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.

Jogo incrível !!! Já esperava ser um jogo muito bom, mas ele me surpreendeu mais ainda.
Estilo de arte único, trilha sonora fantástica e ponto mais forte do jogo é a historia com todos os suspenses, reviravoltas e mistério. Sem contar a narrativa que te deixa imerso e preso nesse universo, com o gostinho de sempre querer saber o que vai acontecer depois.

Único ponto fraco para mim foi que a historia demora um pouco para começar a ficar interessante. Mas nada que prejudique a experiencia final.

Se você gosta de historia, religiões, personagens carismáticos e bem escritos, escolhas que impactam na historia e detalhes históricos definitivamente você vai gostar desse jogo. Ou se você gosta apenas de uma boa historia também irá te render boas horas de entretenimento.

Pentiment é uma Obra Prima e uma das experiências mais únicas que temos em jogos hoje em dia !!!!!!!

I love Obsidian, they're one of the few game studios whose activites I actually kind of sort of follow - and yet it's only some months ago that I learned that Pentiment even exists to begin with. The game seems to have largely fallen under the radar but you can kind of get why, because let's face it - it's not exactly media sexy is it? 2D narrative adventures are a hot item and Obsidian's track record in writing stories and characters has built them a strong reputation, but to put it politely Pentiment looks and sounds dry. It's a story about an artist visiting a tiny village in 1500s Germany to work on a commissioned art piece, with no voice acting included among its heaps of text and the visuals looking like a drab version of the era-specific illustrations if compared e.g. to the more flashy and whimsical Inkulinati (but the design inspiration is the only similarity between the two games). That description is ggoing to sound interesting only to a very niche subgroup of people and it's not exactly something that comes to life in trailers either.

But of course there is more to the game than that. Pentiment starts out as the story of Andreas Maler, the aforementioned artist who's staying in the village of Tassing while working on his art. Andreas is a relative neutral party caught between the rising tensions of the local monastery and the ordinary peasants living in the abbey's shadow, and so when a visiting noble is murdered in Tassing and one of Andreas' friends is framed for it, he takes it upon himself to find the real culprit independent of the existing biases around him pointing fingers at one another. Pentiment is sneakily a classic murder mystery in line with the cosiest of classic British TV series, and it's a real good one at that too. Andreas only has a limited amount of days to figure out the whodunnit by talking to the locals, digging into the town's secrets (sometimes literally) and making deductions and educated guesses based on what he finds out; some of this is based on the decisions made by the player on Andreas' background, all which open different routes and close others. The game doesn't rub a canonical answer on the player's face at any point and it's left to the player to trust themselves to have done their work, to make the right decision and then live with it in good conscience, in this age before DNA tests and fingerprint scans that could definitely prove the guilty party.

And those decisions like who you believe is the right murderer and how you got to that information do matter, in a classic Obsidian style. After the first chapter Pentiment reveals itself to be not just the story of Andreas but ultimately it is the story of Tassing itself. The murder is simply the first chapter and how you conducted your investigation leaves a permanent impression on the village and its people. As you advance through the chapters and navigate through the time skips in-between, you get to live through the aftermath of the positions you took. Over time generations grow and change, some scarred by what has happened in the recent history you just played through and others finding new lives through the events. There is no world-ending threat and even the local lordship barely presents itself in Pentiment's narrative - there is simply this small German village going through interesting times, with the player caught in the eye of the storm in various ways.

I lapped it up. Pentiment's first chapter is engaging enough because Obsidian's character writing is so good and the detective has a great balance of feeding the player information but letting them make their own decisions out of their findings, but it's the later game that got me hooked. The more "lived-in" experience you accrue in Tassing, the more familiar you become with the various characters and families living in it, and soon you begin to learn tidbits about the village's history which becomes engrossing to wade into. The last chapter is a particular highlight because after the game's biggest time skip, it's all about the generational ripples that the stones cast in prior years have caused, and the center of the narrative becomes to make sense of it all by reflecting on why things have happened the way they have. By that point you know all these characters by name and though in the game's world particular details begin to blur over time, you as the player are still armed with knowledge of times gone past that makes it all the more fascinating to navigate through this history. It's such a wonderfully done micro-level worldbuilding and narrative exercise, and playing detective (for various reasons) becomes engrossing.

