Pentiment! (spoilery conversation)

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:

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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 :slight_smile:

16 Likes

My own and Mike Russo’s history with this game are quite similar. I too bought Pentiment a long time ago, November 2023, and then put it aside until I could devote my full attention to it. A strange twist of fortune, or maybe a fateful interference from Perchta herself, made it so that Mike and I finished the game within a day of each other.

Mike’s done a great job already in summarising and explaining the game. I’ll just add some of my personal impressions. As is already in the thread’s title, this will be spoilery for anyone who hasn’t played yet. I’ll try to use spoiler tags if and when I refer to specific details, but so much of the strength of this game lies in its overarching narrative that spoiler tagging it all would produce a big blob.

Many of my favourite books are family/generation novels, where characters, events, and themes get time and room to develop. Pentiment leans into this, a period of twenty-five years passes between the beginning of Chapter I and the ending of Chapter III. During that time, old people die, children grow up, the town develops, and as we learn from the broad variety of conversations and events, the wider world changes a lot too.
My favourite moment of the entire game was probably the beginning of Chapter III, when I was still dazzled by the previous chapter’s ending and found the protagonist had switched to Magdalene. A young girl in her father’s arms when I had last seen her, she was now a grown young woman ready to take on the world.

My uncertainties about how to approach these kinds of games, and the instincts and strategies honed by many years of parser adventuring worked against me in the beginning. I actually missed the very first assignment of the game (trying to get the Gertners some leniency for their rent) entirely because I was too busy exploring places I had no business poking my nose into according to the narrative progression. This impulse for free exploration also meant that I found the secret entrance to the library long before the game would allow me to use it. The slight annoyance this kind of thing produced fell away as I learned to move with the game, lightly nudging the story and my character in the desired direction instead of pushing against the flow and tearing at the seams.

The actual adventure puzzles are very easy, meant to insert a bit of action-initiative from the PC in between the dialogue. Most of the obstacles are conversational navigations towards the intended outcome. What Mike doesn’t mention, and I only noticed when I was already some way into the game, is that in many of these conversations, you set the desired outcome yourself at the start of the dialogue. Spoilery example: In the conversation with Endris the blacksmith about whether he should pursue his interest in the girl he met at the market in the neighbouring town, one of the first options lets you mark what you’d like to persuade Endris to do ( “follow your heart and reach out for love” or “don’t invite heartbreak and risk the stability you have here in town” ). In the following conversation, you can try to choose the options that will press Endris towards that result. At the end, Endris asks a direct question and you have the choice between two mutually exclusive straightforward answers ( “go find that girl” or “stay here in town”). The success or failure of that conversational puzzle isn’t hard set beforehand, it’s measured against what you marked you’d set out to do at the beginning of the conversation and how persuasive your arguments were (most likely along with some other variables checking how the two of you had interacted earlier in the game). The conversation with the young stonemason about whether he should take up a apprenticeship or stay home and care for his mother is another clear example of this.

I absolutely loved the visual design. Except when the surgeon/monk looks like he’s milking a cow while standing over the dead body of the baron. Most of the time the little animations of people keeping busy are appropriate, but sometimes it feels like a a robot stuck in a repetitive tic.
The wider surroundings, fields and houses and mountains and trees are wonderful.

There is more stuff in my head about this game, but it’s getting a bit late. I’ll reread Mike’s post tomorrow and maybe lift some more specific points from it to comment upon.

I certainly consider Pentiment worth every penny I payed for it. A moving story set in a fascinating historical setting with lots of character development and evolution in the surrounding world.

@DeusIrae , I played with Andreas as a fellow interested in the knowledge of nature and astronomy, and adept at logical inference. For Magdalene I chose an interest in technology (tinkering) and a penchant for sarcastic comebacks.
Going for Latin and Orator as you did was a close second choice for Andreas, but I don’t think I can imagine Magdalene any other way than the fiercely independent and ad rem young woman I saw developing as a result of those choices.

9 Likes

FYI, Pentiment is 11.99 USD on PSN right now (it’s 19.99 on Steam)

3 Likes

Some more thoughts, using bits and pieces from @DeusIrae 's original post as prompts:

Well, not overly showy or archaic in terms of vocabulary or sentence structures, but the way the prose is presented to the reader utilises all kinds of tricks and effects to draw the player deeper into the historical time period.
The letters look as if they are being handwritten at the moment the characters are speaking (fastpaced timed text). Different characters have different fonts, from simple for the farmers to very elaborate for the highranking clergy and master copiists. My favorite was the printer, who’s words would be typeset mirror-image and upside-down first, and then *thudded* into his text balloon.
(All these effects are turnoffable in the settings menu.)

