Oh! Something about the visual/auditory presentation of the text I forgot to mention:
At the very start of the game, you are given a mouse-controlled rubbing stone with which to scrape clean an already written-upon page of vellum. Like a painter preparing the canvas, you’re readying a new blank page for the story you’re about to write. I loved the hands-on dive into the historical period this provided.
Now, echos of this action occur all through the game. In almost every paragraph of dialogue, there will be one or two writing errors. The writing itself is accompanied by the scratching sound of a pen. The errors are then erased with the sound of that rubbing stone on the parchment.
Some other small tricks are that the scratching of the pen becomes harsher when the speaker is annoyed or angry, and the letters of a word emphasised in anger have droplets of spilled ink around them. In the same vein, all God’s honorifics are written in red ink, and only filled in after the rest of the text has been written, the same way a real copiist would have done.
I found this absolutely riveting, and I always waited for the last red ink to be filled in and the last error scraped away and corrected before pressing the spacebar to continue. But I can imagine that this could be annoying to someone else.
Was it to any of you? How many, if any, of the text effects did you turn off?
And did you play predominantly with keyboard or mouse? (Or joystick?) I played the game itself (walking around and choosing dialogue options) with the keyboard. For navigating the notebook and for some of the minigames I switched to mouse.
Yes! I loved the clearing of the vellum. I think the word “Pentiment” is very rich, signifying the revelation of an image that was painted over. I think the image and concept are very apt: in a sense, this is what the final mural is, the picture beneath the picture. I suppose I should also acknowledge an etymology shared with “repent.” There’s an idea of both finding and returning to truth.
I found the text effects a good way to keep we players in a frame of mind of meaning-making and interpretation. I cut back on the them after I finished the game once; there was just so much to get through.
I played on Playstation 5 with a controller, and everything went very well.
Is that last panel your reward for the 100% ? In my playthrough Magdalene said she wanted to leave a blank space for the continuing history of Tassen.
Our third panels are the same. Despite some warnings that it might rip open the wounds from the revolt, I wanted to show the disastrous results of violence. I also didn’t want to pick an obvious side.
For the first panel, I chose the myth of Diana and Mars, who later morphed into Tassia and Moritz, showing the continuity (with variance and adaptation) between eras. The second was of the arrival of the Bavarian Christians, repopulating the abandoned town long after the Romans left, as a reminder of the connectedness of local history with that of the wider world.
On your Family Tree, did Vaclav end up on the pyre? In other words, did you encourage him a bit too much to speak freely of his theological views?
I think–think!–that the fourth panel is not painted by Magdalene, but it is dictated by the choice of whether or not to keep Thomas’s secret. I kept the secret, which led to giant depictions of the Christian saints. I think the other option has a before and after of pagan>Christian.
Sadly, I don’t have a shot of my family tree. I barely talked to Vaclav in that playthrough, though, so things might have been safer for him.
There was a program on the classical music radio station about medieval choral singing. While I was listening to the amazing singing, I suddenly flashed back to the scene in Pentiment where the monks are barricaded in the monastery library and you can convince one of them to sing to comfort his brothers.
