ℑ’𝔪 𝔣𝔯𝔬𝔪 𝔞 𝔱𝔬𝔴𝔫 𝔠𝔞𝔩𝔩𝔢𝔡 ℭ𝔬𝔞𝔱𝔟𝔯𝔦𝔡𝔤𝔢. ℑ𝔱'𝔰 𝔦𝔫 𝔖𝔠𝔬𝔱𝔩𝔞𝔫𝔡. ℭ𝔬𝔞𝔱𝔟𝔯𝔦𝔡𝔤𝔢 𝔦𝔰 𝔬𝔫 𝔱𝔥𝔢 𝔟𝔬𝔯𝔡𝔢𝔯 𝔬𝔣 𝔊𝔩𝔞𝔰𝔤𝔬𝔴 𝔞𝔫𝔡 𝔦𝔫 2001 𝔦𝔱 𝔥𝔞𝔡 𝔱𝔥𝔢 𝔡𝔢𝔫𝔰𝔢𝔰𝔱 𝔭𝔬𝔭𝔲𝔩𝔞𝔱𝔦𝔬𝔫 𝔬𝔣 ℑ𝔯𝔦𝔰𝔥 ℭ𝔞𝔱𝔥𝔬𝔩𝔦𝔠𝔰 𝔭𝔢𝔯 𝔠𝔞𝔭𝔦𝔱𝔞 𝔞𝔫𝔶𝔴𝔥𝔢𝔯𝔢 𝔦𝔫 𝔱𝔥𝔢 𝔴𝔬𝔯𝔩𝔡 𝔬𝔲𝔱𝔰𝔦𝔡𝔢 𝔬𝔣 ℑ𝔯𝔢𝔩𝔞𝔫𝔡.

ℑ 𝔡𝔦𝔡𝔫’𝔱 𝔨𝔫𝔬𝔴 𝔱𝔥𝔞𝔱 𝔰𝔞𝔶𝔦𝔫𝔤 𝔭𝔯𝔞𝔶𝔢𝔯𝔰 𝔢𝔦𝔤𝔥𝔱 𝔱𝔦𝔪𝔢𝔰 𝔞 𝔡𝔞𝔶 𝔴𝔞𝔰𝔫’𝔱 𝔫𝔬𝔯𝔪𝔞𝔩 𝔲𝔫𝔱𝔦𝔩 ℑ 𝔴𝔞𝔰 14. 𝔚𝔥𝔢𝔫 ℑ 𝔥𝔢𝔞𝔯 𝔭𝔢𝔬𝔭𝔩𝔢 𝔰𝔞𝔶 𝔱𝔥𝔢𝔪 𝔬𝔫 𝔱𝔢𝔩𝔢𝔳𝔦𝔰𝔦𝔬𝔫 𝔬𝔯 𝔦𝔫 𝔣𝔦𝔩𝔪𝔰, ℑ 𝔰𝔱𝔦𝔩𝔩 𝔭𝔯𝔞𝔶 𝔞𝔩𝔬𝔫𝔤 𝔴𝔦𝔱𝔥 𝔱𝔥𝔢𝔪 𝔦𝔫 𝔪𝔶 𝔥𝔢𝔞𝔡. ℑ 𝔡𝔦𝔡𝔫'𝔱 𝔩𝔦𝔨𝔢 𝔤𝔬𝔦𝔫𝔤 𝔱𝔬 𝔪𝔞𝔰𝔰 𝔴𝔥𝔢𝔫 ℑ 𝔴𝔞𝔰 𝔶𝔬𝔲𝔫𝔤𝔢𝔯, 𝔟𝔲𝔱 ℑ 𝔱𝔥𝔦𝔫𝔨 ℑ’𝔡 𝔩𝔦𝔨𝔢 𝔦𝔱 𝔫𝔬𝔴. 𝔐𝔶 𝔪𝔲𝔪 𝔰𝔞𝔶𝔰 𝔱𝔥𝔞𝔱 𝔞 𝔩𝔬𝔱 𝔱𝔬𝔬. 𝔖𝔞𝔶𝔦𝔫𝔤 “𝔭𝔢𝔞𝔠𝔢 𝔟𝔢 𝔴𝔦𝔱𝔥 𝔶𝔬𝔲” 𝔞𝔫𝔡 𝔰𝔥𝔞𝔨𝔦𝔫𝔤 𝔥𝔞𝔫𝔡𝔰 𝔴𝔦𝔱𝔥 𝔭𝔢𝔬𝔭𝔩𝔢 𝔴𝔞𝔰 𝔪𝔶 𝔣𝔞𝔳𝔬𝔲𝔯𝔦𝔱𝔢 𝔭𝔞𝔯𝔱 𝔬𝔣 𝔤𝔬𝔦𝔫𝔤 𝔱𝔬 𝔪𝔞𝔰𝔰.

𝕿𝖍𝖊𝖗𝖊 𝖆𝖗𝖊 𝖙𝖍𝖎𝖗𝖙𝖊𝖊𝖓 𝕮𝖆𝖙𝖍𝖔𝖑𝖎𝖈 𝖘𝖈𝖍𝖔𝖔𝖑𝖘 𝖆𝖓𝖉 𝖋𝖔𝖚𝖗 𝖓𝖔𝖓-𝖉𝖊𝖓𝖔𝖒𝖎𝖓𝖆𝖙𝖎𝖔𝖓𝖆𝖑 𝖘𝖈𝖍𝖔𝖔𝖑𝖘 𝖎𝖓 𝕮𝖔𝖆𝖙𝖇𝖗𝖎𝖉𝖌𝖊. 𝕴 𝖉𝖎𝖉𝖓'𝖙 𝖗𝖊𝖆𝖑𝖑𝖞 𝖐𝖓𝖔𝖜 𝖙𝖍𝖆𝖙 𝖔𝖙𝖍𝖊𝖗 𝖗𝖊𝖑𝖎𝖌𝖎𝖔𝖓𝖘 𝖊𝖝𝖎𝖘𝖙𝖊𝖉 𝖜𝖍𝖊𝖓 𝕴 𝖜𝖆𝖘 𝖞𝖔𝖚𝖓𝖌𝖊𝖗. 𝕴𝖓 𝕽𝖊𝖑𝖎𝖌𝖎𝖔𝖚𝖘 𝕰𝖉𝖚𝖈𝖆𝖙𝖎𝖔𝖓 𝖈𝖑𝖆𝖘𝖘, 𝖜𝖊 𝖏𝖚𝖘𝖙 𝖑𝖊𝖆𝖗𝖓𝖊𝖉 𝖆𝖇𝖔𝖚𝖙 𝖙𝖍𝖊 𝖙𝖍𝖎𝖓𝖌𝖘 𝖙𝖍𝖆𝖙 𝕮𝖆𝖙𝖍𝖔𝖑𝖎𝖈𝖘 𝖇𝖊𝖑𝖎𝖊𝖛𝖊.

𝕿𝖍𝖊 𝖋𝖎𝖗𝖘𝖙 𝖙𝖎𝖒𝖊 𝕴 𝖜𝖊𝖓𝖙 𝖙𝖔 𝖈𝖔𝖓𝖋𝖊𝖘𝖘𝖎𝖔𝖓 𝕴 𝖙𝖔𝖑𝖉 𝖙𝖍𝖊 𝖕𝖗𝖎𝖊𝖘𝖙 𝕴 𝖙𝖔𝖔𝖐 𝖘𝖔𝖒𝖊 𝖇𝖎𝖘𝖈𝖚𝖎𝖙𝖘 𝖔𝖚𝖙 𝖔𝖋 𝖙𝖍𝖊 𝖈𝖚𝖕𝖇𝖔𝖆𝖗𝖉 𝖜𝖎𝖙𝖍𝖔𝖚𝖙 𝖆𝖘𝖐𝖎𝖓𝖌. 𝕳𝖊 𝖙𝖔𝖑𝖉 𝖒𝖊 𝖙𝖔 𝖘𝖎𝖙 𝖆𝖓𝖉 𝖙𝖍𝖎𝖓𝖐 𝖆𝖇𝖔𝖚𝖙 𝖜𝖍𝖊𝖙𝖍𝖊𝖗 𝕴’𝖉 𝖉𝖔𝖓𝖊 𝖆𝖓𝖞𝖙𝖍𝖎𝖓𝖌 𝖜𝖔𝖗𝖘𝖊. 𝕴 𝖒𝖆𝖉𝖊 𝖚𝖕 𝖆 𝖘𝖙𝖔𝖗𝖞 𝖆𝖇𝖔𝖚𝖙 𝖒𝖊 𝖇𝖊𝖎𝖓𝖌 𝖗𝖊𝖆𝖑𝖑𝖞 𝖇𝖆𝖉 𝖆𝖓𝖉 𝖌𝖔𝖙 𝖆𝖓 𝕬𝖈𝖙 𝕺𝖋 𝕮𝖔𝖓𝖙𝖗𝖎𝖙𝖎𝖔𝖓 𝖆𝖓𝖉 𝖙𝖊𝖓 𝕳𝖆𝖎𝖑 𝕸𝖆𝖗𝖞𝖘. 𝕴 𝖉𝖎𝖉 𝖆𝖑𝖑 𝖙𝖊𝖓 𝖔𝖋 𝖙𝖍𝖊𝖒 𝖇𝖚𝖙 𝖎𝖙’𝖘 𝖔𝖐𝖆𝖞 𝖇𝖊𝖈𝖆𝖚𝖘𝖊 𝖒𝖞 𝖌𝖗𝖆𝖓𝖉𝖕𝖆 𝖌𝖆𝖛𝖊 𝖒𝖊 £𝟑𝟎 𝖋𝖔𝖗 𝖉𝖔𝖎𝖓𝖌 𝖈𝖔𝖓𝖋𝖊𝖘𝖘𝖎𝖔𝖓 𝖆𝖓𝖉 𝖙𝖍𝖆𝖙 𝖜𝖆𝖘 𝖊𝖓𝖔𝖚𝖌𝖍 𝖙𝖔 𝖇𝖚𝖞 𝕲𝖔𝖑𝖉𝖊𝖓𝕰𝖞𝖊 𝖋𝖔𝖗 𝖙𝖍𝖊 𝕹𝖎𝖓𝖙𝖊𝖓𝖉𝖔 𝟔𝟒.

𝕬𝖙 𝖔𝖚𝖗 𝖘𝖈𝖍𝖔𝖔𝖑 𝖉𝖎𝖘𝖈𝖔𝖘, 𝖙𝖍𝖊 𝖈𝖍𝖆𝖕𝖑𝖆𝖎𝖓 𝖜𝖔𝖚𝖑𝖉 𝖜𝖍𝖆𝖈𝖐 𝖆 𝖘𝖙𝖎𝖈𝖐 𝖇𝖊𝖙𝖜𝖊𝖊𝖓 𝖘𝖙𝖚𝖉𝖊𝖓𝖙𝖘 𝖎𝖋 𝖙𝖍𝖊𝖞 𝖉𝖎𝖉𝖓’𝖙 𝖒𝖆𝖎𝖓𝖙𝖆𝖎𝖓 𝖆 𝖘𝖆𝖋𝖊 𝖉𝖎𝖘𝖙𝖆𝖓𝖈𝖊 𝖋𝖗𝖔𝖒 𝖙𝖍𝖊𝖎𝖗 𝖕𝖆𝖗𝖙𝖓𝖊𝖗 𝖆𝖓𝖉 𝖘𝖕𝖊𝖓𝖙 𝖒𝖆𝖓𝖞 𝖉𝖎𝖔𝖈𝖊𝖘𝖊𝖘-𝖆𝖕𝖕𝖗𝖔𝖛𝖊𝖉 𝖉𝖆𝖓𝖈𝖊 𝖓𝖚𝖒𝖇𝖊𝖗𝖘 𝖕𝖔𝖎𝖓𝖙𝖎𝖓𝖌 𝖋𝖑𝖆𝖘𝖍𝖑𝖎𝖌𝖍𝖙𝖘 𝖎𝖓𝖙𝖔 𝖉𝖆𝖗𝖐 𝖈𝖔𝖗𝖓𝖊𝖗𝖘. 𝕳𝖊 𝖜𝖆𝖘 𝖋𝖚𝖗𝖎𝖔𝖚𝖘 𝖜𝖍𝖊𝖓 𝖍𝖊 𝖈𝖆𝖚𝖌𝖍𝖙 𝖞𝖔𝖚 𝖐𝖎𝖘𝖘𝖎𝖓𝖌. 𝕳𝖊 𝖈𝖆𝖚𝖌𝖍𝖙 𝖒𝖔𝖘𝖙 𝖕𝖊𝖔𝖕𝖑𝖊 𝖉𝖔𝖎𝖓𝖌 𝖘𝖔𝖒𝖊 𝖐𝖎𝖓𝖉 𝖔𝖋 𝖐𝖎𝖘𝖘𝖎𝖓𝖌 𝖆𝖙 𝖘𝖔𝖒𝖊 𝖕𝖔𝖎𝖓𝖙 𝖎𝖓 𝖙𝖍𝖊𝖎𝖗 𝖙𝖎𝖒𝖊 𝖆𝖙 𝖔𝖚𝖗 𝖘𝖈𝖍𝖔𝖔𝖑. 𝕬 𝖋𝖊𝖜 𝖞𝖊𝖆𝖗𝖘 𝖑𝖆𝖙𝖊𝖗, 𝖙𝖍𝖊 𝖕𝖗𝖎𝖊𝖘𝖙 𝖜𝖊𝖓𝖙 𝖔𝖓 𝖙𝖔 𝖍𝖆𝖛𝖊 𝖆𝖓 𝖆𝖋𝖋𝖆𝖎𝖗 𝖜𝖎𝖙𝖍 𝖔𝖚𝖗 𝖍𝖊𝖆𝖉 𝖙𝖊𝖆𝖈𝖍𝖊𝖗 𝖆𝖓𝖉 𝖗𝖊𝖓𝖔𝖚𝖓𝖈𝖊𝖉 𝖍𝖎𝖘 𝖛𝖔𝖜𝖘.