Yeah, really interesting. So much so that my enthusiasm and support got the poor man burnt at the stake as well. Did you also find out at the very end?
I thought the wordless epilogue was wonderful. Finally seeing the mural Magdalene worked so hard at, and then seeing the village’s family tree painted by Andreas. It tied the entire game and story experience into a very emotionally touching recapitulation.

This made me very careful during conversations. I didn’t want to inadvertently cut open people’s wounds anew (and, in the game-conscious part of my mind, cut off later options when I might need these characters’ help). But most characters welcomed the opportunity to talk about their lost loved ones, even if it hurt.
I was careful with Magdalene’s sharp tongue too. Her sarcastic comments could just as well burn her for the rest of the game as earn her a hearty chuckle of appreciation. This did turn at least two characters against me for the rest of the game. It made me realise how much thought went into forming each character’s personality, to react differently to a snarky remark that the player may have thought of as some quick out-of-game fun.

I came upon one snag in that regard. It may well have been that I didn’t read the preceding dialogue attentively enough, or that I inadvertently skipped one of those “angels on your shoulder” moments, so i’m not sure I can blame the game. I had encountered Artemis and Apollo looking for frogs in the forest. It was clear they were up to mischief, and I was looking forward to seeing what they would do. Later, when I was talking to the priest in the town church, he mentioned that he couldn’t find the sacristy key. One of the possible options for me was “I know where your key is.” I had no idea what Magdalene was talking about, so I pressed that option. And in doing so, I ratted out the twins’ froggy prank!

And to finish off, a bit about paths not taken:

I have no idea what you’re talking about. Where was this?
I also didn’t treat all the guests in the tavern to a drink. I was focusing on eavesdropping on the confessions, and there didn’t seem to be time enough to do both.
Did you descend into the old mine? I think it’s not necessary, as you can obtain almost the same information from one of the peasants, but I loved poking around in the dark. If you did enter, how did you go down? Since I opted for Magdalene to be a tinkerer, she could lower herself on a rope-pulley thing. I think the twins might have provided an alternate solution.
Lastly, how did you respond to Ötz’s romantic advances. I tried to hold him off without truly hurting him, but I couldn’t resist throwing at least a few nasty burns his way.

2 Likes

Open spoilers, which I think everyone should expect by now, but I’m saying it just to say it.

Platinum get! My final trophy involved getting knocked out by Samuel the Landsknecht (only possible with the Rapscallion background).

This is a really good game! I am not a history buff, but I can confirm that Pentiment conveys a potent and credible sense of the historic. At heart, though, what I found most compelling was the core loop of Act I and II, which mostly involves eating meals with people. Yes, other things happen in-between, but the constant is being welcomed by people into their homes to discuss everything from gossip to folklore to politics. The foods say something about the lives of the people serving it. & this is in miniature what I find so special about Pentiment: there is so much to look at and think about that it is nearly–not quite–overwhelming.

Are there canon murderers for Otto and Lorenz? It really seems that there aren’t. In both cases, I felt that the goal was just to keep specific people (Piero and the Abbot) from being executed. I find that to be a pretty compelling design! Who did you pick? I actually had to get each suspect convicted on my way to the platinum, but I didn’t think any of them were a slam dunk.

I still have quibbles: in Act II, the ending felt a little strained. Peter didn’t really seem to have the charisma to get everyone to behave the way they did. I understand that the peasants hate the Abbot, but the Abbot is not going to cause an accident at a construction site. He so obviously isn’t. That’s one of the reasons they hate him, right? He just hangs out in his abbey and eats posh food. I suppose I felt the creaking machinery of the plot: “this abbey isn’t going to burn itself.”

But in a game this good, much can be forgiven. Act II is still great because of its loop. Child mortality, which is handled as a matter-of-fact thing, is probably the hardest thing. Andreas’s son, August, comes as a shock: so this is why the protagonist has despaired of himself. It’s also heartbreaking that Caspar dies because you treat him well. If you treat him badly, he really does leave when you tell him to. In all these cases, despite whatever else might be going on, it’s ultimately the human connectedness of the work that compels me.

