? And I can hear it already.

JOSH SAWYER: So the soundtrack was developed primarily by Alchemy which is an early-music ensemble. And I worked with them extensively to develop the tracks that were used for the game. We use them kind of sparingly. We don't have a constant running soundtrack. They're mostly used for dramatic events. But when they happen it's usually for very important things. And it fits the tone of the game very, very well. They did an incredible job.

And then we have an epilogue track by Kristen Hayter, the artist Lingua Ignota, which is really incredible on its own. It's a perfect endpoint to the soundtrack. And we released it on Steam. It's available on many streaming platforms as well. And then we're going to be releasing a double album, vinyl, this year. Exactly when we don't know, but it's coming.

SANDRO: So vinyl, you didn't go as far back as to doing a manuscript of it, like handwritten?

JOSH SAWYER: No, unfortunately.

SANDRO: It's beautiful artwork that we just saw. I can say I loved the soundtrack. And if you have not played Pentiment yet, I definitely recommend download it. You can play it on Xbox and on PC. It's on Steam. You can play it on Game Pass. And if you play it and you just need a background sound, a very nice and calming background sound, I can recommend standing anywhere in the village and letting it play in the background.

[MEDIEVAL MUSIC]

There it is. It helped me stay focused during a very hectic December. Thank you, Josh.

JOSH SAWYER: Thank you for having me.

SANDRO: And any last words? What would you recommend people to look forward to?

JOSH SAWYER: Oh, just the soundtrack is coming. We are going to be making another update with little additions soon for the game. But otherwise, check it out. It's on Game Pass. And I hope people enjoy it.

 

[Infinitron]

Followed by a thread complaining about GDC.