𝓘’𝓿𝓮 𝓷𝓮𝓿𝓮𝓻 𝓱𝓪𝓭 𝓪𝓷𝔂 𝓴𝓲𝓷𝓭 𝓸𝓯 𝓼𝓮𝔁 𝓮𝓭𝓾𝓬𝓪𝓽𝓲𝓸𝓷 𝓯𝓻𝓸𝓶 𝓪𝓷𝔂𝓸𝓷𝓮, 𝓽𝓱𝓸𝓾𝓰𝓱 𝓲𝓽 𝓲𝓼 𝓶𝓪𝓷𝓭𝓪𝓽𝓸𝓻𝔂 𝓯𝓸𝓻 𝓼𝓬𝓱𝓸𝓸𝓵𝓼 𝓸𝓯 𝓪𝓵𝓵 𝓭𝓮𝓷𝓸𝓶𝓲𝓷𝓪𝓽𝓲𝓸𝓷𝓼 𝓲𝓷 𝓢𝓬𝓸𝓽𝓵𝓪𝓷𝓭 𝓽𝓸 𝓽𝓮𝓪𝓬𝓱 𝓰𝓲𝓻𝓵𝓼 𝓪𝓫𝓸𝓾𝓽 𝓹𝓾𝓫𝓮𝓻𝓽𝔂 𝓪𝓷𝓭 𝓶𝓮𝓷𝓼𝓽𝓻𝓾𝓪𝓽𝓲𝓸𝓷. 𝓞𝓷 𝓽𝓱𝓮 𝓭𝓪𝔂 𝓽𝓱𝓮 𝓰𝓲𝓻𝓵𝓼 𝓲𝓷 𝓸𝓾𝓻 𝓼𝓬𝓱𝓸𝓸𝓵 𝓱𝓪𝓭 𝓽𝓸 𝓵𝓮𝓪𝓻𝓷 𝓪𝓫𝓸𝓾𝓽 𝓪𝓵𝓵 𝓸𝓯 𝓽𝓱𝓲𝓼, 𝓽𝓱𝓮 𝓫𝓸𝔂𝓼 𝓰𝓸𝓽 𝓽𝓸 𝓰𝓸 𝓽𝓸 𝓪 𝓵𝓸𝓬𝓪𝓵 𝔀𝓪𝓽𝓮𝓻 𝓹𝓪𝓻𝓴. 𝓜𝔂 𝓯𝓻𝓲𝓮𝓷𝓭𝓼 𝓪𝓷𝓭 𝓘 𝓶𝓪𝓷𝓪𝓰𝓮𝓭 𝓽𝓸 𝓫𝓮𝓪𝓽 𝓖𝓪𝓾𝓷𝓽𝓵𝓮𝓽 𝓪𝓽 𝓽𝓱𝓮 𝓪𝓻𝓬𝓪𝓭𝓮 𝓽𝓱𝓮𝓻𝓮 𝓽𝓱𝓪𝓽 𝓭𝓪𝔂 𝓪𝓷𝓭 𝔀𝓱𝓮𝓷 𝔀𝓮 𝓽𝓸𝓵𝓭 𝓸𝓾𝓻 𝓸𝓷𝓵𝔂 𝓯𝓮𝓶𝓪𝓵𝓮 𝓯𝓻𝓲𝓮𝓷𝓭 𝓪𝓫𝓸𝓾𝓽 𝓲𝓽 𝓵𝓪𝓽𝓮𝓻 𝓸𝓷, 𝓼𝓱𝓮 𝓼𝓽𝓪𝓻𝓽𝓮𝓭 𝓬𝓻𝔂𝓲𝓷𝓰.

𝓐 𝓽𝓮𝓪𝓬𝓱𝓮𝓻 𝓸𝓷𝓬𝓮 𝓽𝓸𝓵𝓭 𝓾𝓼 𝓽𝓱𝓪𝓽 𝓱𝓪𝓿𝓲𝓷𝓰 𝓼𝓮𝔁 𝓸𝓾𝓽𝓼𝓲𝓭𝓮 𝓸𝓯 𝓶𝓪𝓻𝓻𝓲𝓪𝓰𝓮 𝔀𝓸𝓾𝓵𝓭, 𝓻𝓮𝓰𝓪𝓻𝓭𝓵𝓮𝓼𝓼 𝓸𝓯 𝓬𝓸𝓷𝓽𝓻𝓪𝓬𝓮𝓹𝓽𝓲𝓸𝓷, 𝓪𝓾𝓽𝓸𝓶𝓪𝓽𝓲𝓬𝓪𝓵𝓵𝔂 𝓵𝓮𝓪𝓭 𝓽𝓸 𝓹𝓻𝓮𝓰𝓷𝓪𝓷𝓬𝔂 𝓪𝓷𝓭 𝓽𝓱𝓮 𝓬𝓸𝓷𝓽𝓻𝓪𝓬𝓽𝓲𝓸𝓷 𝓸𝓯 𝓐𝓘𝓓𝓼 𝓪𝓷𝓭 𝓗𝓘𝓥. 𝓗𝓮 𝓽𝓱𝓸𝓾𝓰𝓱𝓽 𝓐𝓘𝓓𝓼 𝓪𝓷𝓭 𝓗𝓘𝓥 𝔀𝓮𝓻𝓮 𝓽𝔀𝓸 𝓭𝓲𝓯𝓯𝓮𝓻𝓮𝓷𝓽 𝓽𝓱𝓲𝓷𝓰𝓼. 𝓐𝓘𝓓𝓼 𝔀𝓪𝓼 𝓖𝓸𝓭’𝓼 𝓹𝓾𝓷𝓲𝓼𝓱𝓶𝓮𝓷𝓽 𝓯𝓸𝓻 𝓹𝓮𝓸𝓹𝓵𝓮 𝔀𝓱𝓸 𝓭𝓲𝓭𝓷'𝓽 𝓻𝓮𝓼𝓹𝓮𝓬𝓽 𝓽𝓱𝓮 𝓱𝓸𝓵𝔂 𝓼𝓪𝓬𝓻𝓪𝓶𝓮𝓷𝓽 𝓸𝓯 𝓶𝓪𝓽𝓻𝓲𝓶𝓸𝓷𝔂. 𝓣𝓱𝓮 𝓯𝓲𝓻𝓼𝓽 𝓰𝓲𝓻𝓵 𝓘 𝓮𝓿𝓮𝓻 𝓼𝓵𝓮𝓹𝓽 𝔀𝓲𝓽𝓱 𝔀𝓪𝓼 𝓯𝓻𝓸𝓶 𝓶𝔂 𝓬𝓵𝓪𝓼𝓼 𝓪𝓷𝓭 𝓘 𝓽𝓱𝓲𝓷𝓴 𝓽𝓱𝓪𝓽 𝔀𝓪𝓼 𝓸𝓷 𝓫𝓸𝓽𝓱 𝓸𝓯 𝓸𝓾𝓻 𝓶𝓲𝓷𝓭𝓼 𝔀𝓱𝓮𝓷 𝔀𝓮 𝓱𝓪𝓭 𝓼𝓮𝔁.

𝓐𝓯𝓽𝓮𝓻 𝓘 𝓻𝓮𝓪𝓭 𝓣𝓱𝓮 𝓖𝓸𝓭 𝓓𝓮𝓵𝓾𝓼𝓲𝓸𝓷 𝓪𝓷𝓭 𝓭𝓮𝓬𝓲𝓭𝓮𝓭 𝓘 𝓱𝓪𝓭 𝓯𝓲𝓰𝓾𝓻𝓮𝓭 𝓸𝓾𝓽 𝓱𝓾𝓶𝓪𝓷 𝓮𝔁𝓲𝓼𝓽𝓮𝓷𝓬𝓮, 𝓘 𝓼𝓽𝓸𝓹𝓹𝓮𝓭 𝓼𝓲𝓰𝓷𝓲𝓷𝓰 𝓪𝓯𝓽𝓮𝓻 𝓹𝓻𝓪𝔂𝓮𝓻𝓼 𝓪𝓷𝓭 𝓶𝓪𝓭𝓮 𝓽𝓱𝓮 𝓲𝓷𝓭𝓲𝓼𝓹𝓸𝓼𝓮𝓭 𝓬𝓻𝓸𝓼𝓼 𝔀𝓱𝓮𝓷 𝓲𝓽 𝔀𝓪𝓼 𝓽𝓲𝓶𝓮 𝓽𝓸 𝓻𝓮𝓬𝓮𝓲𝓿𝓮 𝓬𝓸𝓶𝓶𝓾𝓷𝓲𝓸𝓷. 𝓘 𝓪𝓵𝔀𝓪𝔂𝓼 𝔀𝓪𝓼𝓱𝓮𝓭 𝓽𝓱𝓮 𝓪𝓼𝓱𝓮𝓼 𝓸𝓯𝓯 𝓶𝔂 𝓯𝓸𝓻𝓮𝓱𝓮𝓪𝓭 𝓫𝓮𝓬𝓪𝓾𝓼𝓮 𝓲𝓽 𝓲𝓷𝓽𝓮𝓻𝓯𝓮𝓻𝓮𝓭 𝔀𝓲𝓽𝓱 𝓶𝔂 𝓼𝓲𝓭𝓮-𝓯𝓻𝓲𝓷𝓰𝓮. 𝓘𝓷 𝓶𝔂 𝓯𝓲𝓷𝓪𝓵 𝔂𝓮𝓪𝓻 𝓸𝓯 𝓼𝓬𝓱𝓸𝓸𝓵 𝓘 𝔀𝓪𝓼 𝓪𝓭𝓿𝓲𝓼𝓮𝓭 𝓽𝓸 𝓵𝓮𝓪𝓿𝓮 𝓪𝓷𝓭 𝓰𝓮𝓽 𝓪 𝓳𝓸𝓫 𝓫𝓮𝓬𝓪𝓾𝓼𝓮 𝓘 𝔀𝓪𝓼𝓷'𝓽 𝓮𝓷𝓰𝓪𝓰𝓲𝓷𝓰 𝔀𝓲𝓽𝓱 𝓽𝓱𝓮 𝓼𝓬𝓱𝓸𝓸𝓵'𝓼 𝓮𝓽𝓱𝓸𝓼 𝓪𝓷𝓭 𝓿𝓪𝓵𝓾𝓮𝓼.

𝘞𝘩𝘪𝘭𝘦 𝘢𝘭𝘭 𝘮𝘺 𝘧𝘳𝘪𝘦𝘯𝘥𝘴 𝘧𝘪𝘯𝘪𝘴𝘩𝘦𝘥 𝘵𝘩𝘦𝘪𝘳 𝘴𝘵𝘶𝘥𝘪𝘦𝘴, 𝘐 𝘭𝘦𝘢𝘳𝘯𝘦𝘥 𝘵𝘰 𝘥𝘳𝘪𝘷𝘦 𝘢𝘯𝘥 𝘨𝘰𝘵 𝘢 𝘫𝘰𝘣 𝘰𝘶𝘵𝘴𝘪𝘥𝘦 𝘰𝘧 𝘊𝘰𝘢𝘵𝘣𝘳𝘪𝘥𝘨𝘦. 𝘛𝘩𝘢𝘵 𝘸𝘢𝘴 𝘢 𝘥𝘦𝘭𝘪𝘣𝘦𝘳𝘢𝘵𝘦 𝘥𝘦𝘤𝘪𝘴𝘪𝘰𝘯. 𝘐 𝘭𝘪𝘬𝘦𝘥 𝘵𝘰 𝘵𝘢𝘬𝘦 𝘱𝘦𝘰𝘱𝘭𝘦 𝘰𝘯 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘔𝘤𝘋𝘰𝘯𝘢𝘭𝘥𝘴 𝘛𝘰𝘶𝘳, 𝘸𝘩𝘪𝘤𝘩 𝘪𝘴 𝘸𝘩𝘦𝘯 𝘺𝘰𝘶 𝘥𝘳𝘪𝘷𝘦 𝘧𝘳𝘰𝘮 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘔𝘤𝘋𝘰𝘯𝘢𝘭𝘥𝘴 𝘪𝘯 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘦𝘢𝘴𝘵 𝘰𝘧 𝘊𝘰𝘢𝘵𝘣𝘳𝘪𝘥𝘨𝘦 𝘵𝘰 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘔𝘤𝘋𝘰𝘯𝘢𝘭𝘥𝘴 𝘪𝘯 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘸𝘦𝘴𝘵 𝘰𝘧 𝘊𝘰𝘢𝘵𝘣𝘳𝘪𝘥𝘨𝘦 𝘢𝘯𝘥 𝘰𝘯 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘸𝘢𝘺 𝘺𝘰𝘶 𝘦𝘯𝘥 𝘶𝘱 𝘴𝘦𝘦𝘪𝘯𝘨 𝘮𝘰𝘴𝘵 𝘰𝘧 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘵𝘰𝘸𝘯. 𝘛𝘩𝘦𝘳𝘦 𝘸𝘦𝘳𝘦 𝘵𝘸𝘰 𝘔𝘤𝘋𝘰𝘯𝘢𝘭𝘥𝘴 𝘪𝘯 𝘊𝘰𝘢𝘵𝘣𝘳𝘪𝘥𝘨𝘦 𝘢𝘯𝘥 𝘰𝘯𝘭𝘺 𝘰𝘯𝘦 𝘴𝘪𝘵-𝘪𝘯 𝘳𝘦𝘴𝘵𝘢𝘶𝘳𝘢𝘯𝘵.

