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 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.

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.

So I wrote this big long in depth review of Pentiment, and then accidentally hit some key that magically CLOSED THE MUTHAFUCKING REVIEW WINDOW WITHOUT ASKING ME TO SAVE AND LOST ALL MY WORK. Sigh.....

So after much swearing and yelling, Ill just say that Pentiment has a really great story, well written and impeccably researched. The artwork and music are exquisite too. But the simplistic and boring gameplay mechanics definitely mar the experience, and made going back to replay the game again an unappealing prospect. If the game didn't rely so heavily on pure dialogue, so as to make 90% of the game a continuous mashing of the X button to get through dialogue sections, it would be a greatly improved experience. I also thought the big reveal at the end was rather weak and not very believable either. Nevertheless, the story and worldbuilding are amazing, and definitely makes it an easy recommendation, at least as a one time playthrough.

Played first 5h sometime during release on Gamepass, recently finally bought it on Steam because I am here to support niche passion projects especially coming from Obsidian.

And oh how I don't regret buying it.

The third act is so emotional and bittersweet. I wasn't ready to tear up during a labyrinth mini game. The little animations, the care that went into making every book, every painting, every dialogue. The feeling of getting closer to characters when sharing a meal. This game goes from a who dunnit mystery to something much deeper.

(Act II is slightly weaker but I love all three acts)

Pentiment reminds us that reading is an act of necromancy.

THE LETTERS MOVE! Even as you read the text in this game, it shifts and rearranges itself underneath your eyes. It is text as a living, breathing entity, and I am positively shocked in retrospect that no other game has done anything like this. Great innovations, I think, rearrange the world around them. They seem like the obvious solution in retrospect because they are so overwhelmingly right that it seems a travesty for any other solution to be used in their place.

Pentiment loves writing. It loves text, it adores the written word, and it is obsessed with the act of reading and being read. It makes every single other text-heavy game look worse by merely existing with such passion for this medium. How am I supposed to read a VN, play a CRPG, wander a walking sim, when the entire time I am now acutely aware of just how dead those texts are? They are cold and unfeeling, just a tool used to get across words to the player, and nothing more.

The text in this game has mechanical depth! I don't just mean the writing, which is a strong contender for the best prose in the entire medium, but the text itself -- the ink bleeds to life in front of you, filling in the outlines of the words as they appear. Several handcrafted typefaces populate the dialogue of this game, each of them accompanied by the scratching of a pen on paper or the satisfying clunk of a printing press, like the voice beeps of a visual novel on steroids -- it turns the act of reading into an awareness of the act of writing, intimately coupling the consumption of the text with the creation of the text in a way that somehow makes the characters in this game feel even more real and human than if they were fully voiced.

Each typeface refuses to just have one variant of each letter, but instead several varying versions of letters are used depending on where they are contextually located, causing the text to bleed and run into itself in a satisfying and natural way. The letters change as you read, but not in a lazy and random way, instead carefully handcrafted for effect. The speed of the changes is just so that, for those within an average range of reading speed, you won't so much notice the exact changes of the letters as they happen, but instead you will always be right on the tail of the rearranged characters, noting their presence in the corner of your eye and by the stains left beneath the newly written text. This is, of course, the titular effect, and it says everything about the historical and cultural themes explored in this game -- but that is for another review to discuss. For our part, we are here solely for the text!

In far more obvious ways, the way that characters write their dialogue reflects who we understand them to be, whether it's in the choice of typeface, the frequency of spelling mistakes, or the ways in which alternate colors of text are used. Some characters wield red text as if we are reading a Red Letter Bible, and other characters hold completely different things to be significant and holy, and thus represent that with red text instead. When characters are impassioned, or tired, or terrified, their text is filled with errors and rapidly changing letters. We get a sense of who they are without even reading the words that they have to say!

Pentiment is all about uncovering the vibrant life in that which we view as dead, permanently separated from us, and hidden by layers of dirt and centuries of distance. It argues that even the very words in which history resides are alive -- and if the text is alive, how can its contents not be? In a world of digital text and mass alienation, is all too easy to conceptualize of a relationship between us, the author, and the text that looks something like author --> text --> reader. The author creates a text, its own standalone object, and we consume it. Pentiment rejects this entirely, and reminds us that the relationship has always been that of a conversation! The act of reading cannot be separated from the act of writing. When we engage with a text, we are fundamentally engaging with its author as well, and by doing so reaching across continents, across millennia, connecting two living persons even if it means that we are resurrecting the dead to do so!

