izigame.me

I love Obsidian, they're one of the few game studios whose activites I actually kind of sort of follow - and yet it's only some months ago that I learned that Pentiment even exists to begin with. The game seems to have largely fallen under the radar but you can kind of get why, because let's face it - it's not exactly media sexy is it? 2D narrative adventures are a hot item and Obsidian's track record in writing stories and characters has built them a strong reputation, but to put it politely Pentiment looks and sounds dry. It's a story about an artist visiting a tiny village in 1500s Germany to work on a commissioned art piece, with no voice acting included among its heaps of text and the visuals looking like a drab version of the era-specific illustrations if compared e.g. to the more flashy and whimsical Inkulinati (but the design inspiration is the only similarity between the two games). That description is ggoing to sound interesting only to a *very* niche subgroup of people and it's not exactly something that comes to life in trailers either.
But of course there is more to the game than that. Pentiment starts out as the story of Andreas Maler, the aforementioned artist who's staying in the village of Tassing while working on his art. Andreas is a relative neutral party caught between the rising tensions of the local monastery and the ordinary peasants living in the abbey's shadow, and so when a visiting noble is murdered in Tassing and one of Andreas' friends is framed for it, he takes it upon himself to find the real culprit independent of the existing biases around him pointing fingers at one another. Pentiment is sneakily a classic murder mystery in line with the cosiest of classic British TV series, and it's a real good one at that too. Andreas only has a limited amount of days to figure out the whodunnit by talking to the locals, digging into the town's secrets (sometimes literally) and making deductions and educated guesses based on what he finds out; some of this is based on the decisions made by the player on Andreas' background, all which open different routes and close others. The game doesn't rub a canonical answer on the player's face at any point and it's left to the player to trust themselves to have done their work, to make the right decision and then live with it in good conscience, in this age before DNA tests and fingerprint scans that could definitely prove the guilty party.
And those decisions like who you believe is the right murderer and how you got to that information do matter, in a classic Obsidian style. After the first chapter Pentiment reveals itself to be not just the story of Andreas but ultimately it is the story of Tassing itself. The murder is simply the first chapter and how you conducted your investigation leaves a permanent impression on the village and its people. As you advance through the chapters and navigate through the time skips in-between, you get to live through the aftermath of the positions you took. Over time generations grow and change, some scarred by what has happened in the recent history you just played through and others finding new lives through the events. There is no world-ending threat and even the local lordship barely presents itself in Pentiment's narrative - there is simply this small German village going through interesting times, with the player caught in the eye of the storm in various ways.
I lapped it up. Pentiment's first chapter is engaging enough because Obsidian's character writing is so good and the detective has a great balance of feeding the player information but letting them make their own decisions out of their findings, but it's the later game that got me hooked. The more "lived-in" experience you accrue in Tassing, the more familiar you become with the various characters and families living in it, and soon you begin to learn tidbits about the village's history which becomes engrossing to wade into. The last chapter is a particular highlight because after the game's biggest time skip, it's *all* about the generational ripples that the stones cast in prior years have caused, and the center of the narrative becomes to make sense of it all by reflecting on why things have happened the way they have. By that point you know all these characters by name and though in the game's world particular details begin to blur over time, you as the player are still armed with knowledge of times gone past that makes it all the more fascinating to navigate through this history. It's such a wonderfully done micro-level worldbuilding and narrative exercise, and playing detective (for various reasons) becomes engrossing.
Whilst the writing and the obviously well-done research are the game's establishing facets, the presentation also plays a huge part of why it sucked me in. The ye olde art style doesn't look that thrilling in the pictures and loses its novelty after the first in-game hour, but the magic is in all the little details. The illustrative style is *everywhere*, including in the character's speech bubbles where different fonts illustrate the various social ranks (which change with dramatic effect if you learn about the characters beyond your surface level assumption), where sloppy handwriting results in typos for the less educated characters and where the ink begins to splutter as their emotions rise. The game's sound world is minimal as well and for the most part there is no music, but that makes any appearance of additional audio cues all the more impactful: a sudden crash or the cacophony of an angry mob sound alarming when you're used to the quiet countryside life, and occasionally the game gives centre stage to the the period-faithful music to highlight moments of great emotion in a manner that makes its sparse soundtrack powerful. Pentiment's audiovisual pleasures are not flashy but they're impactful, perfectly used in strategic ways to heighten the story.
Pentiment is not vying to be another grand Obsidian classic. It's an intentionally smaller-scale game in very many ways, but that's why it also feels so refreshing and unique despite its first impression looking so dry at the initial glance. A narrative "adventure" game like this also makes sense as a genre for Obsidian to branch out to, and I really hope we see them flex their writing team in other projects like this going forward. It's a heartily recommendable game if you enjoy character-driven story pieces where choices feel like they matter, but where the game neither patronises the player nor rubs its decision-making in their face.