𝚆𝚑𝚎𝚗 𝙸 𝚠𝚊𝚜 𝟸𝟷, 𝙸 𝚐𝚘𝚝 𝚊 𝚓𝚘𝚋 𝚊𝚜 𝚊 𝚛𝚎𝚜𝚎𝚊𝚛𝚌𝚑𝚎𝚛 𝚏𝚘𝚛 𝙶𝚕𝚊𝚜𝚐𝚘𝚠 𝚄𝚗𝚒𝚟𝚎𝚛𝚜𝚒𝚝𝚢 𝚊𝚗𝚍 𝚠𝚒𝚝𝚑𝚒𝚗 𝚊 𝚠𝚎𝚎𝚔 𝚍𝚎𝚌𝚒𝚍𝚎𝚍 𝚝𝚘 𝚖𝚘𝚟𝚎 𝚊 𝚠𝚑𝚘𝚕𝚎 𝚝𝚎𝚗 𝚖𝚒𝚕𝚎𝚜 𝚊𝚠𝚊𝚢 𝚏𝚛𝚘𝚖 𝙲𝚘𝚊𝚝𝚋𝚛𝚒𝚍𝚐𝚎 𝚠𝚒𝚝𝚑 𝚗𝚘 𝚒𝚗𝚝𝚎𝚗𝚝𝚒𝚘𝚗𝚜 𝚘𝚏 𝚎𝚟𝚎𝚛 𝚛𝚎𝚝𝚞𝚛𝚗𝚒𝚗𝚐. 𝙾𝚗 𝚝𝚑𝚎 𝚍𝚊𝚢 𝙸 𝚕𝚎𝚏𝚝, 𝚖𝚢 𝚖𝚞𝚖 𝚐𝚊𝚟𝚎 𝚖𝚎 𝚝𝚑𝚎 𝚛𝚘𝚜𝚊𝚛𝚢 𝚋𝚎𝚊𝚍𝚜 𝚝𝚑𝚊𝚝 𝙿𝚘𝚙𝚎 𝙹𝚘𝚑𝚗 𝙿𝚊𝚞𝚕 𝙸𝙸 𝚋𝚕𝚎𝚜𝚜𝚎𝚍 𝚏𝚘𝚛 𝚑𝚎𝚛 𝚊𝚗𝚍 𝚜𝚊𝚒𝚍 𝚜𝚑𝚎 𝚠𝚘𝚞𝚕𝚍𝚗’𝚝 𝚋𝚎 𝚊𝚋𝚕𝚎 𝚝𝚘 𝚜𝚎𝚎 𝚖𝚎 𝚘𝚏𝚏 𝚋𝚎𝚌𝚊𝚞𝚜𝚎 𝚜𝚑𝚎 𝚑𝚊𝚍 𝚊 𝚍𝚘𝚌𝚝𝚘𝚛’𝚜 𝚊𝚙𝚙𝚘𝚒𝚗𝚝𝚖𝚎𝚗𝚝. 𝙰 𝚏𝚎𝚠 𝚢𝚎𝚊𝚛𝚜 𝚕𝚊𝚝𝚎𝚛 𝙸 𝚏𝚘𝚞𝚗𝚍 𝚘𝚞𝚝 𝚝𝚑𝚎𝚛𝚎 𝚠𝚊𝚜 𝚗𝚘 𝚍𝚘𝚌𝚝𝚘𝚛’𝚜 𝚊𝚙𝚙𝚘𝚒𝚗𝚝𝚖𝚎𝚗𝚝. 𝚂𝚑𝚎 𝚓𝚞𝚜𝚝 𝚠𝚎𝚗𝚝 𝚊 𝚛𝚎𝚊𝚕𝚕𝚢 𝚕𝚘𝚗𝚐 𝚠𝚊𝚕𝚔 𝚛𝚘𝚞𝚗𝚍 𝚝𝚑𝚎 𝚕𝚘𝚌𝚑.

Pentiment has an official reading list, partly composed of some of the books that the team used for reference when building the game's art, plot, and characters. They're an interesting collection of books, and since my love of Pentiment overflowed after finishing it originally, I poured that excess enthusiasm into reading them. Now that I have read them all and replayed Pentiment with the knowledge in hand, I thought it would be interesting to dive into the inspirations and how they helped me to have a more complete understanding of the historical and cultural background of the game. Hopefully it won't be too dry, but also bear in mind that this is a very loose analysis. I'm not going to go back and find passages to cite unless they're super important to the point I'm making. I'm enough of a nerd to read five books for a backlog review, not for an academic article.


First things, the books: I read the following from the reading list, which you can find here: (https://news.xbox.com/en-us/2022/11/10/recommended-reading-of-medieval-history-from-josh-sawyer/)

1 The Name of the Rose: Umberto Eco

2 Peasant Fires: The Drummer of Niklashausen Richard Wunderli

3 The Cheese and the Worms, Carlo Ginzburg

4: The Return of Martin Guerre, Natalie Zemon Davis

5: The Faithful Executioner, Joel F. Harrington

6 Dürer's Journeys: Travels of a Renaissance Artist—Susan Foister and Peter Van Den Brink


The Name of the Rose is perhaps the most important book on the list in terms of understanding the inspiration behind Pentiment. I admit I watched the film before reading the novel, but they are rather different beasts. Besides certain common elements between Pentiment and Name of the Rose, like the fictitious Abbey, certain elements straining the credibility of the historical setting (tassing having all strata of social classes present, the 15th century scriptorium vs. a random ass mountain abbey having a gigantic labyrinthine library), and main characters borrowing from real historical figures who are name-dropped in the story (William of Ockham in Name of the Rose and Albrecht Durer in Pentiment), the main connection is that they both use the classic detective murder mystery setup as a framework to explore both theology, historical moments, conflict, etc.

This is the part where the movie most differs from the book; it makes sense given that you can't really fit all that into 90 minutes. It chooses to keep the juicy murder mystery and some background political intrigue but dispenses with the broader narrative of the book, which is about apostolic poverty and the Avginon papacy. Essentially the gravity of the murders add a sense of urgency in solving them because the Abbey is defending its political independence as neutral ground for a meeting of the pope(or anti-pope really)'s men and several monastic orders and representatives of the holy roman emperor to debate the merits of how the church should function, if it should reject all property and live as paupers, which has both a religious significance but also a political one in the conflict between the Avignon Papacy (essentially for a while the pope left Rome and went to France and this had a pretty massive impact upon european politics of the time with a politically ascendant France) and the HRE and the various religious orders like the Benedictines and Franciscans. This is mirrored in Pentiment, which also uses the murders of Baron Rothvogel and later Otto as a framework to highlight both the purpose of historical memory, the nature of justice and peace in early modern Europe, the importance of religion in their communities and how alien that can feel to modern audiences in rich countries, life, death, our ideas of the past and how they influence us in the present, and a whole bunch of related themes.

Similarly, in Act 1, the murder is also presented as politically inconvenient for the abbot, who seeks a speedy resolution to the issue much like the abbot in The Name of the Rose does, but for the different reason that his Kiersau Abbey is an oddity in the church, maintaining practices such as a double monastery, which have long been frowned at by the catholic authorities but have simply remained unnoticed due to its insignificance. A long, embarassing murder investigation could bring the hammer down on them, which leads to the Abbotts callously attempting to throw Andreas' mentor, Piero, for the murder so that the monastery may continue without issue. There is also the matter of the scriptorium and adjacent library with a secret entrance by the ossuary in Name of the Rose and Crypt in Pentiment (though in truth, I think Brother Volkbert confirms that the crypt just holds bones, so it's probably also appropriate to call it an ossuary) being direct references.

In both stories, the skill of the detectives is a bit suspect. In the case of William of Baskerville, whilst he is definitely closer to the Platonic ideal of your Sherlock Holmes figure, being less of an unbelievable omniscient who has information, the reader doesn't like many of the examples of bad detective fiction (cough cough, BBC Sherlock). His assumptions and thought processes are reasonable (for the most part), but he sure takes his time in solving the case. In fact, he arguably fails pretty much everything he sets out to do. Seven people lie dead, the library got burned down, and the matter of apostolic poverty they had come to debate eventually led to it being branded as heretical, though the Avginon papacy did disappear in due time as the seat of the Holy See returned to Rome. Of course, he does have a sort of moral victory over the reactionary Jorge who set the murders in motion to hide the existence of a lost tome, which would, in his view, help to elevate comedy and laughter, which he views as subversive and leading to heresy and the corruption of the divine truth. It is fitting given the frequent debates in the book that the climax would involve essentially a philosophical discussion. This parallels somewhat Pentiment's ending, wherein Father Thomas brings down the Mithraeum below the church to erase the proof of St. Satia and St. Moritz being essentially just Diana and Mars, pagan figures worshipped before the Bavarian Christians settled on tassing. Andreas is also not the greatest sleuth, though, in large part, being an interactive medium, the character of Andreas' skills depends upon players' actions. Nevertheless, the constant of Andreas having to make difficult choices using incomplete information is a constant; it's impossible for him to ever fully uncover the truth of the matter with the limited time and resources he has to investigate the murders, and much like many things, including historical events, it's not really possible to actually 100% discover the "true" killer. There are likelier candidates, of course, and a good argument can be made for the most reasonable culprit, like in Act 1, where it is rather doubtful that Ottilia did it; I think Lucky is almost certainly the murderer; and it's interesting just how much a second playthrough can change a lot of what I thought. In Act 2, it's rather less clear, with Hanna and Guy both having threads pointing to them.

Either way, there is also the matter that Andreas and Pentiment as a whole are also concerned with the perception of truth rather than the whole matter of it, similar to the Name of the Rose: case in point: when Andreas returns to Tassing a few years later in Act 1, the Innkeeper will refer to a warped version of the events of the original murder, suggesting that either way the truth of the events has already passed into unreliable folklore. There is an angle to consider when choosing a culprit in both acts when considering the consequences for the community. Its still refreshing to me in an industry that still has seemingly not moved on from boring black and white low honor vs. high honor binary choice bullshit that Pentiment presents you with the infinitely more interesting to my mind issue of Ottilia Kemperyn. An old, misanthropic, heretical widow whose husband's death was caused by the murdered Baron Rothvogel's savage beating has essentially given up on life. Her house is just about to be taken away from her by the church because she has no heirs and cannot own property herself. If one were to invent utilitarianism in the 15th century, one could argue that letting the obviously innocent Ottilia take the heat for the murder of the Baron is the optimal choice; indeed, standing up for her by challenging the church's claim to her house does cause her to retain the house onto Act 2, but the church is predictably angry at your actions, and you've done little more than buy a woman a few more miserable years of her life. Of course, in doing so, you will be utterly perverting justice and sentencing a woman to the executioner, whose only crime was being born a peasant woman in the 15th century, with all the trials it entails. These tough choices are not limited just to Andreas, with Act 3 the townsfolk are still reconciling their choices in dealing with Otto's murder in 1525 and subsequent burning of the abbey (which mirrors the ending of The Name of The Rose with the Abbey and Library burning down also) and whilst they all have different perspectives on the issue, its interesting that some regret the foolishness that brought the hammer down on them and resulted in bloodshed whilst also recognizing that that very sacrifice led to their current positions, there is some optimism in the ending, with some arguing that the Abbot's ecclesiastical authority being replaced with the lord's secular one has been beneficial, with slightly less strict oversight and Lenhardt being murdered at least had temporary material improvements for the peasants who wouldn't be completely gouged by the new miller. As with everything, one can only move forward; the wheel of time stops for no man, and making peace with our mistakes and seeing a broader perspective is supremely important to life.

Peasant Fires doesn't cover the more famous 1525 German Peasant rebellion, but rather the lesser known Niklashausen rebellion of 1478, wherein a drummer whipped up a mass of pilgrims to rebel against the ruling authorities, claiming that he had received a divine vision of the virgin Mary, who called on him and the faithful to overthrow the corrupt church and kill the priests, that god had ordained for all land to be held in common and the feudal lords of the time had corrupted his will. The book explores the role of festivals in medieval Europe, with some serving as outlets for repressed anger at the authorities, like carnival being a time of playfully "reversing" the established relations of nobility, royalty, and peasantry. It highlights how, for most peasants, the calendar would be seen through the lens of the various public festivals throughout the year, from Christmas to Carnival to Lent to Easter, etc. Despite the much harsher working conditions, there were many more public holidays for the Europeans of the 15th century than there are for the Brits of today. Its influence is most apparent in Pentiment's Act 2, with Otto claiming a holy vision has revealed that the Lord is with the townsfolk of Tassing against the increased taxes and restrictions of the Abbot, mirroring the drummer. Otto's murder occurs during St. John's Eve, a very popular summer festival, with anger boiling over with the Abbot threatening excommunication to anyone he finds in the forest getting up to mischief. In both examples, the peasants are drawn to revolt against ecclesiastical authorities due to the increasing restrictions on their rights and material conditions. In Tassing, there is a noticeable decline in living standards, with the poor Gertners being particularly destitute due to increased taxes.

In the 1478 rebellion, the drummer started rallying people to the cause by preaching near the pilgrimage site of Niklashausen. In Pentiment, the Abbot further angers the peasants by closing the Shrine of St. Moritz, which is also a pilgrimage site and source of some religious comfort to the Catholic denizens of Tassing who often prayed to Saints for deliverance. The book goes into some depth regarding pilgrimages in the early modern period. While the sale of indulgences is much better known given its importance to the reformation, it is often overlooked that pilgrimages served a similar purpose. The idea of purgatory was such that pilgrims could reduce the suffering of themselves and/or deceased relatives by visiting a site of pilgrimage and receiving a partial indulgence for time in purgatory. It was another way in which the peasants would be essentially emotionally blackmailed into either donating or traveling to a holy site, which of course also had the effect of increasing the prestige and economic power of a church that hosted one of these relics, like the hand of a saint, a piece of the true cross, or what have you.

The main issue with the book is that the sources are very spotty, and so the author basically speculates on a large chunk of them. He at least admits that this is the case and makes clear what is his own imagination and what’s supported by the evidence, but still, it's a rather short book to begin with. Its illuminating at the very least regarding just how fucked medieval peasants were economically, the role of festivals and pilgrimages, and the power of mystics in inciting rebellion.

The Faithful Executioner is a work of microhistory focused on the life of the executioner of Nuremberg during a particularly busy time for such a professional. It has the advantage of drawing upon an unusual source: a detailed journal written by the said executioner during his time working for the city. It was rare for a man like him to be able to read, much less to leave such thorough notes about his work. It's a very interesting tale, which I recommend picking up. It's both a greater history lesson about the role of the executioner and the specific conditions in 16th-century HRE, which led to a significant increase in their work, and the personal story of a man’s quest to advance his and his family’s station from the unfortunate place it was put in. It also does a lot to make us understand the perspective and social attitudes that influenced this institution, which is, to our modern eyes, quite cruel and ghastly, without just making an apology for the indefensible. Its relation to Pentiment is obvious; it is a work that is deeply concerned with justice, crime, and punishment, and the appearance of justice and truth is often times more important than the actual thing itself. In chapter 1, whichever culprit gets selected will get executed violently and publicly, either by the executioner’s sword in the case of the male suspects of lucky or ferenc or being choked to death in the case of the female suspects. Interestingly, in the faithful executioner, we are told that execution by sword at the time was usually reserved for the nobility (even often times being the result of a bribe to the judges to forgo the more slow and painful executions down to the more “dignified” decapitation). I imagine, though, that the choice of the sword was more of a creative decision, being the quickest way to show the culprit being killed. In the case of Prior Ferenc’s execution, it was slightly botched, requiring three slashes to finish him off. In the case of the faithful executioner, part of the titular executioner’s great reputation, which allowed him to eventually appeal his status (executioners were part of the official underclass, unable to perform “honorable” professions, and were oftentimes banned from joining a guild and other legal discrimination), came from the fact that he very rarely botched an execution; indeed, the executioner himself could be in danger when performing a beheading, and it was common for crowds to turn on the executioner if it took more than 3 strokes to fall the criminal. Its not surprising to me that states eventually realized how counterproductive public execution was, with modern ones being performed in some prison room away from the public. The fact is, and Pentiment explores this as well, that it's all well and good to believe that someone deserves to die or that they had their brutal end coming to them; certainly, there are many rapists, murderers, etc., and even if one opposes the death penalty on principle, we would not be sad to hear that they were killed. And yet, I dare to say that if you were to witness such a person being violently killed, well, most well-adjusted people would respond with horror and even sympathy for such a situation.

