The best stories in video games manage to blend narrative, art, and gameplay in a way that elevates all three. Obsidian Entertainment’s latest title, Pentiment, is a perfect example of this, telling a deep, complex story of religion, truth and history in the form of a book that the player experiences as they write. Despite some sections with inconsistent pacing, it’s a must-see for adventure game fans.
Pentiment tells the story of the traveling artist Andreas Maler and his time in Tassing, a fictional town on the land of the Holy Roman Empire, way back in 1518. While Andreas goes about his day-to-day work on his masterpiece or makes copies of one of the manuscripts of the local abbey, he quickly becomes embroiled in a series of local mysteries that he must solve himself.
Andreas can be customized with different backgrounds and personality traits to unlock different dialogue options. My Andreas was a theological scholar with a history of hedonism, but another might have studied law and spent his time enjoying the great outdoors. The dialogue options that unlock these different backgrounds aren’t usually essential, but it’s nice to have a sense of control over your conversations since they make up most of the game.
Pentiment tells its story in three acts, two of which involve investigating murders. Between the high stakes and the massive accusations, these murder mysteries are when the game is at its best. There’s limited time to solve the case, but significant actions like dining with suspects or searching abandoned ruins will get you through the day, meaning you’ll only have a limited number of chances to uncover the truth get. I was dying to learn as much as possible, but there are more clues than time to follow them. While many murder mysteries end with a satisfying outcome, Pentiment forces you to choose a culprit with the information you have and live with the consequences if you blame them.
It’s not immediately clear whether you made the right decision or not, but it’s immediately clear how the city feels about it. Accuse a brother of the abbey, and the church will gall you on your return; Blame a beloved member of the townsfolk, and the folks of Tassing might not admire you the way they once did. Those consequences are part of what made Pentiment’s story so compelling to me. Each act is years after the last, and the ramifications of your choices in the previous chapter always feel significant. The town of Tassing is also undergoing major changes; Babies are born and grow into adults, elderly people grow old and die, and townspeople adapt and change. The city is probably more of a protagonist than Andreas.
Perhaps the strongest part of Pentiment is sticking to its core themes. It’s a game about passing stories from generation to generation and how the truth can be skewed over time, for better or for worse. There are rumors that Tassing is home to ghosts, conspiracies, and a dark history, but the only sources for this information are local stories, and each person has a different opinion as to what’s true and what’s not. Appropriately, Andreas’ search for the truth is presented as a story copied into a book. Like the player, he tries to record the whole truth once and for all.
This book-like aesthetic is one of Pentiment’s most charming qualities. It begins with the first few moments of a new save file, where you scrub the pages of an older book to write this new one. Characters and their surroundings are presented in beautiful, era-specific illustrations. The menu is also a book, complete with a glossary to provide the player with any historical terms that they may not be familiar with. You can press a button whenever any of these terms appear to see their definitions in the margins of the book in which the game takes place.
The dialogues also maintain a picture book aesthetic. You won’t hear any voice overs; Instead, the font changes based on a character’s social or professional status. Andreas speaks in a clean but elaborate font, with each letter traced, filled in, and outlined. The common townspeople speak in plain cursive, the printer and his family speak in blocks of printed text, and the abbey friars speak in elaborate letters that look as if they belong on the inscription of a Roman statue. And as a reminder that the player is witnessing the making of the book live, dialogue is sometimes written with a typo or two, which the unseen author of the book quickly erases. The fonts are a wonderfully effective way of adding personality to Tassing’s characters, but if you’re having a hard time reading the cursive, they can be turned off in the settings in favor of “easy-to-read” fonts.
While the presentation of Pentiment’s story is nice, its pacing leaves a little to be desired. I loved the crime fiction sections, but the sections without them felt slow. The story before the first murder takes a while to get going, and I wouldn’t be surprised if a less patient player bounced off the game because of it. Still, it’s far more noticeable in the third act when the stakes dwindle noticeably before ramping up again in the final hour or so. Without going into spoilers, Act 3 brings significant gameplay and story changes, both good and bad. At this point, it felt like I was watching the events of Tassing rather than playing them; I still enjoyed the story, but I didn’t have to make big decisions like in the first two acts, and there was no upcoming process to advance the characters.
It was also in these slow sections that I began to process my issues with the game’s audio design. Most of the time, Pentiment doesn’t play music in the background, which feels awkward when most of the gameplay is just talking to people. The sound of the quill scratching is nice, but I would have liked to have heard more of the game’s score, even if it was a bit sparse and atmospheric. Background characters also don’t stop their idle animations when you talk to another person nearby, and the audio for those animations will continue as well. Mostly silent conversations would be one thing, but talking to a character for two to three minutes while the only sound is the repetitive, incessant sweeping of a nearby broom, I’ve had to remove my headphones on more than one occasion.
Despite some issues with tone and the slowness of the third act, Pentiment is a wonderfully unique storytelling experience that overflows with respect for the historical era it seeks to emulate. Much like the themes of the game’s stories that persist over time, I will think of Andreas Maler and the town of Tassing for many years to come.
