Review- Pentiment

 Obsidian’s Pentiment is a dialogue focused RPG murder-mystery that has many great qualities to make it worth your time. The art style has been a highlight of the marketing because in an age of photorealism and fidelity, the style of renaissance illuminated manuscripts is a breath of fresh air. The dedication to displaying life as it was in the 16th century does not stop at its art style though, as the absolute highlight of this game, as is with basically every Obsidian game, is its stellar writing. The murder mystery is fun to unravel, as is becoming intimately familiar with the fictional setting of Tassing, Bavaria. The real core of this game, and what I am sure to think back most on, is its themes. There's a conversation that Game Director Josh Sawyer and the rest of the team want to have with this game about art, and the importance of art telling things as they are and as they were, rather than dismissing it or forgetting it. Through its interesting use of decision making, how the dialogue undergirds that decision making, and its continual support and recontextualization of its themes, Pentiment sticks the landing with what it sets out to achieve in a mostly satisfying way.

 

Pentiment sees you playing as Andreas Maler, an almost master painter who has a brief stay in Tassing, working on his masterpiece. This is where Pentiment’s decision making begins to take shape. You are allowed to customize your Andreas to a reasonable degree, giving him a custom backstory to your liking based on several possible variations. What is interesting is where the game doesn’t allow you to choose. This isn’t the typical Obsidian RPG defined by seamless consistency between player and character. This means that Andreas, even though his past is in part defined by you, is still his own man and is not always going to have the option to say or do whatever it is you’re thinking should be said or done all the time. This limited choice works in the game’s favor though, as your different dialogue options give you insight into who Andreas is or could be based on your dialogue decisions. Andreas has his own aspirations, his own responsibilities, and the gameplay is richer for not having everything in the player’s control.

 

Another element out of control of the player is how time works in this game. There are moments in the game where Andreas is given a deadline of some sort, where he must gather clues and talk to people. But given that this is a catholic town with their own local branch of the catholic church, he needs to follow the order of their day, so Andreas can only talk to people at certain times and with certain information already in his hands. There are too many people to talk to, and not enough time to investigate all of them, to the point where I could have a second full playthrough of this game and likely not talk to most of the people I talked to originally. This decision making, clue gathering under a deadline lights a fire underneath your chair while you’re playing, leading to a playthrough with at least some regret about how you handled things. This regret is a good thing though, I promise.

 

The one thing I expected going into this game was good dialogue that kept me invested and Obsidian absolutely delivered on that front. What I was most surprised with was how my previous decisions had continued effect and influence in my everyday conversations. For example, in my background information that I gave Andreas, I had him spend some time in Italy in his youth, where he used to get into a lot of petty crime and brawls. I also had it where in college he studied theology and his two favorite subjects were studying Latin and being an orator. All these decisions came up during important moments where because I studied theology, all the sudden I can debate a nun about the merits of keeping a book from being burned, or I can no longer read a text because I know Italian and not French. These points bleed into my earlier point about decision making, but what I really want to stress is that these decisions feel satisfying because there is excellent writing underneath that holds it all up. This same point bleeds into characterization as well. Tassing is filled with all levels of people, from peasants who are viewed by some as practically animals, all the way to the abbey, the local branch of the Catholic church where illuminated manuscripts are created. Each character has their own text font based on their education or penmanship, and the realities of these characters feel true to the period and not like they were plucked out of our modern day and simply placed into this setting. There’s a section of this game where peasants begin to question the authority of the church, after the church begins to squeeze more and more tax money from the people who are already struggling to feed themselves. This strife between the two parties is not universal, both sides are filled with people that have mixed opinions, some not wanting this conflict to end up in violence, and others feeling it’s too late to have anything but. These characters feel real and their struggles in life feel real, and this all comes out through the excellent, solid writing that Obsidian has done with this game.

My one gripe with the game comes in the form of pacing issues that I experienced in the third act, where I felt like a lot of scenes just went on too long, and there were too many people to talk to. It’s a small gripe, slightly exacerbated by the fact that this game is all reading text with no spoken dialogue to support it. Just be aware of yourself and your own propensity that your eyes have of glazing over from looking at continual lines of text.

 

I knew I was going to like Pentiment very early on when the game gives you a sneak peek at the themes it’s playing with. Andreas is working on his masterpiece in the scriptorium, and brother Peiro asks to view the masterpiece in progress. Andreas is painting November, with the peasant tradition of having pigs forage for acorns before eventually killing them. This violent tradition has been forbidden for quite a while, but that doesn’t concern Andreas. Andreas says, “This is the way November is painted”, to which brother Piero responds, “But it is not the way November is.” The same can be said of Pentiment. What do the lives of 16th century superstitious farmers have to show us or teach us now? They teach us what was, and they show just how similar and analogous our lives are to theirs, broadening our perspective on a time in history often brushed over or forgotten. I won’t soon forget my time spent playing Pentiment, and the ideas this game embodies are sure to stick with me long after today.