Certainly, I don’t weep at the thought that some of the hanged nazis at Nuremberg were actually left choking for quite a few minutes before expiring, but even with them, were I to be in the room, I would look away from such a horrible sight. Humans are empathic for the most part, and it's hard to see such things without feeling bad.

It's a sobering moment watching the execution of Ferenc, who might be suspected of performing occult rituals and murdering a man in cold blood, but it's another to see him praying for mercy before being brutally cut down. The victory is hollow; there is a reason why Sherlock Holmes stories end with the suspect in custody and not Sherlock Holmes gloating in front of the gallows with the criminal’s corpse hanging forlornly from the scaffold. Okay, okay, that's enough unpleasantness. Let's move on from this grizzly subject.

The Cheese and the Worms is another work of microhistory, this time on the subject of Mennochio, an eccentric miller in 15th-century France who used his rare literacy and access to a variety of books passed around by his neighbors (who were unusually literate for the time also) to develop his own eclectic brand of religious thought, which eventually got him into trouble with the Inquisition, who were mostly baffled by what seemed to be a unique brand of heresy invented by essentially one random peasant guy, far from the norm of wandering preachers, secret societies, and the like. Its influence is most apparent in the figure of Vaclav, a Romani knife sharpener who will share his equally weird beliefs if you’ll indulge him, which, funnily enough, if you do, he gets burned at the stake for heresy, as evidenced by the town-wide family tree next to the mural in the game's ending. In the case of Vaclav, they’re a weird syncretism of gnosticism, Christian mysticism, and just his own blend of strange esoteric religious theories. The role of increased literacy and the printing press allowing more people to read “dangerous ideas” is brought up often during Acts 1 and 2, with Father Thomas and others being wary of the effects it could have in riling up the peasantry and the danger of certain ideas spreading. The elephant in the room is, of course, the protestant reformation and the 1525 peasant rebellion, which were greatly aided by the increased availability of the written word, further increasing the demand for a translation of the Bible written in German and other vernacular languages as opposed to Latin, which was mainly spoken by the priesthood. Its no surprise that this eventually led to an explosion of different Protestant denominations, as anyone who could read the Bible for themselves could develop a novel interpretation of the scripture.

In the case of Menochio, while from a modern perspective it seems very repressive and authoritarian to be jailed and later executed for having unorthodox beliefs like the universe being created from a primordial cheese eaten by worms who became God and his angels and created the world, it's hard to be sympathetic when the dude just could not shut the hell up about his beliefs. Like, idk about you, Im an agnostic or atheist or whatever, but if I could possibly be executed for it, I would not go around telling people about how god is fake and cringe. Its also funny reading the accounts of the inquisitors, who for the most part, whilst obviously terrible and repressive, would let most cases like a single heretical peasant off with essentially a slap in the wrist, say you’re sorry, do a penance, your priest vouches for you being a good man and for the most part be allowed to rejoin society, but bro just couldn't do it. The number of executions the inquisition actually did was a lot less than we would think; it was usually reserved for wandering preachers, big religious leaders who were trying to get a schism going, etc.

The Return of Martin Guerre is interesting because its “plot” is basically 1-to-1, almost adapted into Pentiment’s character of Martin Bauer. The book was written by Natalie Zemon Davis, a historian and advisor to the French film of the same name based upon the real-life historical figure of Martin Guerre. After her experiences with the production, she decided to write a more “official” account of the story without the necessities of a 3-act structure and cinematic storytelling. Martin Guerre was a peasant in what is now modern-day Basque Country (part of Spain and France) who one day disappeared from his town and, unbeknownst to them, went off to Spain to join the army and eventually got wounded in battle during the Italian wars of the mid-16th century. Meanwhile, a man claiming to be Martin Guerre who bore an uncanny resemblance to the man arrived in Martin’s home town and, after some initial skepticism, was able to slide into his old life through his appearance and seemingly access to knowledge that only the real Martin Guerre could know. It also highlights that under the law of the time, Martin’s wife would not be allowed to remarry, and the way in which women were treated, her standing in society, and her ability to fend for herself were adversely affected by having an abandoned husband. Even worse, the real Martin could have died off in battle, but even this would not necessarily be enough to be able to remarry unless she could somehow prove her husband had been killed. It's not surprising then that she may have been, let’s say, willful to “be fooled” by the impostor, knowing that this was a once-in-a lifetime opportunity to solve her situation. Even more so after “Martin” received his deceased father’s inheritance and greatly increased the wealth of his household.

In Pentiment, Martin Bauer similarly runs off during Act 1 after stealing from the murdered baron and “returns” before Act 2 to take over the household after the death of his father. If pressed, you can uncover the fact that this man is actually Jobst Farber, a highwayman who ran off with Martin and eventually, when he died, used his resemblance to the man to take over his life. Similarly, in Pentiment, Martin’s wife Brigita seems consciously or unconsciously aware of the deception but begs Andreas not to rat him out of town, as he’s been a much better husband than Martin ever was, and in a purely utilitarian sense, his identity theft is seemingly the best outcome for everyone. If one remembers Act 1’s Ottilia Kemperyn, households without children or men to inherit property are very much unprotected, and it's easy to see why Brigita prefers to turn a blind eye to this Farber character’s lies. In the real-life case of Martin Guerre, the prosecution was initiated by Martin’s father-in-law who suspected foul play, but “Martin”’s wife was supportive of her impostor husband. Indeed, what ended up resulting in his execution was actually the return of the real Martin Guerre to the town, who, amusingly enough, seemed less able to answer the questions of the judge in regards to information that the real Martin Guerre would know than the fake one! Thankfully for the wife, sometimes misogyny works out in women’s favor, and she was essentially unpunished (and the real Martin Guerre was reprimanded for abandoning his wife and family) for what could have been considered adultery and false witness with essentially the old “ah well, she’s a woman, it makes sense her feeble mind would be fooled by a talented huckster like this” argument. Not as much of a happy ending for the impostor who got executed but was surprising apologetic, much like Martin Bauer is if you accuse him of murdering Otto Zimmerman during Act 2 of Pentiment.

The final book, I’ll admit, is one that I basically skimmed because it was really fucking boring, and I already read a biography of Albrecht Durer a while back, so a lot of it was just stuff I already knew. It was worth owning, if nothing else, A3 copies of Durer’s famous works. Albrecht Durer informs the character of Andreas quite a bit (though he is also a bit William of Baskerville and Andrei Rublev); indeed, his Act 1 design is heavily inspired by a famous Durer self-portrait. They are both painters from Nuremberg; they both (in Act 2) seem to really dread returning to their wives, which they hate back in Nuremberg; and during the lunch with Brother Sebhat, when a kid is having the concept of different ethnic groups and skin colors existing, Andreas chimes in that in the Netherlands he saw art from the New World that was greater than anything Europeans had ever done, echoing Durer’s admiration for New World art in particular made of metal; him being the son of a goldsmith, it makes sense he’d feel particularly fond of such things.

The use of Durer’s famous Melancholia 1 painting is a key aspect of Andreas’ character journey. In Act 1, his inner psyche is depicted as a court composed of King Prester John (a mythical figure in European folklore often thought of as the Ethiopian emperor), Beatrice from the Divine Comedy, St. Grobian, and Socrates. Whenever Andreas is debating a difficult decision, they can be called upon to give their two cents in a sort of id, ego, and super ego-type arrangement. In Act 2, however, it is only Beatrice who gives advice, her moderation and temperance having devolved into self-doubt and fear. At a key point, Andreas finds his court trashed and all absent safe for Beatrice, sitting in the pose of the famous aforementioned melancholia print: “Now I am all that remains, the melancholy of life’s autumn,” a manifestation of essentially a mid-life crisis for Andreas after becoming a successful artist but feeling hollow inside. Its fitting as well given the beliefs about mental health, a common conception of artists and creatives at the time as “melancholics," and a conception of depression and mental illness as markers for creative genius that sadly persists to this day.

4500 words later, and I'm both embarrassed by how long this has been and frustrated by how much more I could have gone into details on each of the entries, but I think that's enough for now. If anything, I hope this encourages anyone who’s played pentiment to check out one of the books and maybe draw their own connections I might have missed or forgot to include. Whenever I think about what differentiates a 5-star game from a 4.5- or 4-star game, I think this is it. A 5-star game will get me to read six books totaling probably like 1000+ pages. I’m currently reading through The Brothers Karamazov as part of The Friends of Ringo Ishikawa’s readable books list (so far I’ve read Winesburg, Ohio, Confessions of a Mask, and Rumble Fish), and maybe I’ll write a similar piece at some point for each (though bear in mind I started reading the first book in this collection a year ago, so y'know).

Kinda went into Pentiment expecting to have to "eat my vegetables"; its aesthetic being artistically sound, but not really the kind of thing I'm generally into, and its premise sounding intellectually invigorating in a games industry that's arguably in arrested development when it comes to making mainstream experiences for adults, but maybe not enough to keep me personally going for a playtime of over 20 hours. And well, I was pretty fuckin' wrong! And not even in the Disco Elysium way where after I got over the hurdle of the first hour or two that it finally clicked (not to say that Disco Elysium's intro isn't basically perfect in its own way), Pentiment managed to sink its teeth into me right away. The game's art is also a lot more affective and unique than I would've expected just from the couple trailers I'd seen, and despite the entire game taking place across only a handful of screens (contextualized as pages in a book), there were many times that I found myself stopped in my tracks, contemplating the beauty of a specific moment.

It's also just as real as fuck without succumbing to either condemnation or romanticization. Pentiment's perspective on history and the people who shaped it is complex without cowardly labeling every participant as a morally grey agent -- there are unabashedly terrible and evil people in this world, people who are deceptive in their self-servitude, and even inarguably cruel entities like the Catholic Church house individuals who really do want to make the world a better place in their own way and even people who are in the church due to societal forces beyond their control. Pentiment is a game that tries its best to be honest about the world. It's also a game that's absolutely more intelligent and worldly than I'll ever be, and I really don't think I can do it the full justice it deserves in my own analysis of its setting and themes, so I'll just leave it there.

And yeah, Pentiment is also just a great example of how to make a dialogue-focused adventure game fun. Like, part of that is probably because I chose hedonism as one of my skills and made Andreas into a terrible little boyslut, but you know how it is. The dialogue never bored me, every character feels truly alive -- and that's without voice acting! I actually appreciated that there wasn't any honestly, it's a double-edged sword in a lot of games like this, and it only would've detracted from the bespoke aesthetic decision to give every character's spoken dialogue in "their own handwriting", in quotes because I'm not entirely sure what the implication was for the characters that are by their own admission illiterate (but I did love that Claus the town printer's dialogue is the only one that uses an actual typeface, accompanied by the satisfying thuds of a printing press).

By the end of the game, Tassing really does begin to feel like your home as well, not only because many pivotal events in Tassing's recent history are influenced by the player, but because you've grown close to the town's citizens and watched them grow and change as well. Pentiment isn't a power trip in that sense -- you cannot save everybody or give everybody a happy ending, not that you'd want to with some of the assholes you run into honestly -- but it does manage to encapsulate the warm and fuzzy feeling that despite the world being dogshit, we can still do our best for those around us, be a part of a greater whole with honest fervor. The player and Andreas will inevitably fuck up a lot, but it's something we have to live with, something to learn from. Things like that feel self-evident in the real world and are rarely explored properly in games, but the fact that Pentiment lacks a manual save function really sells that feeling. But even if we can't meta-game Tassing into the perfect little Bavarian town suffering under feudalism and religious oppression, the Tassing we end up with is undeniably ours. I think that's probably why I might never replay Pentiment, which is rare for me, since I tend to replay games I love quite often.

Also the "third act" is pretty good! Saw some people criticizing the shift in gameplay focus, but it was a nice change of pace and was probably my favorite part altogether. Don't normally recommend games on here, but honestly, check it out for yourself. I can't really think of many demographics that'd be outright disappointed by Pentiment. It's good. :)

I don’t even know where to start, how to describe this game without spoiling it. I guess I can say, if the game looks interesting to you, go play it right now. If, in addition, you’ve ever liked a game made by Obsidian or a hyperlocal adventure game (Night in the Woods, Kentucky Route Zero, Norco), or some combination of the two (this section is here so I can mention Disco Elysium) then GO PLAY IT RIGHT NOW.

Beyond that, the task becomes workable. When my girlfriend asked me what I thought of the game, I said “I think it’s probably one of the best works of art I’ve ever experienced”, and I stand fully behind that text message I sent like 10 minutes ago. Somehow, Josh Sawyer and his team at Obsidian have crafted a wonderful murder mystery with themes around class consciousness and theology, and a lovely, tender story and cast of characters, and they made it entirely out of historical references you’d literally need an encyclopedia to fully understand. And don’t fret, the encyclopedia is ALSO in the game.

Admittedly the introduction is a little dry. It leans heavy on establishing the setting, your place in it, and a calm before the fall, and it’s important, but until things get going it was feeling a bit like what I was worried it would be: interesting and intellectual, but lacking in heart. Once you get used to the game though, things pick up quick and all of a sudden you’ve been playing for 6 hours straight and it’s 1 in the morning and you don’t want to stop, because you don’t know if the next person you talk to, or the next meal you eat, or the next setpiece you explore could throw mysteries and answers at you in equal measure, pulling you deeper and deeper until the next chapter break.

I don’t think I know how to talk about this game at all actually. Not the way I usually do. Mostly you just have to decide what leads to follow based on what information you have, and what your character can provide based on their background and standing with each member of the community. But that doesn’t really get to the heart of what’s so good about the game, what I love about it. That lies in the seemingly endless depth on display, a hyperfocused depth of character and setting that only exists in those other hyperlocal adventure games and Obsidian-style RPGs, to my knowledge.

It’s just that good, and it gets better and better as you go along. The layers peel back, pulling the sardonic exterior away so you can tug at the core underneath. I’m surprised a game like this could be made still, and by a company of the size Obsidian is. It’s got all the references of a game made by 3 nerds in a basement, all the heart of a game made by 3 indie devs in a basement, and all the technical prowess that being owned by Xbox gets you. I don’t get how a game can be so seemingly mired in itself and yet still so affecting, still such a triumph, and I don’t get how Josh Sawyer’s been doing stuff like this for 20 years. I’ll be buying the collectors edition if it materializes though, you can count on that.