I did not think text could be something that I would find this beautiful. This is what the medium of gaming deserves, this is what it's always been capable of, and it is a joy to finally see the medium's potential fulfilled in such a loving and thoughtfully crafted manner.

Play this motherfucking game!

Sights & Sounds
- It's very likely the game's artstyle drew you to it. It's certainly what piqued my interest. I'm happy to report that it does indeed look amazing, with the highly stylized artstyle reflecting the medieval paintings and illuminated manuscripts produced in Bavaria during the 1500s
- I was also pleasantly surprised by the game's text boxes, which feels like a weird thing to say. There's all sorts of neat little touches. If you're talking to a monk or nun, their speech bubbles will be written in a old-timey gothic script. If you're talking to a printer, the text will plop down on the bubble with a satisfying "clunk" of an old printing press. The text bubbles of people speaking other languages will autotranslate if you have a skill that helps you speak that language. In all, a really cool approach to dialogue
- The music is excellent and similarly of its time. The vocal tracks are especially nice and were a little unexpected

Story & Vibes
- You play as a Flemish artist named Andreas who is living in Bavaria while he works on his masterpiece that will allow him to become a master artist. A mystery erupts suddenly after a local baron visits the town. You'll interview people, play a few minigames and puzzles, and use your best judgement to solve both this mystery and the two others that crop up later in the game
- I'm being intentionally vague in describing the plot. The story is extremely compelling and well-written, so I don't want to spoil anything. It's definitely one worth experiencing
- The writing is also incredibly good, which helps breathe life into the several townsfolk and tourists you'll encounter. Each character feels unique and interesting. Most of them have pasts and relationships that really flesh them out and make Tassing feel much more lifelike. This level of immersion is really impressive when you take a step back and realize that the screen looks like a painting
- It's not all serious, though. The game does have a rich sense of humor. Beyond the occasional situational humor and wry dialogue, you'll also play a few pranks and even be given the chance to headbutt an ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ doctor if you choose the right options

Playability and Replayability
- I'm happy that this is an adventure game where narrative choices actually have an impact on the story. Depending on whether or not you piss off the church in the first chapter, the second chapter can have a very different feel to it. Remember that justice was a little more bloody in medieval times, so whomever you implicate as the perpetrators of the various mysteries you solve will face dire consequences
- Beyond the typical walking and talking you'd expect in an adventure game, there's not much gameplay. Not that it's necessary in a game like this, but you won't even be managing an inventory
- Given the narrative focus and the ability to converse with your own mind when faced with certain dialogue choices, I've seen some reviewers compare the game to Disco Elysium. While there are some superficial similarities and they'll largely appeal to the same audience, you'll be doing Pentiment a disservice if you go into it expecting the same experience. Disco Elysium is such a unique (and in my opinion, better) game that it's not fair judge Pentiment against that sort of masterpiece
- I understand that it's difficult (or maybe even impossible) to implement a chapter select in a game where choices matter, but I still really wish there was a chapter select. I want to go back for the achievements I missed. Quick tip for achievement fiends: when it comes time to accuse someone of a crime, be sure to quit to the menu after the achievement pops. You'll be able to make the choice again to collect the other missable ones

Overall Impressions & Performance
- Although the game is gorgeous on a larger display, it really shines as a Steam Deck title. It's fully verified and runs perfectly. The frequent autosaves and exploration/narrative focus make it an easy game to pick up and put down whenever you're interested in delving a little deeper into Tassing's mysteries
- Depending on how thorough you are on each day of the game's story, you'll wind up with a wide range of completion times. It's probably possible to beat this game in as little as 12 hours if you don't do much exploration, but what's the fun in that? There's a lot of good dialogue to read, history to learn, and subplots to unearth

Final Verdict
9/10. If you're a fan of narrative-focused games and like your choices to have an actual story impact, this is well worth full price. It's really hard to complain about a game with dollar-per-hour value that spins a tale this good. If you like the art style and enjoy a good mystery, this is easy to recommend

Pentiment is enshrined in my pantheon of great narrative games alongside such modern classics as Kentucky Route Zero, Night in the Woods, and Disco Elysium. It demands more from the player than most games do, asking you to adjust to the rhythms and customs of country life in medieval Bavaria, and then to care about a very large and tangled web of relationships, with dozens of named characters who all know and gossip about each other, and also age and marry and have children and get sick and die. It took a while to grow on me, but I’ve rarely felt more rewarded for my investment. Highly recommended to anyone with the patience for it.

as vezes parece q nada nesse mundo é sagrado.

as pessoas são violentas, vis, cruéis, quase sempre propensas a oferecerem o seu pior por muito, muito pouco. sangue é derramado, e apenas depois de muito tempo são capazes de refletirem sobre as consequências de suas ações.

