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.
The player inevitably becomes aware of things that they've missed, at which point fomo takes over and sucks most of the fun out of the game imo. A quarter of the way through I started to neurotically check the whole map constantly and it became exhausting. It doesn't help that the traversal is so tedious.
The "detective" aspect of the game is not good either. The time constraints just feel arbitrary and contrived, and investigations almost never lead to anything resembling a "eureka" moment... Instead, I usually came away feeling like I learned nothing and wasted my time. I understand this is partially by design, and in a way it works narratively, but more than anything its frustrating.
I don't think Andreas works very well as an MC either. I felt I could exert quite a bit of influence on his character through choosing his background and in conversations, but it was often in conflict with who the writers intended him to be. But oddly enough, he never gets a properly developed backstory, so he ends up in a state of limbo... He wasn't who I wanted him to be, but I never had a good sense of who he was really supposed to be either.
This is not a review, just a comment so I'll only point out two things that I liked about it. First, in Act 2, people often ask you how you feel. I was saying I feel great because I thought it's roleplaying. It was so moving when it turned out that Andreas was in fact extremely miserable, and my choices to say he felt great turned out in fact to not be roleplaying as such but hiding the pain.. And I also loved how the game handles choice, some people criticize the game that your choices don't matter, when it's completely not true. Yes, the main plot stays the same, but the people, the town changes so much. I chose to kill Lucky and the first act and I would never hear the end of it from his widow. So you get the best of both worlds: you experience an amazing story and at the same time see clear consequences of your actions. If you give the player too much choice, there is a great risk he will choose a boring route, resulting in boring story. It's impossible here.