- Tell a toddler a story about oranges
- Skip forward 7 years
- Fail a persuasion check with said child because I picked the wrong bedtime story, directly determining this character's fate which will not be revealed until the absolute final moment of the game

very good game, plz play

There is a pattern with very few exceptions in the way I experience modular narrative games. The beginning of the game lays out a structure—the game's mechanical thesis—and I begin to understand ways in which that structure can be used to tell brilliant intertwining stories in ways that haven't been possible before. And then, inevitably, as I begin to approach the end of the game, I realize that it will not live up to the promise of its own structures, and however beautifully it weaves its story it will live in the shadow of what could have been.

Pentiment's story is doubtlessly beautiful. It takes a small town in an unglamorized time in history and tells a gripping tale that combines religion, politics, and humanity together as deftly (and with as much research) as any lauded novel of historical fiction. The comparison to Middlemarch is perhaps obvious, but well-earned. And it gives the player ample opportunity to influence characterization without making the protagonist a cipher with no personality of his own.

In the beginning, Pentiment tries to give the player a similar level of control of the narrative with a brilliant structure in which the player is presented with a buffet of choices of what to investigate and who to dine with, but with only a few days to allocate between them so that many paths remain unexplored. Allowing a single playthrough to miss major chunks of content is absolutely necessary for a narrative game to truly be modular, and this structure facilitates that while also presenting the player with a meta-puzzle across multiple playthroughs: learn what each of these events gets you, what information you get or friendships you make, and what is duplicated across different events. Combine this with the player's chosen traits and dialog options opening or closing different paths, and then hide the heart of the game within this web so that only by deeply understanding the town outside the minds of the protagonist—by becoming in a way its protector-saint—can you truly understand its secrets and navigate its innermost channels.

Despite creating a structure in which this is possible, a genuinely inspired combination of Inkle games and dating sims, Pentiment instead lets this structure fall by the wayside to the extent that the last third of the game is almost completely on rails—the player can and probably will see everything the game has to offer at that point, no matter what. Although the narrative is still marvelous it's no longer modular, and it only functions as a game within the scope of a few conversations and the player's trudging between screens.

And, oh, what trudging it is. Although I mourn for its unfulfilled potential and there are increasingly many glitchy moments or unedited lines as the game goes on (the result of a rushed end of production?), the truest deepest flaw of Pentiment is surely the amount of time a dedicated player will simply spend moving from screen to screen. In every hour any part of the map could have a new event or new dialog—but almost none actually do. There are just precisely enough that the player is motivated to check everywhere over and over again, wasting cumulative hours of real human time.

But if Pentiment's mechanics are a little underconsidered and their quality occasionally slapdash, it's still a miracle that it exists at all. I never thought I'd see a AAA studio, a Microsoft subsidiary no less, make something like this that is so openly in conversation with this genre which has for decades been exclusively the territory of indie games (and indeed was rarely a big name there either). I dearly hope that this helps legitimize that space and expands both its popularity and marketability, and I dream as I always have of the day when someone makes a game that truly grasps the potential towards which games like Pentiment extend their hands.

Pentiment’s existence is an astounding one. This is not because it’s a game developed by Obsidian, as they have been celebrated for nearly twenty years as one of the premiere WRPG devs, nor it is because it’s the passion project of Josh Sawyer, who was one of the lead devs for Fallout: New Vegas and Pillars of Eternity 2, which are among Obsidian’s best games. This game is astounding in that such a clear labor of love that goes so hard against the grain of the mainstream game industry would have not existed if not for the support of the largest AAA publisher, Microsoft.

Pentiment isn’t a traditional RPG, even more so than fellow detective RPG Disco Elysium, as it’s more of an adventure game as it has no stats. I would still consider it a RPG though as the background and skills you choose for the protagonist, Andreas Maler, shapes what he can do and his relationships with the characters around him and the choices you make. Pentiment is also not a traditional detective game either for reasons that are bit spoilery, but one of them is that Andreas is not actually a detective. Andreas is not Sherlock Holmes, Harry DuBois, or Lady Love Dies; he is merely an artist completely out of his depth dragged into the rural Bavarian town of Tassing’s turmoil and forced to try and maintain the peace between the town and Kiersau, the Benedictine abbey who governs them. Andreas can’t Columbo his way to the truth, his and your choices are tinged with uncertainty as you try to uncover the culprits. Ultimately, the murders are a backdrop to the main theme of the game, history.

Pentiment is foremost a game about history, a rumination of the past and how society is built on the foundations of older ones, how they evolve and change over time, and how the past and its truths can be obfuscated through multiple means. The game take place in the Holy Roman Empire in the early 1500’s at the dawn of the great societal upheavals of the Early Modern period in Europe. Martin Luther has published his 95 Theses only a few years prior to the start of the game’s narrative, which will eventually lead to the greatest schism in Christianity, The Protestant Reformation, and more than a century of bloodshed and strife across the continent. Johannes Gutenberg’s printing press has revolutionized society as now the proliferation of books and the ability to read them are no longer only in the realm of the aristocracy and clergy. The growing education of the peasantry leads to class conflicts with their noble and clerical lords who desire to keep the underclasses under heel. The old traditions of the medieval era are dying away, this is initially illustrated with Keirsau and its monks, who are the very few still writing and illustrating books by hand. All of these events tie into the events of the game’s narrative and its setting and characters, and what a fantastic job the game does bringing them to life.

Pentiment’s attention to detail both to its historical time period, setting, and art design is wondrous. The game drops references left and right to historical people, places, and concepts of the era which deftly manages to give the uninitiated player a trove of information in the in-game glossary for clarification, an expansion of the similar systems that previous Obsidian RPGs, Tyranny and PoE2 had. As a lover of history and games that immerse themselves into the subject, Pentiment is one of the very finest, it not the most. The game is mostly a slow burn, letting you get to really learn about the daily lives of the townsfolk and the monks and nuns, before shit starts hitting the fan. This works so well for the game because you really get a sense of place with Tassing and its people. The writing is fantastic as its fleshes out its cast and setting splendidly. The game also manages to balance having its light-hearted moments with serious drama and the narrative ends up being a powerful journey.

The game’s art design is absolutely beautiful, crafted akin to the style of the manuscript illustrations of the era. The characters have just so much lively detail to them and the backgrounds are so scenic. The UI is also so creative as well. Characters’ dialogue boxes are expressed through the writing of a quill complete with sound effects and typos in the dialogue that get corrected like someone was actually writing them by hand. There’s even another facet of this UI where the town printer, Klaus’, dialogue boxes are instead expressed in the style of printing press block prints complete with printing press sound effects. All of this sheer attention to detail are testament to how much love was clearly poured into this game. The soundtrack is also beautiful, though the game uses it more sparingly than most games. Just one of the most aesthetically beautiful and creative games I’ve played.

Pentiment is a masterpiece of the medium and hopefully will stand as inspiration for other game developers in the years to come. If you have an interest in it, I highly recommend it, it’s fast become my GOTY and one of my absolute favorite games of all time. It truly is an amazing joy that this game exists.

Pros:
- Excellent presentation and art style reminiscent of the manuscript illustrations of the 16th century
- It's a bit difficult to discuss the story without mentioning specifics, but it's interesting. Initially Pentiment sells itself as a murder mystery, but really it's more focused on the village of Tassing and how the events that take place and your decisions gradually affect the people who live there over a 25 year timespan. More than anything, it succeeds in being as authentic to the time period as possible through its setting and characters
- General dialogue is very well written, and has a unique way of presenting itself with the use of different text fonts that represent how Andreas perceives the social status of the characters

Cons:
- While I liked the direction the story goes, I have mixed feelings on the pacing. In general it's a very slow burn, but this is particularly so in its third act which compared to the first two felt like a drawn out epilogue that was hours lengthier than it needed to be. I also wouldn't really say I was satisfied with how the mystery wraps up either
- Exploring the town is pretty dull, Andreas is clunky to control and every area is separated with a book flip load animation that, while cool at first, wears thin very quickly. You'll also be walking through the same few areas for the entire game which got exhausting by the end
- I can't say I was into the way the gameplay was structured. Deciding how you spend your limited time between the characters was cool on paper, but this was only prevalent in Act 1 with the next two being more linear. And even despite that, you only have very limited time to speak to characters because two events of the day are spent sitting down and eating with someone. This became annoying when I was trying to uncover evidence close to the deadline but I couldn't pursue it cause other events weren't open during these times
- I know this was a relatively small project for Obsidian, but I wish Microsoft invested more into it as a first party title. It would've greatly benefited from voice acting, and while I usually don't mind that there aren't any voices for a text heavy game like this, there's also very little music to make up for it. Most of the game is just ambient noise and silence as you read through its dense dialogue, which made it feel like it was missing something to me

Thank God they finally let rope kid out of the Pillars of Eternity mines so he could make this.

It is exceptionally easy to get caught up in the idea that the past wasn't just a different time, but a different world. It's a truism, and one that's so obvious that it can muddy the simple fact that people haven't changed all that much. We're a social species who cope with both reality's bounties and hardships in much of the same ways, though the exact specifics continue to change throughout the years. The medieval peasantry were in no way fundamentally different to ourselves. The struggles of the poor and prosperities of the aristocracy under feudalism mirror those of the poor and the wealthy today. They're different, but they aren't that different, and showcasing that is what really makes Pentiment shine.

1500s-era Tassing, Upper Bavaria (a fictional mish-mash of locations throughout present southern Germany) is a tiny, impoverished mud pit with a population of about fifty people, and they're all written like actual human beings. Everyone has their own struggles and their own secrets, and there's so much to dig into that nobody will ever feasibly discover everything by themselves. This is a story to be discussed and dissected; rarely can a narrative stand up to a scrutinous analysis, and I imagine that Pentiment is going to join a very, very small list of stories that actually can. Every game with a story released since 2019 has been inevitably and unfavorably compared to Disco Elysium, but this feels like one of the only games that manages to be in its weight class. It's hard to overstate how good it is.

There's a massive amount of care put into portraying this world accurately, evidenced by the almost hundred texts referenced in the credits. Josh Sawyer's narrative direction is immaculate, but it would do a disservice both to the rest of the team and to the player to lump all praise onto him. Narratively, graphically, and sonically, everything here is near perfect. The art style and sound design can lead to some truly beautiful moments, and the game is a delight to take in. It feels like a spa trip. It's refreshing and good for the soul. Let this shit seep into my pores.

God, I love Pentiment.

ok. so. I've been on a streak of these story games after realizing with telltale walking dead that sometimes games without shotguns can be awesome. It did sort of have this barrier of the whole setting being .. medieval times in some buttfuck country I never heard of set dozens of years before I was even born. Medieval times is a pretty boring setting. If you ask me, the only three settings I will accept are modern day, zombie apocalypse, or the cold war. Games CANNOT be set in the future because they will be outdated when we get to the time the game alleges it's set in. It also cannot be set in space because there's no sound in space so I have to turn off my volume every time for full immersion and its so lame. My most important rule is games cannot be set in medieval times because I don't want motherfuckers saying "thy, thee, thine, thou, wasn't, shakespeare," and other medieval words. Also I can't help but think it just really smells bad there.

But you know what, I gave this one a try. And I'm glad I did because despite the boring, lame setting and naming all these old monks from like 1500 in conversation as if I'm supposed to know who they are, I found peace within the world through the protagonist, Andy. You see, Andy is a visitor and an artist. You play as him and choose what he says. What I did was I self inserted as him and I thought I was him. So when people said "oh yeah saint reactine from the denzel mountains said pablo neruda and max brooks of loeb city went to the pottage shop to eat pottage" (authors note: pottage is like beans sort of ) both me and Andy can nod our heads and pretend to know wtf is going on.

You see I'm a big fan of games that make me feel smart without having to be smart or do anything. There are no real puzzles in this game or any way to fail, it's completely linear and no matter what you do you win. But it makes me feel smart because I didn't know it was impossible to lose. So when I kept winning, I felt sooo really sodding smart. (Authors note: sodding is ancient slang for fucking) Andy quickly became one of my favourite characters in recent memory because of how relatable he is not just in his fish outta water attitude in the town, but his personal arc also really resonated with me. Anyone can relate honestly. The game says a lot about passions and goals love and people and building on the past and the economy's relation with art and the passage of time and faith and a whole lotta fancy pants college degree bullcrap but I won't get into that because I want YOU to get into it.

Yeah you play the game yourself and comprehend the themes and subtext and stuff. That's gonna be real fun for you. The side characters are also super fleshed out and seeing these guys change over the course of the game was amazing and I was really really invested, which is surprising especially for such a short -ish game, I have to admit its very hard to get me to care for a whole town of people but I did even if sometimes I couldn't pronounce their medieval ass names. There's a whole lot of them and it normally would be easy for them to feel really similar visually and personality wise considering there's no voice acting but the art style is so outta this world that not only does everything look smooth and the animations feel real and sick and awesome, but each npc has their own look and style where you from a glance can almost tell what they're like just from their face and what they're doing and their posture or whatever. I had some complicated ass relationships with these townspeople. And I think that's really awesome.

One thing I did think was sort of underdeveloped was the actual quest design and time passage mechanics. Your quests are always very similar, go here and ask this person about this. Like I get it there's no funny business its a straight up realistic medieval times thing, and there are some exceptions where the quest can be action packed... But yeah it can get boring to make a break in the case and my next goal is to talk to these three people about this topic and gather info, which I guess is the point since you're solving a murder mystery but, whatever. Aside from the variety I just wish the actual stuff was more robust and clear. Like ok this quest tells me to talk to this guy. I go to the guy. He gives me a "wassup Andy" and I can't respond. Is the quest broken? did I come at the wrong time? who knows. The in game journal ain't tellin me jack squat. I also thought the pacing could be off at some times, some chapters felt very long and some felt like they were over in a second. But if those tiny ass baby ass complaints are all I got then I don't see why I can't bestow upon this game one of elk's highest honours, the coveted, the exclusive, the cool and badass 5/5. Yeah. Hell yeah.

good night!

EDIT: Josh sawyer blocked me on twitter so im dropping my rating of this game. Thanks for understanding.

It’s important that you treat Pentiment with the same scrutiny and scepticism that you (hopefully) do with any other historical source. Most media, not just videogames, are, politely put, atrocious at dealing in good faith with the settings and themes that Pentiment tackles, to the point where it’s probably reasonable to call it one of the most authentic games ever made in this regard. The flip side of this is that it makes the things Pentiment gets wrong feel more conspicuous than they would be otherwise.

If that last part has your guard up, you can safely lower it, because Pentiment’s small handful of inaccuracies are pretty minor in that they don't affect the plot overmuch. I won’t say what they are specifically, because this is the type of game where any and all details ought to be discovered yourself, but among other things, they include at least two cultural events which are unambiguously Christian being misattributed to Alpine paganism of some description, as well as one figure who was (to my knowledge) neither pre-Christian nor worshipped as a goddess being described as a pre-Christian goddess.