é meio q sobre isso q esse jogo é. sobre o tempo. sobre como a história de um lugar está sob constante transformação. sobre como velhas feridas podem se tornar apenas distantes memórias. sobre como velhas feridas podem gangrenar e se mostrarem mortais. pentiment tem muitos temas, mas acho q esse foi o q me pegou mais. o tempo tem poder demais sobre as nossas vidas.

eu gosto como esse jogo tem respeito pelo período histórico em q ele se passa. ele se dá ao trabalho de humanizar cada pequeno habitante de Kiersau. cada um é capaz de amor, carinho, diligência, inveja, cobiça, violência, luto. ele não romantiza o período como outras obras q se dizem "historicamente corretas", mas aproveita a pesquisa meticulosa de consagrados medievalistas para nos mostrar como a humanidade de 500 anos atrás n era tão diferente assim da q a gente conhece hj em dia.

eu poderia ficar babando ovo desse jogo por alguns parágrafos. não acho q seja lá muito necessário, pois acho q já ficou claro q amei praticamente tudo nele. antes de qualquer coisa, é um ótimo mistério medieval, Umberto Eco ficaria orgulhoso. a apresentação dele é maravilhosa e torna a experiência de gameplay bem mais agradável. se fosse pra reclamar de alguma coisa, é q o vai e volta pelo mapa as vezes pode se tornar meio entediante. ir de um canto pra outro na abadia pode ter até uns cinco loadings e isso é meio q demais.

mas enfim, eu amei esse jogo. eu amei Kiersau, tanto seus habitantes quanto a sua história.

vou sentir saudades de um lugar q nem sequer existe. arte é uma coisa doida.

Got my likes on twitter interrogated after uttering in a discord VC call

"Pentiment is extremely ugly"

So much for the tolerant left

Pentiment was a very inspired and fun experience. The first two arcs worked well to create both interesting murder plots while also progressing an intriguing major overarching plot-line.

The investigations were great and the game did well to create situations where I had to pull out a notepad to keep track of all my theories (both for the murders, and the overarching plot).

The characters were likable and the world well written, I had a joy exploring and talking to everyone. It was a great to see my choices, however small I may have initially thought them, have varying impacts that could be directly seen in later arcs. When a 'choice is remembered' you can count on it coming back up later in the game, whether small or large.

The third arc was a bit lackluster compared to the previous arcs though and I found myself a little bored. It eventually picks up but by then the game is mostly ended. The conclusion to the overarching story was not quite what I was hoping for in terms of excitement however despite my misgivings I think it well written and not overly convoluted which is a testament to Obsidians effort.

Overall Pentiment was a great game that I'm happy to have played, I highly recommend it to anyone that appreciates choice and consequence.

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.

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

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.

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/

You KNOW a game is good as fuck when you hit the end and you see a list of research citations in the credits. Holy shit, dude, what a ride. Game that has met near-universal acclaim actually extremely good, who would have thought?

I do think I ruined my experience by taking it a bit more slowly than I would have liked, as I found myself forgetting certain plot threads and characters, but the core is strong enough that I have a lot of great memories of going through the game. There's a lot of stuff that's really stuck with me since I played it, like every end of act going hard as hell. I like Andreas as a protagonist, he's got a very nice balance of being customizable through player choices while also having a very compelling core to him. All the characters were good, actually, even with some minor difficulties in remembering everyone (and that's even with a cheat sheet in the journal...). There were definitely characters I wish I'd gotten to spend a little more time with, because I'm not sure if that was the only time I could've chatted them up or if I just missed out on their storylines.

I also had a great time with all the mysteries, and it was extremely cool how like. Absolutely none of your Big Choices in that regard end up feeling good in the end. I remember completing Act I feeling like I'd made some sort of horrible mistake, and it absolutely ruled. As much as I love it and want to know what happens in other paths, I'm not sure if I want to play it again, because I think in games with choices like this you are bringing a certain aspect of yourself to the playthrough, you know? I'd certainly love to know how things turn out for other people, though. Maybe once I've sat on it a while.

