Pentiment

Before Pentiment’s release, nobody quite knew what to expect of it. The buzz on the net was that it’d be Obsidian’s Reformation-era take on Disco Elysium. But now that the cat’s out of the bag, it’s safe to say that the Disco Elysium comparisons were a bit off the mark. Pentiment has more in common with modern day adventure games such as Life Is Strange and Telltale's The Walking Dead than the RPGs Obsidian built its reputation on.

That’s not to say Pentiment doesn’t offer plenty of opportunity for role playing. While you don’t get to create your own character outright, you do get to choose an academic background and a few personality traits, which affect how conversations unfold. Depending on the choices you make, your version of the main character, Andreas, may be more inclined to overcome obstacles with either his wits or his fists. In that sense, Pentiment is a bit like Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis. But whereas in Atlantis each primary trait led you down a completely different path, here the path is always the same, with your choices merely tweaking the scenery around you.

And therein lies my primary issue with Pentiment. For a game that offer so many dialogue choices – hundreds, if not thousands – your level of control over the story is always limited. It’s choice without empowerment. Then again, maybe that’s the point – we are all bound by the rules and circumstances of the times in which we live, after all.

The lack of empowerment is perhaps justified, but the absence of certain quality of life features is harder to forgive. There’s no fast travel, and running around the village of Tassing, small as it is, quickly grows tedious. This is exacerbated by the fact that you never know where a new item or opportunity for conversation may appear. If you want to be thorough, you have no choice but to run through the entire town and talk with each villager multiple times a day. Certainly Obsidian could’ve found a way to streamline this process without dumbing the game down. For instance, putting a notification icon next to villagers to show that they have something new to say would’ve spared me from reading “God bless you, Andreas” a few hundred times too many. Some limited form of fast travel would’ve been much appreciated as well.

Despite my qualms, I have to admire Obsidian for daring to make a slow-paced game about a Reformation-era painter. The developers thoroughly researched the setting and it shows, from the themes to the art design. While I can’t say that I enjoyed every moment of my playthrough, I respect what Josh Sawyer and Obsidian have achieved with Pentiment and wish more game developers would pursue smaller, mold-breaking projects like this one.

Obsidian is one of the few modern developers that I try to play every game of, they've released some of my favorite games (and some other not so favorites), so always hoping they strike gold again with each. Josh Sawyer is the lead designer on this one, and with his track record of Fallout New Vegas, Pillars of Eternity 1 and 2, he's got it pretty good when it comes to RPGs. However his latest Pentiment is much smaller in scope, and it's not an RPG either. It's like this personal pet project that he has a lot of passion for.

So in short the game is an historical adventure game where choices matter. You play as an artist in the 16th century where you are caught up in some murder mysteries, and through the course of 3 acts you get to walk around the little town and lots of discussions with the townsfolk and church people. The amount of lore and research put into the game is really impressive, not many games go down like that for such historical accuracy. Also the graphics are quite beautiful, kinda looks like an hand-drawn style and just really pretty to look at.

But... this game has a lot of reading. Like intense amount of conversations with not a single one featuring voice acting, you really have to be in the mood of reading a novel to play this game. The choices made matter and will affect the storyline, some people might not show up in later parts depending on all your actions so thats cool. The events take place in limited time, you'll need to make wise choices and most of the time you'll end up regretting such and such decision but that's the charm of the game (you can't really "fail" in the end). But to go back to the reading, that's pretty much that's there is to it. I'm not so great at reading novels as my mind starts wandering off, so many times I just lost track of what was being talked about. Mostly my fault there, but I feel that voice acting might have brought in more attention from myself and perhaps give more personality to the characters. But still there, some of the conversations tend to go on forever and there's only so much back story of the church and saints I can handle at once. The pacing feels a little bit off at times. The overall story gets interesting at times, but then it hits you again with another slow momentum.

I think fans of Disco Elysium, Norco and Kentucky Route Zero might feel at home here. The writing and work put into it is definitely above most games, there's many aspects that I can understand why someone would call it a classic and praise it high, but it didn't really hit me in the feels that much. I'm glad Josh got to do his game like he wanted and that he's getting praise for it, certainly pushes the adventure genre in a certain direction and there's not much quite like it. Just not my favorite personally.