There are a couple of reasons why these don’t overly strain Pentiment’s believability and for which it deserves to be given the benefit of the doubt. For starters, relative to the vast majority of media set during the early modern period and (in this case, just after the) Middle Ages, Pentiment’s immensely tactful to the point where I'm (almost but not quite) inclined to think these kinds of mistakes were intentionally included, on the part of its characters rather than its writers; that it avoids the common error of misattributing the origins of Christian saints to pagan figures further suggests this. More broadly, it’s unreasonable to expect anything to be perfect in terms of accuracy and – on exceedingly rare occasions, in exceptionally talented hands – inaccuracies can be advantageous. Excalibur’s a more visually distinctive and symbolic film for featuring armour which is about 1000 years too advanced for the 5th/6th century AD. Shadow of Rome’s a more memorable game for making you fight a ~15ft tall Germanic barbarian whose weapon of choice is a marble pillar. Likewise, in a meta sort of way, Pentiment’s central idea of historiographical truth being difficult to pinpoint is arguably strengthened by its own shortcomings in this respect. Ideally, this’ll encourage players to be more wary of any historically-themed media they engage with, including Pentiment itself.

Any such grievances are further obscured by the mostly impressive weight Pentiment lends to your decisions. I had the fortune of playing through Pentiment concurrently with my brother, and when we’d walk in on each other playing it, we’d do mutual double takes as one of us was in the middle of story events that the other didn’t even consider would be possible. Speech checks being affected by past dialogue choices encourages you to constantly, properly pay attention to and think about what you’re saying in a way I personally haven’t seen done since the isometric Fallouts or Vampire the Masquerade Bloodlines. Although its time limits (while appreciated) aren’t implemented as organically as Fallout 1’s, an advantage Pentiment has over even those titans is that it also autosaves after every single action you take, lending everything a degree of permanence that few other RPGs can offer. If you were feeling particularly cheeky, you could go as far as to say that Pentiment can be counted alongside the campaign of Black Ops 2 in the pantheon of games which actually are what everyone pretends New Vegas is.

I call it only mostly impressive because Pentiment’s key weakness is the linearity of its third and final act, which even if you’re being charitable can only really be called overbearing. Not to bang on the choices-don’t-matter drum too hard, because nobody can ever seem to agree what choices mattering in a game really looks like, but you’re much more likely to wish you were able to say or do something other than the options you’re given in the last act than in the preceding two. Potential twists and turns you might hope to direct this chapter’s plot towards are often snuffed out by blurted out variations of “actually, I was only pretending to want to do that” that you rarely have any control over. This isn’t to suggest that Pentiment ends on a sour note – the ending itself’s quite lovely – but from a decision making standpoint, the whole last stretch’s noticeably more limiting.

However close it comes, this is never enough to distract from Pentiment’s visual splendour. Jan van Eyck paintings and The Tragedy of Man are the only other media I can think of which incorporate so many different historical art styles into one cohesive package and so skilfully. Sebhat being drawn in the style of Ethiopian Coptic Orthodox art’s a particularly inspired touch, but in general it’s no wonder that the art director and animators are the first names to pop up on the opening credits, because it’s like a playable manuscript. Rarely do you come across a game where you can legitimately say that the visuals are a selling point in and of themselves.

There should be more games like Pentiment. It represents two things we need more of – big developers putting out more niche, experimental titles, and historical media which isn’t riddled with self-congratulatory 21st century arrogance that spits on the memory of everyone who happened to be born before an arbitrary point in time, in which characters actually believe what they say and aren’t one-dimensional caricatures of the past. Be thankful it exists, whatever its issues.

     ‘This was the only earthly love of my life, and I could not, then or ever after, call that love by name.’
     – Umberto Eco, Il nome della rosa, 1980.

Capturing the contours of a sixteenth-century society in the Holy Roman Empire is a difficult task. Central Europe was undergoing complex transitions as a result of demographic recovery, religious innovation and the administrative mosaic of Germanic territories. Recent historiography emphasises the interlocking and overlapping of forces that shaped regions and societies: it is difficult to generalise local observations to the rest of the Empire, but it is also unwise to paint the portrait of a village on the basis of generalities alone. For example, the forms of feudalism differed on either side of the Elbe. A theoretical simplification is to consider the regions south and west of the Elbe as being under the rule of Grundherrschaft [1]. This form of feudalism developed from the 14th century onwards with the decline of the traditional smaller lords and the demographic collapse caused by the Black Death. This situation allowed the surviving peasants to expand their farms and establish stronger hereditary rights over the land. Although still subject to the authority of their local lord, they had greater freedom of action.

     History, fiction and myth: the Umbertian gaze

Towards the end of the fifteenth century, friction between the nobility and the peasantry increased as the former sought to assert their authority over land that seemed to have been de facto freed from serfdom. Another factor in the social crisis was undoubtedly the demographic upturn from 1470 onwards, which swelled the cohort of landless peasants, while small landowners were no longer able to take advantage of the economic opportunities of the previous century. In some southern regions of the Holy Roman Empire, agricultural production was no longer profitable, so it became mainly subsistence farming. These factors led to a widening gap between the peasants and the lords. The lords, sometimes nobility, sometimes clergy, were in latent conflict for other economic and political reasons.

It is difficult to summarise several thousand pages of social history in a few lines, so these few elements of context will suffice. Pentiment makes the bold choice of setting its action in this complex historical background, in a locality centred around the village of Tassing and Kiersau Abbey. The project explicitly borrows from Umberto Eco's The Name of the Rose (1980). Although the historical context is different, the themes and structure are similar. Eco's readers will find themselves in familiar territory: Pentiment allows the player to assume the role of Andreas Maler, a Nuremberg artist commissioned by the Abbot of Kiersau to illustrate a Book of Hours as part of his certification as a master artist. During his stay in Tassing, Andreas gets to know the many members of the local society, until a murder takes place. For personal reasons, Andreas is thrust into the role of detective and must unravel the many secrets of the community.

Like The Name of the Rose, Pentiment multiplies points of view and semantic layers. The game is at once a general dissertation on the social history of the Holy Roman Empire, a detective story, a philosophical debate, a theological meditation and a discussion on the value of storytelling. It is through this literary device, borrowed from Eco, that the title manages to find a great deal of coherence in its storytelling [2]. The investigation – i.e. the criminal story – is interwoven with the socio-political narrative, so that the player is constantly confronted with both general and specific elements. Andreas Maler acts as a bridge between these two worlds. Firstly, because he finds himself at the crossroads of very different social universes: as a traveller, he is used to many cultures; as a young artist, he associates with the powerful without being fully part of their universe. Above all, he is a stranger to Tassing, and his gaze is that of a witness whose interest in local politics, however altruistic, is rather weak. In other words, his view is certainly subjective, but it is all-encompassing. These characteristics are very similar to those of William of Baskerville, who had a complex theological background.

     Depicting the Middle Ages through the new social studies

In terms of narrative economy, such a protagonist captures the player's attention in a number of ways. For classically trained historians, Andreas provides access to the ancient and medieval literary world; for mystery fans, his role as a detective is crucial. The choice of Andreas' background means that, in addition to the interactive gameplay typical of CRPGs, players can personalise their experience around the themes that interest them most. As a Latinist, I was pleasantly surprised to see Pentiment commanding a very solid Latin, and to read the classical locutions quoted by Andreas. The title has a rare encyclopaedic quality, in tune with recent scholarly developments. There remain a few very minor approximations, such as certain onomastic choices (Else Mülleryn should rather be spelt Müllerin) and Kiersau's remarkable and exagerated interregionalism. On the latter point, the choice was certainly motivated by Umberto Eco's vision of a universalist abbey and a political response to Kingdom Come: Delivrance (2018): the figure of the Ethiopian priest Sebhat seems a rather explicit foil to Daniel Vávra's ultra-conservative claims about the absence of people of colour in fifteenth-century Bohemia.

Pentiment always uses its encyclopaedic knowledge wisely to illustrate medieval mentalities. Arrogantly imparting knowledge is the best way to undermine the friendship and support of the game's various characters. The game constantly seeks to highlight the limits of Andreas' knowledge and the subjectivity of the concept of truth. As such, Pentiment seeks to portray the situation of women in the Middle Ages with real nuance. The game's fictional micro-history project features women who are involved in their village's economy and are pillars of the community. Discussions with the Benedictine nuns also provide an opportunity to explore women in religion, and Pentiment clearly illustrates the prejudices of the time, as well as Andreas' very masculine perspective. In contrast to the Christian tradition, which leaves no place for women in its traditional hierarchy – women's religious offices generally disappeared in the central Middle Ages, which is exactly the situation described for Kiersau Abbey – and restricts them to religious life or marriage, Pentiment constantly emphasises their agency and the ways in which they can circumvent the restrictions. Amalie illustrates the extreme spiritual experiences that women can voluntarily inflict on themselves through her retreat and mystical visions. Illuminata embodies a mastery of the literary classics, while the other sisters stand out for their practical knowledge and integration into Tassing society.

     To write, to read and to die in the universal library

Like Umberto Eco's library, that of Kiersau Abbey is intended to be universal. It seeks to circumscribe all known knowledge through the possession of rare volumes, be they erudite treatises or chivalric romances. Writing and rewriting are at the heart of Pentiment's project. The narrative is subjective and subject to numerous corrections: when the dialogue is presented, mistakes punctuate the text and are corrected in front of the player. Similarly, the choice of script depends on the impression the speaker makes on Andreas. He presents the discourse of the educated clergy in a Gothic style, while the villagers have a much less polished script. Above all, it is noteworthy that Andreas changes his representation according to the information he receives. For example, when he learns that the shepherd is actually an avid reader of Latin books, he updates the script used in the dialogue. These elements are linked to a concern for memory, and Pentiment sets out to question what deserves to be left to posterity, rejecting the idea of a monolithic history. The truth is in a constant state of flux and varies from different perspectives: it is this insight that guides Andreas' investigation into the various murders. The game is less about finding the culprit than about writing Tassing's story. The game forces the player to accuse one of the suspects for each murder, but it is remarkable that all the solutions seem unsatisfactory. Pentiment is not about solving murders, but about understanding how Tassing society reacts to events that upset its internal balance.

Pentiment borrows its idea of humour from The Name of the Rose [3]: laughter is used to subvert the order of the world, because it reveals – through sarcasm or astonishment – the way in which the world turns. The comic scenes in the game anchor the narrative in a plausible reality, not just a cold, theoretical illustration of 16th-century Tassing. Pentiment's dialogue system is not so much a mechanic that supports 'choices' leading to different endings, but rather a sincere exploration of the world. Comedy is necessary because it is an instrument of freedom and truth, which all the characters seek in one way or another: to laugh is to break free from social bonds, hence Saint Grobian's irreverence. Conversely, silence allows the player to conform to the social mould, to maintain the status quo. Such a position is sometimes necessary to make progress in an investigation without alienating potential allies. The great strength of Pentiment is that it strikes the right balance between laughter, speech and silence. The characters, including Andreas, have to take a stand, and the question is how to do it.

There are no straightforward answers, and the game is never preachy or pretentious. The complexity of the world, of social relations and social transformations explain the hesitations. Uncertainty is part of the truth: Pentiment shines through its unique artistic direction, borrowed from manuscripts and engravings. In a stroke of genius, the game moves drawn characters on fixed backgrounds. There's something magical about seeing sketches move in this way, evoking a kind of collage. The practice of cutting out and reusing figures and backgrounds is well documented in the production of medieval manuscripts, underlining the plasticity of art in the representation of history [4]. In a fifteen-hour adventure, Pentiment creates such a vast universe. I find it difficult to write more, given the extraordinary richness so elegantly condensed into a game, from religious issues to economic innovations. In this respect, it is worth mentioning the welcome presence of an indicative bibliography in the game's credits. Umberto Eco concludes The Name of the Rose with a variation on a line by Bernard of Cluny: 'Stat rosa pristina nomine, nomina nuda tenemus', he writes. The original rose lives on in its name, we keep the names naked. To Bernard of Cluny's 'ubi sunt...?', Eco adds the persistence of memory. The memory of people who existed centuries ago should persist even more; Pentiment is a sublime fresco in their honour, coming as close as possible to the historical truth without ever being able to fully circumscribe it: 'Since I tell to its end my story, then joyful shall be my days.' [5]

___________
[1] Joachim Whaley, 'Economic Landscapes, Communities, and their Grievances', in Germany and the Holy Roman Empire, vol. 1, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2012, pp. 122-142.
[2] José-Marie Cortès, 'Itinéraires interprétatifs dans Le Nom de la Rose', in Synergies Inde, no. 2, 2007, pp. 289-306.
[3] Michel Perrin, 'Problématique du rire dans Le Nom de la Rose d'Umberto Eco (1980) : de la Bible au XXe siècle', in Bulletin de l'Association Guillaume Budé, no. 58, 1999, pp. 463-477.
[4] Anna Dlabacová, ‘Medieval Photoshop’, on leidenmedievalistsblog.nl, 18th February 2022, consulted on 13th June 2023.
[5] Wolfram von Eschenback, Parzival, II, XVI, l. 676 (trans. Jessie L. Weston), c. 1210.

Sim, tô escrevendo essa review de madrugada, porque esse é um daqueles jogos que têm tantos detalhes bons que, se eu deixar pra outro dia, vou acabar esquecendo deles. É aquele jogo de nicho, bem nicho mesmo, mas que não exige um conhecimento profundo sobre a época abordada, já que tem um sumário com várias notas explicando muitos detalhes, tanto geográficos quanto históricos. Isso facilitou muito pra mim, mas algumas palavras como "abadia", tive que pesquisar no Google mesmo. Basicamente, é um jogo investigativo com o foco quase todo em diálogos, feito pra tu ler, pensar no que dizer, convencer e se relacionar com os personagens, tipo um jogo da Telltale, mas menos linear, já que tu transita livremente pela cidade de Tassing.

Esse jogo me passou a mesma vibe de "O Nome da Rosa", filme de 1986, sobre um monge que investiga uma série de assassinatos dentro de um monastério (juro que daqui em diante não vou mais falar grego). Esse negócio de conhecimento proibido é muito presente em ambas as obras de uma forma que envolve todo o mistério da trama. Pra cinéfilos, tá aí uma recomendação.

