I posted that on 11/29/2022, and two years on lo and behold my backlog cleared sufficiently to play Pentiment. I have thought, and I know a bunch of other folks have played the game in the interim (including @rovarsson) so figured it might be fun to get a conversation going!
If you’re not familiar with it, Pentiment is a game by Obsidian (Fallout: New Vegas, KOTOR II, Neverwinter Nights 2, Pillars of Eternity 1+2, plus Fallout 2 and Icewind Dale 1+2 when they were Black Isle Studios back in the day); they’re owned by Microsoft these days but this was a smaller-budget game by the standards of mainstream studios. It’s a historical game set in a small town in the Holy Roman Empire at the dawn of the Protestant era; you play an artist employed by the local monastery who gets pulled into a murder investigation that winds up providing a kaleidoscopic look at the religious, social, and economic tensions pulling at the community.
The reason I’m talking about it here is that it’s pretty much choice-based IF. There aren’t really any puzzles or much gameplay beyond choosing different dialogue options as you talk to the many residents of the town and succeeding or failing at the occasional persuasion check based on how well you’ve managed to convince them. There are some very light RPG-style systems where you can choose a set of background traits for your character that do things like allow you to read particular languages, provide bonuses or penalties to the aforementioned checks, or open up new choices in a few dialogue trees, but this is almost always a matter of flavor. While there are a couple of small minigames, they’re pretty much just there for pacing rather than any challenge (there’s an optional card game that might be a little more tricky, but I didn’t go down the branch where you come across it).
Of course it’s not purely text-based – you have your little guy run around in the world to do all this talking, and the art is pretty great; there’s an illuminated-manuscript frame around it, and the 2d painted style is appealing while doing a lot to supplement the worldbuilding (you might not immediately know the social class of a character just from their name and occupation, but seeing their clothes and household goods will make it very clear). But the words are definitely the major focus; while the prose is rarely showy and avoids pointless archaism, the writing does a great job conveying the setting and the character of the various people you encounter.
Anyway, all that by way of throat-clearing – I have some more specific thoughts, which will be spoilery, so if you haven’t played yet I’d definitely recommend doing so (it’s $20 bucks on Steam, but I got it for half off in a recent sale and wouldn’t be surprised if it gets discounted for the holidays)!
On Pentiment’s presentation of its world:
Overall this game is a history geek’s dream – I don’t know what dark magic Josh Sawyer did to get Microsoft to publish a game that name-check Philip Melanchthon, but seeing stuff like that come up delighted me. But beyond the details I thought it did an awesome job conveying the feeling of the time, and communicating many of the major controversies and social movements of the era. There were two places I wished it went a little deeper, though I understand why they made the choices they did:
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The way that first the abbot and then the lord erode the traditional rights of the peasants (to forage in the forest, pay taxes in goods and services rather than coin) is a big part of the game, but it’s not given much context beyond strict economic exigencies – because the scriptorium is no longer making much money for the abbot, they’re squeezing the peasants to make up the difference. That’s all well and good, but it would have been neat to see this linked to the broader currents transitioning the society from feudal to early modern property and political relations; consolidation of property rights to eliminate old feudal obligations and traditions, so that land was easier for owners to buy, sell, and cultivate, helped increase overall productivity, and the increased marketization of rural economies helped support the development of the middle class and enabled trade, so these are not one-sided “the rich are just jerks” developments by any means, and someone with a Whiggish view of history could definitely see them as unalloyed positives. But they were still massively disruptive, and seeing the way the decisions of the relevant individuals were shaped by the changing tides of history would have enriched things, I think – the flip side is that the game is already doing a lot so I can see why they didn’t get deep into this, but especially for players who opt into the law background, a few gestures towards these dynamics would have been fun.
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The bigger omission, I think, is the way the Reformation is largely portrayed as a concern only to the educated characters. What’s here is good; Luther as a boogeyman is funny, and I enjoyed Vaclav’s gnostic syncretism (er, maybe a little too much, as I think my failure to discourage him got him burned at the stake). But the peasants don’t seem to be interested in any of it, and their revolt is portrayed as almost exclusively having to do with temporal grievances (OK, Gernot threatening to excommunicate everybody is religious threat, but it’s mostly about the townsfolk disobeying him, and secondarily about reversion to pagan customs). But my understanding of this era is that the populace was deeply interested in the Reformation; if you look at the actual Twelve Articles, the very first one is about the community having a say in who their priest is, for example. Sure, peasants didn’t have the leisure time to get deep into the scholarly debates (or, often, the literacy, though we’re told that Father Thomas’s efforts mean many of the peasants in Tassing can read) but the church was a huge part of their life – they knew about, and had opinions on, transubstantiation, the authority of the clergy, the proper relationship between the Pope and secular leaders, etc. Again, I think I can see why they downplayed this – doctrinal disputes can seem abstract or even absurd to a modern audience, so grounding the revolt in purely material concerns and keeping the Reformation to more abstract, philosophical argument was probably a good design decision, but I suspect this was a conscious departure from history.
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After a couple critiques, let me say that the portrayal of child mortality was very effective and heart-rending (though even still I suspect if you compared it to real-world statistics, it’s somewhat soft-pedaled in the game). The art in Act I really makes the kids look very cute; to find out that many of the lovable scamps died in between acts, and even some of the babes in arms, is a gut-punch that took a lot of the happiness out of seeing people again, and the reveal about August had me tearing up. The writing is very deft here, not going into histrionics and making clear that infant mortality is an expected part of life for these people, but profoundly painful all the same.
On the game qua game:
- I really liked the various background and the flavor they provided, but thought a bit of clearer telegraphing might have been a good idea – I mostly took Orator because I thought it went well with being a Latinist, but it seems like it provides a significant bonus to lots of persuasion checks (and I think Haggle works the same way for Magdalene) which seems way more useful than most of the other traits. I know this stuff is hard to balance, and this is a game that’s entirely about the experience rather than “winning”, but it does feel like a shorter list of qualities with more direct feedback about what they do could have reduced the FOMO.
- Similarly, the “miss out on 25-33% of the content” structure of Acts I and II was kind of frustrating to me – these all looked like fun set-pieces, so it’s painful that I didn’t get to experience the spinning bee or the inn booze-up, and the game’s one-save-only structure means you can’t easily go back and check out what you missed. I get that these choices feel more significant and “game-y” as a result, but eh, not sure that was needed; maybe creating more dependencies where the order you picked them in makes more of a difference could have been a middle ground? Alternately, perhaps dynamic tweaking of the supper/dinner system could have been effective; some of them seemed to cover similar info that you get from one of the missable segments, so shifting which are available to avoid redundancy could have been interesting too.
- The angels-on-your-shoulder mechanic, where you could do a bit of introspection and get different perspectives on particularly tricky choices, was really smart, I thought – there’s been lots of ink spilled on the challenge of making sure the player understands the implications of dialogue options, with tons of examples of like picking something seemingly-innocuous only for the player character to be rude or start a fight or whatever, and this mechanic felt like a good way of addressing those risks without needlessly burdening the interface for regular decisions.
- The journal of people, places, and tasks was lovely – I wish there’d been a family tree, though, I never got a handle on all those Bauers (except for Martin, of course).
- I also thought the way your choice of gift for Magdalene influences her traits was genius – it was unexpected but made for a nice connection between the protagonists.
…I have other thoughts, but I’ve already written a bunch so this is probably a fine place to stop and see what others thought! Though in closing I will say I was surprised by how much the ending hewed to Name of the Rose 
So I stopped after that, but may try again at some point…