Pentiment Previews
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During this year's Gamescom, Obsidian Entertainment revealed the release date for Josh Sawyer's upcoming narrative RPG Pentiment. The announcement was accompanied by a press demo at the event, and as a result, we can now check out some previews for this curious project.
"One of the things we talked about early on is that there are a number of suspects for these murders, and it's not very clear—you don't have DNA evidence, you don't even have anything resembling forensic science," Sawyer said. "The justice system itself is pretty odd to a modern viewer. There's a lot of ambiguity here and you're put in a position where you have to pin the murder on somebody, and it's never going to be clear if that's really the person."
"You have to either use your best judgment or pick the person that you want to see go, because the punishment for murder in this time period was pretty severe. We really want you to see the consequences play out over a long period of time."
IGN:
Pentiment’s gameplay is straightforward enough. It’s largely conversational and choice-based, though I did play a handful of simple point and click minigames as I did chores for the widow, like breaking sticks and hanging things on the wall. But like a proper manuscript, Pentiment delights in the details. Words unspool across the page in distinct, flowing fonts (which you can toggle off if you like) as if a hand is writing them as the story unfolds. I loved the small, occasional spelling errors that appeared, but would correct themselves after a few moments, emphasizing the human storyteller presence behind the words. Highlighted words can be unfurled into much larger manuscript pages that offer detailed glimpses into real medieval history or fictional character background, illustrated at times with accurate figures and at other times inexplicably with images of cats wearing flaming jars on their backs.
Obsidian describes Pentiment as a "narrative adventure with RPG elements," and its team leads repeat this like a mantra: "narrative adventure," and "not an RPG at its heart." Yet, the designers also emphasize the game's constant threads of tough decisions and moral gray areas that follow lead character Andreas, an artist living in a small Bavarian village in the early 1500s, over the course of many years. The game begins with Andreas learning that his best friend has been accused of a murder that he didn't commit, then realizing he's his friend's only advocate. You spend the rest of Pentiment trying to solve exactly who did commit that murder, only to see Andreas become a small-village detective who investigates other crimes over the years.
Pentiment’s attention to detail is staggering, all the way down to the font rendering. Depending on a character's story, upbringing, and other facets of their personality, the game changes their dialogue’s typeface. A character with higher status has a fancy font that is borderline illegible by today’s writing standards; in contrast, a poorer character would have a more scratched and easy-to-read style. A small but very impressive detail is how lines get slashed out as dialogue is written as if the player were reading old manuscripts where the writer would scribble out a mistake. It’s a touch that Obsidian could easily skip, and no one would even think twice about it, but it pulls a lot of weight in making Pentiment feel genuinely authentic to the time period. That attention to detail encapsulates how much Sawyer and his team really care about putting players in medieval Europe.