Early into Pentiment, you are asked to provide a background for the player character. Among your background choices are things like what and where they studied, what their academic interests are, and what languages they are proficient in. While choosing my options, I realized that Pentiment is one of those rare games that flex its “intellectual” muscles without being overbearing or annoying. Like Disco Elysium, Pentiment is a smart, narrative game that you can tell the creators, especially director Josh Sawyer, poured years of historical research and writing into. The result is a unique game that, if you are into historical narratives and theological debates from the early reformation, creates a captivating and repayable narrative despite a few pacing issues along the way.

One of the difficulties of selling this game is the lack of an easy genre to categorize it. On the one hand, it is an RPG, with dialogue choices and light character building. However, there are no dice rolls and skill checks like you’d find in a traditional RPG. One could also say it is a point-and-click game, but there is very little pointing and clicking and, thankfully, there is no inventory management. The game is not “played” so much as it is read, but describing Pentiment as a visual novel is also misleading, as it's not quite so direct as that.
While it’s difficult to categorize, I think it’s safe to say that if you like your games or RPGs to have a lot of action of some kind, you likely won’t enjoy Pentiment from a “game” perspective. You don’t “do” very much other than talking, but this is Pentiment’s greatest strength: how it influences your decisions about who to talk to, and where to go to investigate the odd goings-on of Tassing, the town where Pentiment is set.
Each section of Pentiment has a slight time constraint and so you carefully have to choose where to spend your time and with who you speak. Talk to the wrong people and before you know it your afternoon is gone and you are none the wiser for it. This time mechanic also adds to the replayability of the game, as you begin to wonder what other dialogue options may-or-may-not have looked like. In short, dialogue becomes the game’s main action and it is where the tension of the plot is created and resolved.

Since it is a narrative game, the plot needs to be strong, the writing needs to stay consistent and engaging, and the world needs to be fully realized. Amazingly, Pentiment almost does all of this. The plot is strong, weaving mystery and historical drama together in a story that channels Umberto Eco, Father Brown, and Engels’ “The Peasant War in Germany” in equal measure. The writing is also consistently strong, with characters following surprisingly complex arcs that add to their personal and psychological growth within their specific historical time frame.
The real highlight in the writing, however, is the world itself. I’m not sure if it is intentional, but the map and journal design are awful to navigate. The plus side of this is that I stopped relying on the map and journal, and chose instead to engage with the world and learn where things are and who everybody was on my own. As I ventured and learned about each character on my own, as opposed to following a checklist, I grew more familiar with and attached to the lives of these peasants, nuns, monks, and noblemen. By the end of the game, I felt like I knew Tassing inside and out, despite my roughly 15 hours of perusing its relatively small play area.

The writing doesn’t always hold up, and this is evident in the final act. Information is repeated and the mystery is so close to being solved that it’s difficult not to begin speed-reading past the 10th person who talks about the same dramatic event everybody else has already spoken of.
Similarly, I was disappointed by the background dialogue choices given to my character. I chose “theology” which only offered snide, snobby remarks from my character that made them look terrible to both peasants and monks alike. For instance, when a character mentioned that their infant child died, my “theology” dialogue response was something along the lines of “Oh, that’s too bad… was the child baptized?” A response that obviously upsets the person I’m talking to. I found these dialogue options intrusive and odd because the story otherwise gives such great depth and nuance to theological and philosophical differences, that these “theology” responses felt more like edgy Reddit-atheism jabs at Christianity to make the player feel stupid for choosing a religious background.

Pentiment is worth checking out, especially if you have gamepass. If you find yourself not enjoying it after three-to-four hours, I wouldn’t push through unless you are really digging the story and want to know how it ends. The game is weirdly niche, and as someone who ranks the Name of the Rose in their top three novels of all time, and reads Medieval philosophy and history as a hobby, this game offers a surprising amount of depth without sacrificing accessibility.