Whilst the writing and the obviously well-done research are the game's establishing facets, the presentation also plays a huge part of why it sucked me in. The ye olde art style doesn't look that thrilling in the pictures and loses its novelty after the first in-game hour, but the magic is in all the little details. The illustrative style is everywhere, including in the character's speech bubbles where different fonts illustrate the various social ranks (which change with dramatic effect if you learn about the characters beyond your surface level assumption), where sloppy handwriting results in typos for the less educated characters and where the ink begins to splutter as their emotions rise. The game's sound world is minimal as well and for the most part there is no music, but that makes any appearance of additional audio cues all the more impactful: a sudden crash or the cacophony of an angry mob sound alarming when you're used to the quiet countryside life, and occasionally the game gives centre stage to the the period-faithful music to highlight moments of great emotion in a manner that makes its sparse soundtrack powerful. Pentiment's audiovisual pleasures are not flashy but they're impactful, perfectly used in strategic ways to heighten the story.

Pentiment is not vying to be another grand Obsidian classic. It's an intentionally smaller-scale game in very many ways, but that's why it also feels so refreshing and unique despite its first impression looking so dry at the initial glance. A narrative "adventure" game like this also makes sense as a genre for Obsidian to branch out to, and I really hope we see them flex their writing team in other projects like this going forward. It's a heartily recommendable game if you enjoy character-driven story pieces where choices feel like they matter, but where the game neither patronises the player nor rubs its decision-making in their face.

Beautiful game with an intruiging mystery that gets a satisfactory resolution. Interesting, multi dimensional characters with reasonable motivations drive the story forward. The only problem I have with the game is, unfortunately, the gameplay itself is extremely lackluster and consists mostly of walking to every place and NPC and exhausting all the dialogue each time you get control over your character. If you don't have a problem with walking simulator type games, this is a brilliant kind-of-one

It's hard to find the words for this one. Pentiment is really good and really unique. It's more novel than it is video game. More choose your own adventure than RPG. It's in that Disco Elysium mold of point and click mysteries where you learn as much about your character and yourself as you do the story in which you're immersed.

The game is very Disco Elysium-esque. There's a profound impact and comparison here that is hard to avoid if you've played both games. Pentiment isn't as good as Disco Elysium, which is unfair to Pentiment since Disco Elysium is among the greatest games of all time, but it's absolutely worth every minute you'll spend with it. The writing is strong not just for a video game, though it's in the 99.9 percentile there, but for any media.

I won't waste time covering the entire narrative here but I'll jump right to what I've found to be the most common complaint of the game. It seems those who weren't quite satisfied with Pentiment found issue with the 'lack' of impact of your choices on the story's outcome. It is a complaint I could not possible disagree more with. The choices you make are the story. Precisely because there are no 'correct' choices is why the choices have so much meaning. My playthrough of Pentiment felt deeply personal and while it admittedly offers little reason for me to replay it, I feel no need to. I don't need to alter the story I experienced. It was a wonderful experience. The game offers you several key choices that dramatically impact the narrative and you have to live with what you've decided.

The narrative is full of moral twists and demands you make tough decisions. But it does so by introducing you to a very living world that replicates its time period very faithfully, pun intended. The experience is highly immersive and you feel an immediate understanding of the world around Andreas and Magdalene. You feel the heart of Tassing and the weight of its history. The ripple effects of every event in the chain of time that's led to the town's state in each act. Each character and family is well written and connected in a weave of crucial relationships and connections across generations of this sleep Alpine town.

It's all tied together with a tremendously unique and effective artstyle. The game is an excellent adaptation of medieval illuminated manuscripts and its accompanied by wonderful sound design. In a game without voice acting, the entire experience feels brimming with life. A stark contrast to a game like Pokémon Scarlet whose lack of voice acting was hardly compensated by any such care and left the game feeling shockingly sterile. Pentiment is choc full of life at every page turn and every step. The textboxes being presented like scribed text with erasing typos was a phenomenal artistic choice and the game rewarded it at every step.

There's a number of teeny quibbles with some narrative choices. There's some complaint with quest design aspects. But very minimal. To dwell on them would detract from the praise this game deserves. Writing this compelling, this well thought out, this engaging deserves to be praised in a video game. It's a crowning achievement. And to nitpick at the frays of a masterwork quilt belies all that comprises the fabric. Simple gameplay layered on top of a lovely, lovely story. It's worth the game of the year acclaim it's received.

Finally played it after that NoClip documentary.
It's quirky and interesting for sure!
But I can't help it - some things happened in this game that made me go :"no".
At the end of the first arc, you must decide who to kill off and you will be wrong - as there is no right answer at this point. However, you do not get time to further investigate in the story (and that pissed me off as a detective-story-loving person).
You're automatically pushed into a timeskip where the same thing happens - with even less time to investigate and more people hating you. This was too much negativity both from me, the character in-game and the NPCs at the same time and made me just dop this.