PENTIMENT
Obsidian Entertainment
PC, Xbox, Nintendo Switch

Describing the process of pitching Pentiment to the executives at Obsidian Entertainment, Fallout: New Vegas director Josh Sawyer stated, “I never would have proposed Pentiment if it weren’t for Game Pass,” the Xbox subscription service which offers a Netflix-like model for playing new games. Indie game development creates brilliant games, but Pentiment is the sort of achievement that can only be made with the decades of expertise leveraged by its development team and the resources afforded by studio development. One look at its art in motion reveals the nature of this staggering accomplishment – they have married the medieval art of liturgical Dutch masters with a game Sawyer described in the linked interview above as “Night in the Woods meets The Name of the Rose.” The presentation of this game is clever and full of the kind of ideas smaller teams cut for scope.

You play primarily as Andreas Maler, an apprentice artist working on his masterwork (think master’s thesis in a grad program) in a monastery outside the small Bavarian village of Tassing. You characterize Andreas through dialogue choices which offer you great freedom, but his voice and sense of humor largely remains the same wherever you place his values. Andreas, meanwhile, characterizes his peers, with different fonts reflecting different levels of literacy – when he realizes he had somebody wrongly pegged, their next line will play out, change font, and then be presented again to reflect their class and education. It’s the sort of judgment you get used to Andreas making.

The game’s story spans twenty five years in Tassing’s history where the town is thrown into uproar by a series of murders, all seemingly disconnected…save for one mysterious link. Andreas takes it upon himself to solve these murders and protect the falsely accused, partly because he is an educated outsider but also because he is somewhat arrogant and selfish. These murder investigations take place over the course of a handful of days. Andreas will visit with different townsfolk to ask questions, potentially lure them into exposing secrets, and collect evidence. At the end, whether he has enough evidence or not, he will nominate someone for execution, and depending on his case, his accusation will succeed or fail.

Unlike classic LucasArts games, it is impossible to collect all of the evidence and information you need in one playthrough. Convicting the wrong person for a crime won’t stop the game in its tracks. It’s a storytelling game, and part of that story involves finding your own values as you explore impossible situations. As a result, navigating the game’s choices becomes a series of very intentional decisions, and exploring Tassing’s world merits eagle-eyed attention. As a roleplaying game, it gives you so much space to play, to solve problems and find new ones based on choices you made hours ago, that it compares favorably with Sawyer’s prior landmark quest design in New Vegas.

Pentiment’s story is told with expert writing which neither becomes self-serious and dry or the Monty Python skit the art evokes for many modern players. The game is very funny without being condescending to its characters – it respects them as people, not so different from us, but also respects the difference a world of rotted food and Catholic governments would have on its characters’ worldviews. There are moments in this game where a less expert hand might make this a diatribe, but Sawyer and his narrative design team manage to largely keep Pentiment in the voice of the manuscripts which have survived from the era – albeit in plain English rather than unnecessary Middle dialect.

On that Middle dialect – I don’t want to scare people away who might enjoy this game but may not have the Medieval European history education to enjoy it. Whenever a proper noun or historical movement is invoked, you can hit the view button and it will zoom you out to view definitions of each of those terms. Adding in-line footnotes to a game based in history is so outrageously smart that it should become a standard in almost any narrative game. The UI itself is presented as a medieval text, clear maps and quest logs laid in an artful tome.

The joys of Pentiment come in unraveling its mystery and coming to love its characters. Its core mystery weaves in and out and comes to a satisfying conclusion. In the meantime, meals, knitting competitions, local festivals, gossip and play give you opportunities to care for the people you might be sending to conviction. One of my favorite characters is Klaus Bruckner, a block printer and family man whose sense of friendship and loyalty are spoken in sometimes blunt but fair clarity. There are ten other characters I might’ve selected.

One highlight is optional. An Ethopian priest, Brother Sebhat, has come to visit Tassing’s monastery to present his manuscripts for study and documentation. However, he hasn’t gotten a chance to meet the townspeople. He asks you to organize supper. When you arrive, more people than he ever imagined have joined to meet him. Sebhat takes the opportunity to learn about life in town and share his experiences as an outsider, before reading a passage from his own bible. The game’s art style changes at this moment – he presents the story of Lazarus in the art of Ethopian Orthodox Catholicism, with the townsfolk joining this story. The children ask why everyone in his bible is brown. Sebhat’s storytelling gets the chance to express a deeply felt, reassuring sermon about death and salvation, a welcome balm during this murder investigation. As he’s telling his story, one of the little girls steals Andreas’s hat – she then mad dogs you, like, “are you going to interrupt Brother Sebhat to get your hat back?” If you let her keep the hat, twenty years later, her child will be wearing it as a family heirloom.

That sequence, I think, highlights the deftness with which Pentiment expresses its narrative. Pentiment is not afraid of the scripture in its world, willing to embrace religion as a powerful force in the lives of its characters, but remains skeptical of the institution which governs that religion. It celebrates the difference between different churches, the churchless, the pagan, the European and African, between men and women. It tells this serious story with a sense of humor, the recognition that sometimes kids are just little shits, without becoming a farce. Sebhat’s supper is one of many scenes that moved me deeply.

I’m a geek for this kind of stuff – medieval literature meets murder mystery is a fanfiction my dreams wrote up while I was writing D&D campaigns in high school. I never thought it would be realized in a video game. It is chock-a-block full of magic, empathy and history. Pentiment marries a celebration of life alongside a recognition of the hardship and violence of a time where most leave no monument. From graves marked for “Two innocents” to the ruins of Roman aqueducts littered throughout Tassing, Pentiment works to preserve a history many never learned.