Built over Roman ruins in the Bavarian mountains, the 16th-century village at the center of Pentiment appears peaceful and unassuming. A Benedictine abbey governs Tassing, reliant on dwindling art commissions and spending by pilgrims to a nearby holy site. But as the lone setting for this 2D mystery-adventure game, the abbey plays host to murderous intrigue that morphs into a microcosm of class conflict. Through a story that spans 25 years, the game displays a thematic scope and ambition comparable to any of the more outwardly sprawling, choice-laden RPGs that made developer Obsidian Entertainment’s name.
Pentiment is broken up into three distinct time periods, each of which the player will explore in granular detail. As Andreas Maler, an artist working in the abbey’s scriptorium, you experience the daily lives of townsfolk to whom you are a glamorous outsider. The game effortlessly conveys that, over generations, the citizens’ lives have become believably intertwined with the fabric of Tassing and its meager economy. Changes in the area tend to be gradual: taxation, marriage, employment prospects, and the broader shift from pagan customs to Christian ones.
A murder, then, would be seismic and destabilizing, and Andreas finds himself investigating more than one over Pentiment’s timeline. Think of the game as a village-wide locked-room mystery, with the large cast of characters morphing into suspects. Everyone has a long-standing grudge or secret, and by poking around the village and talking to characters, Andreas gathers enough evidence to support an eventual accusation. Whether it’s the right one, though, is an entirely separate consideration: Like the smaller but similarly structured Paradise Killer, the truth of the matter might not be the same as the case you make to the authorities.
Where Pentiment departs from so many other mystery games, though, is in how close the protagonist is to the action. Andreas has to live among Tassing’s people, adhering to times of day and expectations to work. There are promises to keep and favors to do. You glean a lot of history simply by sharing meals with characters, giving the game a dense and lived-in sense of community. Pentiment doesn’t present a hermetically sealed crime scene that serves as a puzzle to be solved; in fact, the game is constructed in such a way that you’re never certain of the killer’s identity. In the end, the real mystery is much more complex, with the stakes made more personal since the passage of years depicts the results of the decisions you make.
It’s remarkable to see Obsidian’s resources brought upon something that’s allowed to remain intimate and small, hardly short on dramatic bloodshed but notably absent of any world-defining conflict. Not even your role as the protagonist guarantees influence on Tassing life. The game obscures how dialogue options feed into later persuasion checks that tally your skills alongside words you chose to determine whether a character heeds your advice. Whether you pass or fail an abrupt persuasion check, you’re forced to accept the result and move on.
Other elements similarly restrict your choices and nudge you forward. The time of day advances upon performing certain actions, so you’ll often have more potential leads than you have time to investigate them. Some early dialogue exchanges will prompt you to pick RPG-esque character traits to define Andreas’s background, so knowledge in fields like medicine and Latin will illuminate some details but leave you in the dark about others.
On the whole, though, the RPG elements are sparse, with no combat or inventory to juggle. This is very much a game built around looking at its dialogue boxes, which emulate hand-written lettering down to ink splotches, drying ink, and crossed-out typos. It’s a distinct and pleasing look, particularly when combined with things like page-turn transitions to evoke book illustrations of the sort that Andreas might make. Some phrases will be underlined, signifying that you can zoom out to a wider book view that has explanatory notes in the margins.
Unfortunately, Pentiment often sacrifices pacing and basic clarity of information for this style. Minor irritations accumulate over time, like how the sheer volume of margin notes practically begs for a more seamless integration into the dialogue than zooming out and zooming back in for the hundredth time. The main menu is made to look like a handwritten journal and quickly becomes a headache to navigate, at times reminiscent of the infamously unusable journal from The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind. Though your quest log is mercifully broken up by section, all updates are presented as blocks of diary text that can’t be sorted and provide no highlights for reference at a glance. Longer questlines spill onto additional pages, which are easy to skip because the game never signals when turning the page will continue the current entry or start a new section. Sometimes your notes even fail to record all the potential leads you’re given.
Rather than creating a sense of immersion in an authentic setting, Pentiment’s menus evoke a dark world where not everyone has been taught how to draw up coherent lists and outlines. And it’s not the only area where the game sags under the amount of information that it presents to the player. Though you can reference a list of characters with brief summaries to help keep track of the large cast, the character menu ends up as nightmarishly unsortable as the questlog and can’t be accessed in the middle of conversations anyway. Zooming out to the margins when a name is said in dialogue yields only an illustration to help put a face to the name, which doesn’t always answer the real question of who does what job and who the hell they’re related to.
While Pentiment does make a few convenient concessions like marking your map with points to investigate, the game also attempts to allow you to find stuff on your own—just like any good mystery game. In practice, though, this involves tromping back and forth between marked points in the hope that you’ll find new details because the game doesn’t indicate whether there is or isn’t anything new to learn at a location. You’ll often get a stock “Hello, Andreas” greeting in lieu of useful information, and sometimes the characters will spew unskippable text boxes of historical trivia, almost as if you’ve stepped on a landmine that explodes into word vomit.
While such digressions, to be fair, are optional, the game does encourage you to poke around every corner of its vibrantly rendered world to ensure that you’ve got the facts straight. In the end, though, Pentiment excels less as a mystery game and more as a portrait of a community. Because as a mystery to be solved and a mediation on how stories evolve over time, its focus wanders and ironically comes to fixate on elements like presentation and background lore that can all too easily overwhelm the basic tenets of telling an engaging story.
This game was reviewed with code provided by Assembly.
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