Of course, what originally drew me to the game was the presentation, and it's really incredible. The game looks fantastic, between the speech bubbles with text that suits their own writing style and the period-appropriate art representing characters and their mental states, particularly Andreas's mind palace. Like. God damn. I don't like getting into spoilers in reviews but those fucked me up bad as the game went on!

I know people are kind of mixed on how good the individual acts are, but I'm gonna be real, I liked all of them for their own reasons. Act three is very different, and it threw me off guard at first but I really loved the themes it played with in comparison to the first two, while also really enjoying the first two. Of course it's all meandering to the same thematic core, the center of the labyrinth--but I think it's fun to find your way there yourself, isn't it?

Good shit. Absolutely worth a play or three.

Pentiment is a special game in every respect; a true labor of love. Every time Josh Sawyer speaks about his work in interviews, particularly in the Noclip Documentary, you can see the passion and joy he had for this project in his eyes. In our fast-paced era where games are released and almost as quickly forgotten, Pentiment stands out among the ranks of games that are exceptional and, for this reason, has left a lasting impression on me.

It tells its story so wonderfully slow-paced and with such attention to detail. Every citizen in Tassing has their own unique handwriting, depending on the social class Andreas assigns them to. This is accompanied by such a relaxing ASMR quill sound that I had to snap myself out of a trance several times to follow the story. I like how historical themes of the time are explained and contextualized. In the middle of the game, the Peasants' War is presented in a way that is so understandable and interesting to me, unlike any other medium could achieve. It is only through this game that I engaged with my local history because a major battle of the Peasants' War also took place in the town where I have lived for a long time, and this is deeply rooted in the town's history. Before, I never felt the urge to be interested in it, and now a game from 2022 has done that. It's wonderful.

Many characters are written so realistically and lovingly that I wanted to experience every single dialogue with them because they almost always had something interesting to say. I appreciate that the game uses quiet moments to exchange information with the villagers over a shared meal or just to talk about the latest gossip. I also like that I can play Andreas in different ways. You can play him as a hedonistic jerk who never backs down from a fight, or as a theologically trained pedant who wants to impress everyone with his logical thinking. The decisions you make have significant impacts; for example, towards the end of the game, a character transformed so positively that I was truly delighted. It's nice that Josh Sawyer hasn't completely forgotten his role-playing roots but has skillfully woven them into the game.

It remains true to its main theme throughout the entire game: the examination of history and how it influences so many aspects of our lives in various ways, and how history can be interpreted differently and sometimes corrupts, But it also shows how incredibly important belonging and community are, and that every person deserves them. The ending is one of the best I have ever experienced, and having Lingua Ignota sing the credit song is the cherry on top. It is a truly almost unique experience that everyone should play if they are not averse to extensive texts.

I know intuitively that people from hundreds or thousands of years ago are just like us, just governed by different (or not-so-different, as it often is) systems and levels of technology that make them behave in different ways. Pentiment has made me feel that more than any other story. Partly this is because this time period is not the setting I tend to gravitate towards in any media, but its more due to it its exhaustive research - which it is effusive about showing you at all times - and being able to chill in this town for several hours, meet its people, and see how it changes over the years. Pentiment is a game about how everything that happens today is built on what came before, how history never stops, and how sad it is that one's role in life and the actions available to them are dictated by class and social status. All of these were true 500 years ago, and they remain true in 2023.

There are many things to admire about Pentiment, but the one I keep coming back to is the game's refusal to let your build-linked dialogue choices always be the ideal options in a conversation. This is extremely rare, even in other games that are celebrated for their writing. It's an effective reminder that not everyone you meet has a need for or interest in your superior cognition. It also dissuades you from minmaxing Andreas (silly as the thought may sound), encouraging a build based on your own personal interests rather than one engineered to produce the highest number of optimal outcomes. You're best served if you're in it for the love of learning, much like Andreas himself; gamers looking to exhaust every conversational tree and win every heart and mind are not going to have fun.

This is especially important to remember given Pentiment's assertion that powerful people prey on the ignorance and incuriosity of others in order to preserve their power. We are responsible for making our own meaning in this world, yes, but we must do so without losing sight of history, lest the ruling class create their own.