Como é um jogo onde teu personagem é um prodígio a mestre artista, tu pode escolher no início os conhecimentos que Andreas aprendeu nas viagens de estudos, que vão te dar opções de falas exclusivas nos diálogos. É uma mecânica perfeita, por mais que eu tenha adquirido o "conhecimento da curtição" e não tenha conseguido "macetar" nenhuma das personagens através do diálogo, mas no trailer mostra que dá pra fazer isso sim.

Gostei muito de fuçar na vida de todo mundo e fazer vários amigos e inimigos, mesmo que o jogo todo se passe em um mapa pequeno com algumas localidades secretas a mais, tem uns time skips que vão trazendo novidades e mudanças na cidade com o passar dos anos, sempre te proporcionando aquela curiosidade pra saber como aqueles personagens queridos estão. A parte mais legal disso é ver a influência que você causou na cidade.

A estética e os simbolismos do game contribuem muito pra história, tipo as alegorias daqueles personagens que só existem na mente do Andreas, representando seus pensamentos, e as fontes diferentes nas falas dos personagens pra simbolizar status e nível de escolaridade.

No início do último ato, confesso que fiquei triste pelo que aconteceu e com medo do caminho que o jogo ia seguir, mas logo o game puxou minha atenção de volta à medida que a trama voltava para o núcleo do mistério principal.

E no final, teve uma bela conclusão, com uma explicação que amarra todas as pontas soltas, mostrando que já estava tudo ali, o jogo esfregou na sua cara, mas você não percebeu (pelo menos eu não percebi).

Não acho que esse jogo tenha um fator replay muito grande, já que o mistério depois do fim já foi solucionado, mas tô muito curioso pra saber o que aconteceria se eu tivesse seguido por outros caminhos e escolhido conhecimentos diferentes.

Edit: As crianças são muito fofinhas.

Uma aula em forma de jogo.

Poucos jogos me surpreenderam tão positivamente quanto Pentiment.

A história do game é relativamente simples, você controla Andreas Maler, um artista que foi contratado para fazer uma obra para a igreja de Tassing, uma pequena cidade formada em meio a ruínas romanas (Ao decorrer da gameplay você percebe que o jogo é sobre a cidade). Num dia qualquer, um nobre local que visita a cidade acaba sendo assassinado. Nisso, um dos companheiros mais queridos de trabalho de Andreas acaba sendo acusado, e cabe a você encontrar o verdadeiro culpado para impedir que esse seu amigo seja morto.

Aqui é de longe o ponto mais brilhante do jogo: sua mecânica de investigação. As decisões que o jogador toma durante a investigação tem impactos significativos nas vidas (e mortes) de todos os personagens do jogo (O game acerta MUITO no desenvolvimento dos personagens) e muito além disto suas decisões tem efeitos que podem ser sentidos pelas décadas seguintes.

Além de tudo é genial o fato do jogo ser uma aula de história sobre a Europa Medieval, tendo até mesmo momentos do game em que fatos históricos ficam muito presentes (Por exemplo o ódio da igreja em relação as propostas de Martinho Lutero).

Outra aula que o game dá é sobre a evolução das técnicas de reprodução artística, mostrando a transição entre as transcrições a mão e o surgimento da tipografia como forma rápida de produzir textos (O mais incrível é a naturalidade que essas “aulas” são inseridas na gameplay, sempre caminhando junto com a narrativa e fazendo sentido a todo momento).

Também é legal a forma que você molda seu personagem e como isso tem impacto nas investigações e na narrativa em si. Outra coisa impossível de não elogiar a identidade visual do jogo, totalmente na estética das pinturas e ilustrações medievais.

Também me pegou muito o lindo trabalho do game em dar diferentes caligrafias para as "vozes" dos personagens (a dos camponeses é mais simples, e a dos monges mais rebuscada, por exemplo). De longe isto da tipografia é o exemplo de como este jogo consegue encaixar perfeitamente a estética com a narrativa.

PRÓS:
- Decisões realmente mudam a história e o mundo.
- Estilo de arte lindo.
- História e personagens muito bons.

CONTRAS:
- Ritmo do último capítulo é destoante comparado com o restante do jogo.

What makes Pentiment more than an interactive Name of the Rose is the expansion of the narrative over multiple time-scales, with decisions echoing throughout days, seasons and decades. While Rose is confined to a few days, taking place in “real time”, Pentiment expands further through time (and space, from within the abbey and then out into the surrounding village). The narrative momentum gradually slows to a haunting, sad resolution.

Similar to Pathologic 2, time is against you, and no mystery is ever fully resolved. With the little info collected in your investigations, the truth is always incomplete, and a lingering guilt is cast over your decisions. Unlike Patho 2, time progresses in an abstracted way: during the day you may talk to anyone you find, but engaging in work, meals or certain events will advance time. There is no real-time simulation of the town, but the ever-changing seasons, events, architecture and people give Tassing the illusion of an analog, living world that many ‘dynamic’ open-worlds struggle to evoke.

I was initially put off by the art direction, akin to contemporary animation like Song of the Sea/Secret of Kells (which director Josh Sawyer has mentioned as an early influence) and I was looking for something uglier, maybe closer to the work found within the manuscript’s margins. Ultimately, this does lend a more expressive, readable quality to the characters and world.

I don't even know how to describe this game. It's just vibes. It's an experience you must go through for yourself, as blind as possible, to get the most out of it. It's about the choices you make, no matter how small. It's about trying to find the truth when there is never enough time. It's about living with the consequences of your actions. I don't think I've ever had an experience like this - where I felt the passing of time and the characters' growth so deeply. This one is going to live in my mind rent-free for a while.

last weekend I was supposed to work at my job both days both closing shifts but instead I went with my boyfriend to go visit his family. his family are at this point in my life basically my family, they’ve taken me in in every way and treated me as one of their own, regardless of my faults or shortcomings and not even taking into account that I’m not blood related at all, they are my family. on Sunday night me my boyfriend and his youngest sister went to the beach at sunset, me and his sister shared a salad and all of us afterwards kind of retreated into ourselves as we sat on the beach. I just laid down in the sand and listened to the waves and the people talking, a child came up to us and asked if we wanted our future told, in moments like these I feel surrounded by God, I feel surrounded by life and like I am actively being looked out for by someone or something that I can’t wrap my head around fully. I never would have imagined that this would be my life, I thought my life would be a lot different and I thought I would be much more important, but apparently I am important in my boyfriends eyes and his family’s eyes, my family’s eyes, and I think I am important in God’s eyes.

I don’t want this review to come off as overly preachy or without some level of context. I am not a devout Christian, I believe organized religion is by and large evil, I believe religious people in general contort their beliefs to harm others, I believe the church has done more harm than it’s done good, I believe that Pentiment believes all this too. so it’s definitely a bias I share w the game. I have not stepped into a church since I was a kid, I haven’t prayed in years. that’s not what religion to me is and that’s not what faith to me is, that’s not what god to me is, God to me is the wind I felt on the beach and the relaxation I felt overcome my body.

every conversation that my boyfriend my sister and me had that weekend ended up circling around the same topic. how hopeless and how bleak everything feels right now, how truly boring this life is. I was born post y2k and pre 9/11 to a father and mother who were too immature to have me, a mother who told me that if abortions didn’t go against her religion she wouldn’t have had me. I was born into uncertainty and so were the rest of my generation. and as soon as we started to find our footing then Covid happened and that did kind of set everything back in lots of ways. there’s another recession about to happen and inflation is awful and everything feels so uncertain for children of a certain age, all three of us have several years in between us but all are temporarily stuck at this crossroads waiting for the world to get better before we make any big plans. but at least for me when sitting on that beach that anxiety was lifted off me, and I think off them too as no one really spoke for the time we were there, everything felt right.

I would feel weird talking this personally about a game without giving some context as to my religious background. up until my tweens I went to both a religious fundamentalist school and church, it terrified me and instilled within me a deep religious paranoia that’s only exacerbated by me having obsessive compulsive disorder. throughout my teens I did not think of religion or spiritualism at all especially given the fact that my mother became more of a religious fanatic and I would often see her awake at 4 am knelt down praying. I wanted nothing to do with it esp. considering the fact that it brought my family no solace or comfort seemingly, that it only made them more bitter and resentful. later in my teens I would become rlly religious and almost holier than thou in a way that now seems rlly cringey and lame and now I have just settled into some loose Christianity flavored spiritualism than anything else. I realize that religion, esp, western judeo-christian religions are smth for privileged ppl. despite plenty of problems w my biological family I rlly am a privileged girl, I haven’t known that much struggle in my life. my bf on the other hand is wildly different from me in that way. his entire family was very standardly catholic, not in an overbearing way just very middle of the road catholicism, but with coming from a poor family and having to deal w the fallout of Covid and just worsening financial situations they are no longer rlly a religious family. and I don’t blame them, religion like all hobbies or all beliefs or ideologies that ppl spend too much time pooping thought into are for the privileged and the wealthy.

this is a theme throughout each act of pentiment. the balance between devoutness and wealth. we see this through food and the meals the player character has with npc’s, brothers and sisters of kiersau abbey who are much more willing to chastise u for speaking out of turn or saying anything that can be misconstrued as sacrilegious have large bountiful meals that often times aren’t even finished fully while the ppl down below in tassing go hungry. but meals with the townsfolk and peasants of tassing oftentimes go much more smoothly and it seems like they’re going out of their way to secure both ur spot and ur comfort at their dinner table. my biological family very rarely had meals at a dinner table, most times we all fended for ourselves, made our own meals, ate by ourselves. but when I am with my boyfriend’s family I always know there’s a spot for me at the table, to have a meal with them, to share a memory with them. the first year or so that I was around them I didn’t know how to go about this, it made me uncomfortable to eat in front of them, now I look forward to it and see the table as smth communal rather than just someplace to eat. this is echoed not only in pentiment’s dinner scenes but also in fx’s the bear and any anthony bourdain series, two things that that pentiment’s dinner scenes often reminded me of in the way all showcase the passing of thoughts and ideas and beliefs and heritage through sustenance. at some point in act 2, a character that was rude and haughty in the previous act now is hospitable and offers you some of their good apples. it reminded me a lot of a recent episode of American dad where the smith family end up on a deserted island with no memory of their past lives and no idea on how to escape, they’re stuck w a tv that only plays an ad for gold top nuts. through this ad they’re able to bond and through past cultures they’re able to build the base for a new culture and a new society, the episode ends w them fully understanding who they are and back at their house, unable to give up on tradition they again share a dinner of gold top nuts and make a promise that they’ll put out their good nuts for each other.

at the heart of pentiment is exactly what the smiths were doing by rewatching that ad over and over again, the passing down of thoughts and customs and beliefs and ideas and ideologies from one society to make an altogether new one. it’s a sentiment similarly echoed at the end of guns of the patriots when solid snake says “We can tell other people about - having faith. What we had faith in. What we found important enough to fight for. It's not whether you were right or wrong, but how much faith you were willing to have, that decides the future.”, that is the core of what pentiment is saying as well but with twenty additional years of history behind it. everything that’s happened between 2001 and 2021 is here, present and accounted for, every significant historical moment from 9/11 to the Covid pandemic makes its way into the subtext of pentiment. it’s a game about the history of the 1500’s but viewed through the lens of the 21st century and informed through everything that’s happened in the last twenty years.

games critic and essayist noah Caldwell gervais said in his resident evil retrospective It Takes A Few Years For The New Rot To Settle In Though. It’s a quote that I was haunted by throughout every act of pentiment, an idea that is always at play when examining how exactly did andreas mailer end up in tassing, what led to these terrible things and why must these terrible things repeat and repeat and repeat ad nauseam, much farther than when act 3 ends and much farther than 2023. we have built our towns and our cultures and our lives on the backs and the buildings and the bones of others and they all always come crashing down and we always rebuild them back on the same rot and decay.

constantly I was also thinking of otessa moshfegh’s lapvona and the adult swim animated series moral orel, both of those are also about religious towns and how religious communities function. all three are very much so tragedies as well though, humanistic and very loving tragedies, in these stories there aren’t evil per se. just ppl that are cruel and misguided and blind and who contort words that are supposed to be meant as comfort to bring harm to their towns. none of these pieces of media spend time damning the worst ppl in these towns, instead all of the time is spent making sure u understand how these communities sprung up and how they allowed for ppl to take control and turn them into smth quite fascistic. instead we spend time sympathizing w ppl ur supposed to hate and learning ugly truths about ppl who at first glance ur supposed to love or be endeared by. hope is what allows ppl to keep living after being wronged and it’s also what allows ppl to continue wronging others.

the poster for this game I find so clever and so beautiful, the body of the player character is detailed and hard at work, but the face is deliberately clouded. a messy brushstroke that hasn’t been filled in yet. your andreas is not my andreas and vice versa, he is someone that’s shaped by your own personal feelings on god, nature, religion, love, art, family, friends, sex, the church, and the future. he is a blank slate at the start of each new game and to each new player but over the course of the game he becomes his own person due to decisions and backgrounds u have locked him in to, some things are unable to change, some things happen regardless. if u quit the game halfway through there are things that still happen regardless of how u played andreas or how I played andreas. the abbey stays almost identical in between the chapters, the monks and sisters that live up there greet you still with the same mix of hate spite love and righteousness, but the town changes and the ppl within the town changes. decisions u make still affect everyone years and years down the line just as they do in real life.

you see characters in act 2 and act 3 that almost function as what you, the player character, could’ve ended up like if u made different decisions and if some decisions u weren’t locked into from before u even press new game. brief glimpses of who u could be playing as if Andreas in act 1 wasn’t written in such a purposeful way, if he wasn’t born to a life of privilege, a life where it’s okay to be an artist, where it wasn’t okay to play Andreas as u did. brief glimpses of the non player characters and how that could’ve been your fate. you might’ve ended up like Paul or Casper in act 2 or Anna and Ursula or even some of the younger sisters of the poor Clare’s in act 3. it reminded me a lot of a scene from the last season of six feet under where the youngest child of the Fischer family and the only artist in it Clare goes to an art exhibition put on by her old art school friends. she hasn’t seen them in months, she dropped out of school and she’s working an office job, she hasn’t picked up a camera in months, things feel uncertain for her. I love this scene and I love these characters in pentiment that act as a mirror to the player character, It made me reflect on how my life did not need to play out like this and how if I did anything differently or took different paths maybe I would’ve ended up somewhere completely different and maybe I would be someone completely different. in my senior year of hs almost every single day I was working on a project of some kind with several different people. I made what felt like very big very important connections that would get me to the next step. everyone told me I was rlly good and ppl younger than me treated me as a mentor and ppl older treated me as someone on their level. I had made it in my head and then randomly on a fluke I gave it up, I became uninspired and I became jilted and I gave it up. I’m 23 now and I don’t anything to show for it artistically, in the past couple years I’ve made peace with that, I’m okay and even happy with that. I’ve seen and kept tabs on the people I used to collaborate with and work with, all are still working and almost all have improved their talents. but I’ve done almost nothing creatively since high school, but I’m happy. straight out of high school and just a little while after turning eighteen I moved in with someone I didn’t know that well and I’ve been here ever since. And I think to some extent the fact that I’m doing much better now in all ways has smth to do with having faith, not even faith in god or a god but just a blind level of faith.

