Pentiment Review - Page 3
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Initially, though, you'll just be playing as a young artist trying to help his friend who's been accused of murder. If you've seen any police procedurals in your life, you probably know that to prove someone's guilt in a murder investigation you need to establish means, motive, and opportunity.
Not having the luxury of dozens of seasons of Law and Order at his disposal, Andreas takes a more cavalier approach to his investigation. He mostly focuses on the means and motive parts of the equation, while opportunity becomes but a distant afterthought for him.
This starts to make sense when you consider that Andreas is not the detective on the case, and he's actually forced to solve the murder before that detective arrives. As such, cross-referencing alibies and establishing corroborating statements is not something you'll get to do.
In fact, while you'll eventually get whoever was orchestrating the murders, you'll never know for sure if the people you accuse are the actual perpetrators. The way the game is set up, several people could have committed the murders, and a major aspect of the game is figuring out if you want to put the heat on whoever you feel is most likely to be the killer or someone whose guilt will affect the community in the least negative way.
This is further complicated by the fact that you can't physically follow all the leads at your disposal. Now, the game doesn't have an actual time limit to prod you along. Instead, each day you have is separated into several segments. And while most of your actions are free, certain legs of your investigation, like unearthing a grave or eavesdropping on a secret conversation, advance the clock several hours.
You usually have a decent number of options in how to spend your time, and so you'll be forced to decide if you want to continue digging in a certain direction, or instead spread your attention between all the suspects and then make an educated guess with what you've got.
Assisting you with all this will be an assortment of skills presented as backgrounds and cultural touchstones. These are generally determined by the places you've lived before your arrival in Tassing and the subjects you've studied over the years.
So, for example, being able to read French, on account of spending some time in France, will help you out in certain situations, but at the same time, it will preclude you from being able to decipher Italian texts.
By the looks of it, there aren't any random rolls or skill checks in the game. You either know something or you don't. And when it comes to persuasion, it's all about your skills as an orator and your previous interactions with the character you're trying to persuade.
Another notable thing about Pentiment is the way it presents its dialogue to you. The game has no voice acting of any kind, but instead, it elevates its text-based conversations to a new level.
This is very much welcome, as for years, RPG dialogues have not merely been stagnating, they've actually been regressing. We went from Planescape: Torment's complex dialogue trees to Mass Effect's dialogue wheel, and then to its simplified version in Fallout 4.
But then, games like Disco Elysium seem to have reminded people that there's still a lot that can be done with plain old text. And Pentiment is a great example of that.
Keeping in tune with the game at large, whenever a character speaks in Pentiment, it's presented as a piece of parchment gradually being filled with writing. You get different fonts depending on who the character you're talking to is. Peasants and other barely literate people have their own simplistic scribbles, educated people write in a more legible way, monks impress you with their gothic font, while people working in the printing press business type out their words instead of writing them.
As that happens, you occasionally get typos that get fixed right before your eyes to simulate less-than-perfect speech. Parchments get covered in ink blots whenever a character is getting really steamed. And if you assume someone's level of education, but then realize you've misjudged them, the font they speak in will change from that point onward. It all absolutely oozes style and gives you a better feel for the characters than any voice acting.
