If You Missed It: Pentiment review – More than you ink

It’s a given at this stage that with the flood of games unleashed in the last two months of every year (no doubt to stay top of mind in terms of holiday spending), certain titles slip through the cracks. As a player you may be intrigued by something but forget about it in the wake of dazzling AAA releases that benefit from a mega-million marketing budget. Before you know it, months have passed, and it’s a question of backtracking to play the games that initially caught your eye, but were drowned out in the noise.

One of the 2022 end-of-year releases that arguably ended up in that boat was Obsidian’s unconventional and artistically minded narrative adventure, Pentiment, which debuted on 15 November. Featuring a 2D aesthetic based on illuminated medieval manuscripts and Germanic woodcuts from the period, Pentiment drops the player into an unassuming Bavarian village that is plagued by a string of murders as part of a decades-long conspiracy. It’s up to you, as journeyman artist Andreas Maler, plying your trade at the local monastery’s scriptorium, to get to the bottom of the deadly mystery.

Pentiment is unusual in a number of ways. There’s the tribute art style, of course, but the game is free of voice-over, and, largely, music as well. Though far from a visual novel, it’s heavily text based in its interactions and choices, so expect to do a lot of reading to the scratchy sound of pen on parchment.

Narratively, Pentiment breaks from convention as well. Kicking off in 1518, its story is spread over approximately 25 years. Reflecting reality, characters you initially meet as toddlers are adults by the end of the tale. At the same time, the town of Tassing evolves as inns and imposing town halls join the skyline, and different tradespeople pop up on the basis of new technology and socio-economic shifts.

It’s worth mentioning at this point that Pentiment is set at a time when the past was giving way to the new. More specifically, the Catholic Church was finding its power challenged by the emergence of Martin Luther’s Protestantism, and the growth of printing as a way to mass disseminate texts. On top of that, the general population, long oppressed, was feeling empowered to question authority imposed on them with no basis, and act on their grievances.

Gameplay too is idiosyncratic in Pentiment. Andreas’s investigations are confined to a set number of days, and each is divided into periods such as working hours, sleep and forced meal breaks. There are only so many leads you can pursue due to this structure (especially if you’re dipping into Pentiment’s mini games), which means you’ll have to replay the game if you want to explore every suspicion. For the record, a single playthrough will take you a not-unsubstantial 15 hours. And though you will get to the heart of the conspiracy – Pentiment’s story is largely on rails with your role-playing choices impacting the details more than anything else – you will never know if your theories about the murders are correct.

With all this said, Pentiment obviously won’t be for everyone. If you prefer games that deliver a dopamine hit of action from the get-go, you’ll find Pentiment far too slow and passive. The game is quiet, story-driven and contemplative, speaking to the type of player who will hear “medieval murder mystery with a monastery” and immediately think of Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose. Or, to a lesser extent, Ken Follett’s decades-spanning The Pillars of the Earth.

If you are open to it, though, you’ll find that Pentiment is oddly compelling. Your investment in its world and characters grows the longer you play, and the passage of time’s impact on human life is treated with a lot more raw authenticity than you normally find in video games. As an example, you return to Tassing after almost a decade to find that one of your friends, who had a lovely wife and son, is now a widower struggling to raise an infant daughter. Your friend doesn’t mince words, wanting to know why you never kept in touch, or sent a consolatory message.

That really seems the point and power of Pentiment as an experience. A pentiment or pentimento is defined as “An underlying image in a painting, especially one that has become visible when the top layer of paint has turned transparent with age, providing evidence of revision by the artist.” Pentiment does exactly that with one fictional location, peeling back centuries of history, and then even more, to show relatable people and stories. The past is not so different from our present in terms of individual grappling with life-altering events and complex emotions that stem from them. At the same time, the passage of time is necessary as it allows for new beginnings, growth and stories layered on top of that older image. It’s arrogant to think that you are the centre of the universe when you are just an addition to the canvas, connected to so much on multiple levels.  

Pentiment is not without its flaws. The villagers are sometimes hard to tell apart (even with an inconsistently updated character glossary); it can be overwhelming to face a whole town square of people that need interrogating; and a 90-degree narrative handbrake turn in Pentiment’s third act feels unnecessary, throwing player emotional investment. But it’s all part of making something different; making art. Pentiment’s overall effect is poignant and powerful.

You can play Pentiment right now on PC, Xbox consoles and with a Game Pass subscription.