For the past three years hbo has put out a rlly delightful documentary series called how to with John Wilson. each episode is about how to master a new topic or hobby but also it never ends up being rlly about that, but instead about how to form connections and how communication works in a world where that’s all but impossible. The season that’s currently airing will be its last and this Sunday’s episode felt like both its darkest and most uplifting. throughout the episode Wilson is reminded that he doesn’t rlly matter, doesn’t matter to his alma mater or to hbo or to the next generation or to the art world in general. there’s a really sad fucking just depressing moment of him standing outside of the Elon musk time magazine party and looking down at the streets below as he records a billboard for his own show, he narrates how he’s worked hard for this and ultimately it doesn’t mean much to him and hasn’t made him feel the way he thought it was gonna make him feel. instead after that he winds up at a competition for the largest grown pumpkin. after an entire episode where he seemingly is feeling down on himself and where he is artistically he winds up at a gathering of ppl where there’s a real sense of community. the entire show has been for me about the growing disconnect there is between us all esp. post-covid. that one of the only places he can find a real sense of community and belonging is at a pumpkin growing competition. it almost feels cyclical to the pilot episode where he tries to learn how to make small talk. in one of the only pre-covid shot episodes of the entire series he meets a man on a trip to Cancun, everyone else is having fun at spring break but John Wilson and this man are disconnected in a culture of disconnection and through that are able to bound by breaking down the barriers of what’s considered small talk.

it will be harder to have real conversations with ppl than it already is. we will be further and further disconnected from everyone as years go by but I think as long as there are days like tassing in 1545 cancun in 2019 or the beach at sunset in 2023 that there will always be small moments of genuine connection w other ppl

One of the rare times where history is cool and interesting and made me cry.

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When it comes to stories set during the Middle Ages, alot of writers tend to focus on the brutalism of the time period. Scenes of people falling in the mud with the pigs, losing life and limb in war and combat, taverns full of mead and debauchery. Sometimes, someone gets lit on fire, but in all cases it is an unbearable life.

And all of that is true in Pentiment, except for the last part.

To me Pentiment is about, to borrow the words of one character, love. The world is harsh and unfair, and those who stand to gain will take advantage of the less fortunate. There isnt always enough to eat, and the seasons are unforgiving. And yet, still, people have passions. Interests. Connections to each other, hopes, dreams. People live out there in the wilds of Europe (in the past but now also) and thats something I think Middle Ages fiction tends to forget. People cared about things. They cared about each other. I have to imagine it was the only thing making any of it worthwhile.

Pentiment is seen through the eyes of an artist. Art, to me, is the joy of communication. You put paint to the canvas, ink to the page, you carve feeling into the stone, perform meaning in the light of the bonfires. In this way art is less the thing you hold in your hand, and is more the thing you hold in your head that you are trying to conjure and evoke into the minds of others - and so the artist is therefore driven to spend alot of time thinking and interpreting the world around them. The only real reason one would spend so much time formulating such involved communication has to be that these things matter a great deal, such a great deal that they must be shared, compelled by some instinct of connection. As things play out, it becomes clear Pentiment cares alot about caring. At every step, its thinking about caring, exploring the struggles of caring, the concept of caring.

And sometimes (often) that makes Pentiment a very tragic game. Tassing is a small town nestled in the Alps but it is in no short supply of heartbreaking stories. There is murder. There are consequences. There is sorrow, there are burdens, there are scars. Everyone agrees, Europe in the 16th century sucked ass (in fact, everywhere sucked ass back then). But Pentiment is also a game that believes the arc of these things bends towards good. Things get better, slowly. They build on top of each other, in layers, in steps, in iterations.

I played this game sort of assuming the word “Pentiment” probably meant something similar to “penance”. Some sort of remorseful, regretful obligation. Some sort of “catholic guilt” type thing. The game is fairly religious - if only because everything was religious in the Middle Ages and during the Renaissance.

But I looked up pentiment after playing and I learned that it actually has to do with painting. It is when the underlying image of a painting begins to show through.

What a perfect name.

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Minor Thoughts scrap pile:
- I hate choice-based games where every answer is the right answer, because it fundamentally means choices dont matter. This is one of the worst things to happen to gaming and I want it to stop.
- Similar to previous, this game does a poor job of keeping track of context. I will learn information from interacting with an object, then talk to someone who "introduces" me to that same information and your character will behave like this is the first time theyre hearing about it. The lateral-linearity is not interesting enough to be worth this hassle.

There's a certain power in dissatisfaction. In giving players bad choices. There are many choice-based crpgs that offer perhaps too much choice in how the world is shaped. In how to influence others. Pentiment wisely pulls back on this to build an aching, intimate yearning. A yearning to make all the right decisions. A yearning to keep everyone safe, to choose a killer that will hurt the fewest people instead of choosing a killer based on evidence. A yearning to protect, and a yearning when we've failed. Our main character is not the hero deciding the fate of the world. He's just a guy, in a place and time. How we all leave our mark on history is subject to so many factors beyond our control.

Mechanically, its hard to say every skill has all the uses it could. Skills mainly make certain investigations easier, but they're always multiple avenues to uncover all the evidence you want. But this also means that every skill choice that does provide a new dialogue path feels all the more rewarding for your commitment. The skill choices in the final act of the game, compared to the others, are much more limited in their scope, but the final act is also much more on the rails than its previous story sections. Less time for choices to matter.

Still. Just kind of a truly banger game with incredible artistic sensibilities.

Pentiment is, simply put, a beautiful game. Along with Disco Elysium, I believe this game expands greatly the scope of interactive fiction, and narrative in video games generally, despite the fact that they are two entirely different beasts in my opinion. Yes, they both lack combat and have an emphasis on storytelling. However, for me, while DE's focus was (obviously) about modern life, its grievances and similar issues, Pentiment is all about history. I don't mean that it focuses on people's lives in the past; it does have a lot of that, yes, but I mean the representation and the interpretation of the past. During the whole game, that's also what we do as we try to solve the murder mysteries. The accumulation of centuries still affect the people of Tassing, just like in reality. A shorter and a more personal version of this fact is apparent in our protagonist, Andreas Maler, who is haunted by the ghosts of his past, even in the first seconds of the game.

Pentiment will probably be boring for most people, as the gameplay is nonexistent other than few easy puzzles and clicking your way across Tassing and its surroundings. However, if you look at it as a narrative about the past and its effect on present, you will probably understand its value. It has excellent artstyle, beautiful music and an engrossing story that spans across 25 years. Although I had some issues a few times such as NPCs not recognizing that I spoke to them before, I think it is forgivable. If you are interested by the things I said, definitely check it out.

Pentiment absolutely floored me; what a fantastic experience. As someone with a huge interest in art history, the amount of research and careful planning that must have went into this project is insane. It's as educational as it is enthralling.

Set during the 16th century at the dawn of The Enlightenment, it's no mistake that Obsidian wanted to illustrate parallels between this era and our own. To say any more about the plot other than it being a "historical murder mystery" could spoil the experience. The way dialogue is presented through different fonts is an inspired choice which helps to indicate a character's social class or simply how our protagonist perceives them. The lack of voice acting may be a deal-breaker for some, but when you consider the size of the dev team, the number of unique NPCs, and the amount of branching paths based on the choices you make, that would be an incredibly tall order. And it's the ramifications of said choices that made this narrative feel so impactful; begging you to come back for more and see what you missed in future playthroughs. That first in-game day is admittedly a little slow but it is meant to establish the status quo in the village of Tassing before pulling the rug out from under you; of which it does several times. Once I hit that second day I was hooked until the very end.

If it wasn't for Game Pass it's possible I never even would've tried a game like this, so I'm once again extremely grateful for the service. Microsoft may not be churning out the big AAA exclusives like Sony, but I will gladly take experimental passion projects like this in the interim. Even if you find it isn't for you, which is possible because it's clearly very niche, there's still no harm in giving it a try. It's not the kind of game that'll blow up on social media or Twitch; it's a very methodical and often peaceful experience that's less of an RPG and leans more towards a visual novel.

Hats off to Josh Sawyer and his team at Obsidian; I cannot wait to see what they have in store for us next.

Penitência. Um castigo ou salvação imposta àqueles que acreditam na expiação do pecado pelo sofrimento, e pela dor da carne. Como se seu lamento te livrasse do mal em corpo e alma.
Essa é uma visão desse termo;
Outra interpretação, talvez mais apostólica, seja na forma do cristão entregar seu corpo à santíssima trindade, tal qual Jesus e tantos outros mártires fizeram ao longo dos anos.
Santos que se sacrificaram em nome de sua fé e se livraram de qualquer peso, culpa ou dor mundana.
"sorte deles que morreram acreditando terem mudado o mundo, azar o nosso que continuou nele, sofrendo as devidas consequências"- Pentiment.
Agora, o quão cruel é não conseguir ser um mártir? Nessa busca interminável por uma dor para aliviar a culpa, a penitencia tem seu lugar sacro. Um sacramento louvável de dor, e compulsão que emula um sacrifício do corpo. ( tal qual jesus) quase de forma fetichista.

Esse comportamento de autodestruição sagrada se vê mais comum do que parece no comportamento humano, mesmo fora da igreja.
Em artistas, por exemplo, isso é quase religioso.
Muitos artistas têm sua arte como lástima. Vai devorar sua obra como um lobo devora um porco espinho, se mutilando e se lamentando, mas encontrando arte nesse ciclo ( que alguns vão dizer ser virtuoso).
Esse vício, talvez herdado da influencia cristã na arte, deu vida a grandes obras e artistas. Uma que eu amo de um dos meus artistas favoritos é a "A Incredulidade de São Tomé", por Caravaggio. Um artista que , pelas suas obras, vivia em constante penitencia.
Nessa obra, vemos ele (um suposto autorretrato, como ele costumava fazer) tocando na ferida de Jesus. Quase que surpreso, enquanto Deus, com um olhar piedoso, deixa Caravaggio magoar sua ferida em nome de sua fé. Como se precisasse tocar para crer, e ao tocar, ferisse a Deus, e portanto, a si mesmo. Apesar de não ser cristão, eu tenho um apreço por expressões de fé e eu amo como em Caravaggio, toda sua dúvida (e penitencia por conta dessa dúvida) transborda em arte. Caravaggio viveu e morreu se mutilando, talvez fisicamente, mas pelo menos em parte de sua arte (Davi com a cabeça de Golias)
Mas e para você? Quantas vezes foi o pentinente; e como pentinente, foi também teu confessor?

E quantas vezes, encontrou uma fé, mesmo fora da igreja? Se convenceu que merecia todo tipo de tormenta por conta dessa contrição. Quase de forma fetichista, assumiu o papel do réu, júri ou juiz?

Pentiment vai falar de fé, mas também vai falar dessa peleja interna em que vivemos ao longo da vida. Entre nossas diversas facetas, humores e contradições.
Pentiment é um retrato que vai contar em seu macro como a história é contada, muitas vezes pela arte, e como isso reflete na vida e nas dores das pessoas a sua volta. Por outro lado, é esse olhar íntimo e pessoal na vida de um protagonista esplêndido que consegue, com tão excelente uso do feitio de jogos, expressar uma jornada pessoal na vida de um artista. Nos conflitos externos e internos. Na disparidade entre amor a arte, amor a pessoas e amor próprio.
Também, na busca artística quase sagrada da alto penitencia para aliviar a dor do fardo da culpa de pecados ainda não cometidos.
Esse jogo é excelente e recomendo qualquer artista jogar.

Pentiment definitivamente não é uma obra Caravaggista, mas retrata de forma excelente artistas como Caravaggio.
PS: Pentimento, em quadros, pode remeter a um deslocamento de elementos ao longo do tempo (na arte final) muitas vezes resquícios de outras versões são evidentes em quadros, quase como fantasmas na obra. Esse jogo tem tudo a ver com isso.

Playtime: 18 Hours
Score: 8/10

A really excellent game! Obsidian will always be my favorite game studio and this game reminds me why that is. I remember watching various podcast interviews with Josh Sawyer when this game came out and to see his passion for the game got me excited to play it. It is a very different type of RPG from Obsidian but it still has that charm and ultimately plays like a passion project. But what did I think overall?

The roleplaying mechanics are dialed back a bit from other Obsidian games but its still pretty effective here. You can pick things like where Andreas (the main characer) studied and what he studied. I picked Law and Occult studies, and it made for an interesting combination. Both skills came up quite often in conversation and were very handy when I was investigating leads. When talking to characters sometimes when you make dialogue choices the game will pop up a "This will be remembered" message like in a Telltale game, and this basically comes up later when trying to perusade someone, as it will list a bunch of options you picked before and whether or not that person agreed with you which leads to either a successful or unsuccessful persuasion. Simple but it gets the job done. Its funny how I was just reviewing and complaining about Starfield's skill checks being meaningless and yet this game does it so much better imo. Overall, I liked the roleplaying aspects of this game which is what I play RPGs for.

The comparisons to Disco Elysium are fair in some cases but a bit off base in others. It definitely has that similar detective vibe of you trying to solve a murder, but otherwise its quite different. DE has a lot more systems at play and the skill checks are based on dice rolls, where as this is just a simple you either have the skill or you don't system, which I ultimately prefer. I do wish there was a leveling system similar to DE's but otherwise theres not much to complain about.

The story overall I thought was very good and well told. The first two acts had me hooked as to who the killer was and I kept feeling like I was making the wrong decisions, but in a good way. There's plenty of choice and consequence here and I love to see that in RPGs. Act 3 did drop off a bit for me in terms of my interest in the story, as your not really solving a murder but rather learning the history of the town, which I didn't find as interesting. However it does pick up towards the end and I found the twist to be very unexpected. And I thought the story wraps up nicely by the end of the game.

Otherwise I don't have many complaints. The OST is very good but it only plays during certain key story moments and I would have liked it to be used more. Even just a simple town theme that would play when your running around the town would have been appreciated. But overall, I highly recommend this game to anyone who likes RPGs or history and with it being on game pass which is how I played it, its worth your time!

All Games I've Played and Reviewed Ranked - https://www.backloggd.com/u/JudgeDredd35/list/all-games-i-have-played-and-reviewed-ranked/