I loved the way everything came together in the end. The mural felt like a very fitting way to sum up my experience with the game. I was given a chance to say what is compelling and significant about this place where I’ve spent so much time. It’s really powerful when the full mural is displayed just before the credits.

My biggest complaint is Pentiment’s shocking disregard for players who might want to experience the game more than once. Visual Novels have had a solution for skipping to either unread text or choices for longer than I’ve been looking at them. An experienced designer like Josh Sawer absolutely did not mistakenly believe repeating–for instance–the boat ride with Saint Grobian would be universally enjoyed the second or third time. There’s just no reason to require clicking through a half hour of exposition on repeated plays. I don’t mind the FOMO thing that people mention. In fact, I embrace the sort of YOLO “make choices and live with them” design of Pentiment, but some allowances should have been made for repeat players. Coming back for more shouldn’t feel like punishment.

Still, I kept at it anyway and eventually got the Platinum trophy (100% for achievement people). I don’t regret it. Pentiment is really special, and I recommend it wholeheartedly.

3 Likes

Having played through only once (yet), I can’t say for certain. For the Baron in Chapter I, I really couldn’t bring myself to accuse the nun who was sexually assaulted, even though her motive would have been compelling to the court. I pointed the finger at Ferenc instead, and I felt really guilty when his head was chopped off! Not with a clean slash, but with three blunt blows of the sword!

For the murder of Otto, I followed the trail of evidence (mainly Sister Amalie’s statment) to Brother Guy, and I felt, uhm…, less guilty about that.

Once I got over my initial FOMO, I started to appreciate that this was actually a great strength of the game: it forces you to act upon incomplete information, sometimes making regretful choices in order to secure your main objective: saving the person you know for certain is innocent.
For this reason, the importance of incomplete information at the heart of the game, I suspect there are no canon murderers.

In Chapter I, my affection for Piero was the motivation that made it kind of okay to accuse someone else based on incomplete evidence. I did not have that motivation in Chapter II, as the Abbot is an arsehole, but my utter dislike of Guy was stronger, so that made it kind of okay in that case.

In this way Pentiment made me look in the mirror, consciously questioning my motives for following this or that thread of evidence, pointing to this or that suspect. Distressing, enlightening, thoughtprovoking.

3 Likes

This was my experience the first time I played through! I recall realizing that I couldn’t actually prove who the baron’s killer was, then thinking, “Right or wrong, this is what it takes to save Piero.” It was a complicated feeling to be sure, and then the execution had me questioning my choices.

Guy, on the other hand… he was just so awful. Whew.

3 Likes

Next time I play, I wonder if I can stomach it to side with Guy on everything he says, take his actions and words as my guiding compass…

I’ve already decided to take a more theologically orthodox and morally conservative stance the next time through, but I’d say there’s a still a world of difference between that and mimicking Guy. (The brown colour of my nose, for example…)

2 Likes

Ha! You will surpass my efforts. I did manage to stay out of trouble with the Abbot in Act I once, though…

3 Likes

Oh, after he and I had had our first few words, I didn’t even try anymore. It was great fun openly discussing Reformation with the Baron during dinner at the Abbot’s table until we got kicked out.

2 Likes

I tried to do a replay to make different choices and see the different outcomes… but then I couldn’t bring myself to accuse anyone other than Ferenc (who I’d accused in my first playthrough) in Act I, which defeated the entire point of replaying. :joy: So I stopped after that, but may try again at some point…

3 Likes

Something I only discovered later was that (Fenrec Spoiler) Fenrec was being blackmailed by the Baron to perform the ritual!

2 Likes

I learned that early on and it made him irrevocably suspicious in my eyes! (The fact that the other suspects also had justifiable motives was less important because I liked them more :joy:)

2 Likes

FWIW: I thought choice of suspect was mostly impactful in terms of my experience of deciding. Since you can quit right after choosing a guilty party, I chose Matilda without ever seeing the outcome. Quickly noped out of that! Difference between Widow and Fenrec in Act II isn’t massive. I think a lot of Pentiment is mostly about feeling the weight of choice and how you reach those choices. Like hunting with the Miller vs exploring the ruins.

Plus the combinatorial element of “how does my background affect my experience of these events.”

2 Likes

Lots to catch up on!

