Let's imagine for a second that a standard Obsidian RPG is like a bag of Maoam Stripes. Much like the delicious fruit chews, a game like The Outer Worlds contains a multitude of different flavours: combat is tasty strawberry, stats and levelling is ol' reliable raspberry, open-world exploration is zingy apple and the tasty cola is wearing a big moon head and hitting people with a giant space hammer. It's multi-faceted and each flavour offers a bit of variety. But for all the great options inside the Maoam Stripes bag, as connoisseurs of the fruit chew game, we all know that the cherry Maoam is the god-tier addition to the bag; the creme da le creme pick that, if you could, you would buy a bag exclusively of.
Where am I going with this? Well, the Obsidian RPG's cherry Maoam stripe has forever been its industry-best dialogue and moral choice systems. Whether it's feeding one of your trusted companions to a casino of cannibals in New Vegas or upending the whole narrative of Outer Worlds by selling your narrative-driving saviour out to the space corps, these games have always thrived upon setting up superbly-well-written scenarios and giving you engaging ways to interact and experiment with them. With Pentiment, Obsidian has done the unthinkable. It created a Maoam bag filled purely with cherry Maoam stripes.
Pentiment is a simple game. You walk around, you talk to people, you make decisions and you live with the consequences. No battles, minimal open-world exploration and zero experience to grind. It's just one facet of Obsidian's skill set refined and focused to the sharpest point possible and it's absolutely fucking incredible. It's so easy to take one look at this game and assume it's not for you. The 16th-century setting is immediately imposing, with dense dialogue exchanges taking up 95% of its runtime and historical events and concepts being thrown at you thick and fast. But in truth, one of Pentiment's greatest strengths is how it accounts for the fact you're likely going to be lost in this world and commits to providing you with the context needed to navigate it.
And after you do manage to get your head around everything, from the townsfolk's relationship with the Romans' beliefs to why the Abbey has such a stranglehold on the town, Pentiment becomes Obsidian's best storytelling achievement to date. This is a passion project through and through, and you can tell Josh Sawyer was committed to telling a poignant, thought-provoking story that dives into class struggle, conflicting ideologies, religion, the pursuit of passion, justice, guilt and a bevvy of other themes throughout its 15-hour runtime.
It's a game that thrives on throwing you into messy situations with no right answer and forcing you to clumsily clamber your way back out of them while living with the consequences. Whether the town is begging you to assign blame for a seemingly unsolvable murder under a strict time pressure or asking you to paint a mural while acknowledging the various conflicting belief systems of its people, so much of Pentiment is focused on stumbling blindly in the dark. You'll never be able to learn enough to confidently piece together a mystery because you aren't able to chase every lead. It's such a smart game because it inherently questions information, the power of it and how passing it carelessly can lead to harrowing, life-altering results.
If I'm honest, I have issues with the third act, which takes a slow, meandering U-turn at the game's most exciting point. But other than that, I'm obsessed with Pentiment. In the same way that Disco Elysium and Outer Wilds have been lodged in my head as mature, thought-provoking experiences that have stuck with me long after the credits rolled, Pentiment feels like that next game I'll be annoying people about playing for years to come.
It's also exciting to see Obsidian (which is fast proving to be Xbox's best acquisition to date) embracing complex, adult stories that tackle hard-hitting themes. Of course, they've always been amazing storytellers, and Pentiment does have the cheeky sense of humour that made New Vegas and Outer Worlds so special. But this is so measured and engaging. It makes me more excited than ever for Sawyer's next project, whether that's Outer Worlds 2 or (hopefully) another small passion project where he gets to flex the team's terrific writing chops.
Where am I going with this? Well, the Obsidian RPG's cherry Maoam stripe has forever been its industry-best dialogue and moral choice systems. Whether it's feeding one of your trusted companions to a casino of cannibals in New Vegas or upending the whole narrative of Outer Worlds by selling your narrative-driving saviour out to the space corps, these games have always thrived upon setting up superbly-well-written scenarios and giving you engaging ways to interact and experiment with them. With Pentiment, Obsidian has done the unthinkable. It created a Maoam bag filled purely with cherry Maoam stripes.
Pentiment is a simple game. You walk around, you talk to people, you make decisions and you live with the consequences. No battles, minimal open-world exploration and zero experience to grind. It's just one facet of Obsidian's skill set refined and focused to the sharpest point possible and it's absolutely fucking incredible. It's so easy to take one look at this game and assume it's not for you. The 16th-century setting is immediately imposing, with dense dialogue exchanges taking up 95% of its runtime and historical events and concepts being thrown at you thick and fast. But in truth, one of Pentiment's greatest strengths is how it accounts for the fact you're likely going to be lost in this world and commits to providing you with the context needed to navigate it.
And after you do manage to get your head around everything, from the townsfolk's relationship with the Romans' beliefs to why the Abbey has such a stranglehold on the town, Pentiment becomes Obsidian's best storytelling achievement to date. This is a passion project through and through, and you can tell Josh Sawyer was committed to telling a poignant, thought-provoking story that dives into class struggle, conflicting ideologies, religion, the pursuit of passion, justice, guilt and a bevvy of other themes throughout its 15-hour runtime.
It's a game that thrives on throwing you into messy situations with no right answer and forcing you to clumsily clamber your way back out of them while living with the consequences. Whether the town is begging you to assign blame for a seemingly unsolvable murder under a strict time pressure or asking you to paint a mural while acknowledging the various conflicting belief systems of its people, so much of Pentiment is focused on stumbling blindly in the dark. You'll never be able to learn enough to confidently piece together a mystery because you aren't able to chase every lead. It's such a smart game because it inherently questions information, the power of it and how passing it carelessly can lead to harrowing, life-altering results.
If I'm honest, I have issues with the third act, which takes a slow, meandering U-turn at the game's most exciting point. But other than that, I'm obsessed with Pentiment. In the same way that Disco Elysium and Outer Wilds have been lodged in my head as mature, thought-provoking experiences that have stuck with me long after the credits rolled, Pentiment feels like that next game I'll be annoying people about playing for years to come.
It's also exciting to see Obsidian (which is fast proving to be Xbox's best acquisition to date) embracing complex, adult stories that tackle hard-hitting themes. Of course, they've always been amazing storytellers, and Pentiment does have the cheeky sense of humour that made New Vegas and Outer Worlds so special. But this is so measured and engaging. It makes me more excited than ever for Sawyer's next project, whether that's Outer Worlds 2 or (hopefully) another small passion project where he gets to flex the team's terrific writing chops.