Oh, yeah, I ran into that a few times – I get why there isn’t a general “escape out of this conversation” key, but at least four or five times I’d wind up with no option except to make an accusation or otherwise do something I didn’t want to do either at all or yet (like talking to Guy in Act II when you’ve got info on his skullduggery), and wound up quitting the game so that I could not initiate the conversation at all. A bit more care to always offer escape-hatches in those situations would have been nice (or, just a more player-friendly save-and-load system…)

It’s in fact in the bit where you treat everyone in the tavern to a drink, which I likewise didn’t do – for whatever reason, I decided to go hunting with the miller instead, mostly because I felt like there was a 1 or 2 percent chance he’d try to kill me either accidentally or on purpose, and I thought that would be fun :slight_smile: Probably a less-good choice, but the scenery was lovely at least!

Yeah, I think that’s required to progress? I had the rope option without being a tinkerer, from just talking to Baltas, but I went with the twins instead since I figured having someone up there in case things went wrong was probably a good idea!

I encouraged him a fair bit, but made clear I wasn’t going to be sticking around in Tassing to be a housewife; the ending family tree showed him marrying Magdalene after also leaving and going to her in Prague, which I thought was a nice way to tie a bow on their plot.

Oh man now I’m doubly sad to have missed out on the drinking vignette, sounds like you could get up to a lot of fun there (though I suspect my weedy orator/lawyer would not have done as well in the punch-up).

Oh yeah, I loved the meals too! The art is great, and as you say, the social class and lived reality of folks’ lives really came through. I imagine most everybody already hates Gernot by the time Act II rolls around, but seeing the pheasant and other delicacies at his table while the Gerstners don’t have enough for their own sick kid because they’re being hospitable sure is a twist of the knife…

That was my sense, which I think is a nice way to do things – it makes the decision-making less about adding up clues and more about thinking about who “deserves” punishment, and why. I found that both novel, and uncomfortable, and also probably a good fit for a late medieval/Renaissance worldview, where character, social class, and perceived merit/sinfulness might have weighed more heavily than evidentiary proofs in making judgments.

I went with Ferenc in Act I, like everyone else – I was intending to name Ottilia on the least-harm principle, but found I couldn’t do it in the event, and figured Ferenc was cruising for a bruising anyway so I was just speeding things up. In Act II, I actually went with Hanna; Guy is an asshole, but I found the reason for some of his bad acts sympathetic, and I thought killing him wouldn’t tamp down the tensions between the town and the abbey, which was the main thing I was trying to do.

I’m curious now what happens if you don’t name any suspects – are there branches where Brother Piero and Gertner are killed rather than any of the folks you can finger?

Yeah, I think this is a better way of putting my feelings – I didn’t mind having to make choices, but stuff like the tavern scene feel like a real good time and it’s lame that the only way to experience them is a full replay that will involve many many entirely duplicative hours.

4 Likes

Yeah. >GO TO MAIN PAGE and then >CONTINUE are this game’s version of save-scumming. I also approached Guy in the library, not meaning to reveal anything, but more to see if I could get him to release any more clues.

Oh man! That got me really angry. Especially after hearing all that crap about how the abbey was struggling and they had to increase taxes.

That is nice. But MagsMagdalene going to Prague alone and starting a new life was more in line with how I interpreted/developed her character.

About Prague, I really enjoyed the glimpses of Esther’s life in the letters. It’s merely hinted at, but throwing Jews out of the city and then allowing them back in when commerce and moneylenders were needed was a disruptive reality for them. Always knowing that no matter how good your connections or standing in town were, you could be thrown out at any moment.

4 Likes

Yeah, I appreciated some of the incidental color there – I picked England as the place Andreas spent time between Acts I and II, and there were a few incidental lines of dialogue about how Henry treated the Jews, plus I did like how Guy’s backstory also touched on these themes. I did feel like the fact that there was zero anti-Semitism on display when Benjamin and Rachel visited might have been historically strained, but definitely the right decision!

3 Likes

Oh hey, just saw Steam has the game on sale for $10!

2 Likes

I noticed this too. It was not ignored completely however. Benjamin and Rachel emphasised how happy they were to find such hospitable people in the Drücker family, and mentioned this was not straightforward.
Twining the threat of a pogrom into the already busy narrative would have been complex, at the very least asking for a chapter of its own, or an even more twistingly branched game.

2 Likes

I think it was also explicitly stated that Agnes wouldn’t turn Rachel away.

2 Likes