Pentiment review

Pentiment, Obsidian's historical artistic adventure and labour of love, arrives on Xbox, PC, and Game Pass tomorrow — here are our thoughts on this creative masterwork having rolled credits and jumped back in for more...

Video games really have spoiled us in terms of power and spectacle. We’ve felled armies, saved galaxies, defeated gods… you name it, chances are some gaming hero or another has done it in suitably bombastic style. Sometimes, though, we might not want that — the stakes don’t always need to be that high to make for a captivating tale and when so many games are already competing to one-up one another to crank the intensity ever higher, it can be a great change of pace to dial things back a bit. Or, in the case of Pentiment, quite a lot. This is no epic globe-trotting tale, but a small-scale, self-contained adventure that barely sets foot outside of the fictional 16th century rural Bavarian settlement of Tassing. And rather than being held back by its narrow scope and tight focus, Pentiment is all the better for it.

Pentiment is a work of art

Pentiment is a narrative adventure with light RPG mechanics, dropping us into the role of Andreas Maler, a wandering artist who finds himself in Tassing working on a commission for the local abbey. Beyond this basic background, much of Andreas’ past and personality are for you to shape, with early decisions letting you choose his fields of study, areas of interest, and many other cultural touchstones for him. These aren’t just for your benefit, either. You’ll frequently see the icon representing one of your choices pop up in lines of questioning, responses to other characters, or even observations in and around Tassing — if you decide Maler had a studious past, he may be able to interpret Latin inscriptions on the town’s Roman ruins, for example, while a background in medicine will make him more likely to be able to identify useful flowers and herbs in Tassing’s surrounding woods and forests. With a fair few such character-defining choices to make throughout the game, there’s room for your version of Andreas to be really quite different to another, and each variation will allow for different experiences in many interactions, potentially even leading to different outcomes.

One fairly common flaw with choice-based games like this is poor signposting — having prompts that don’t necessarily line up with the ensuing dialogue, or making it unclear which have consequences. Pentiment swerves these issues wonderfully, with clear indicators when something important has been said or done (in the vein of Telltale’s ‘[person] will remember that’ pop-ups), icons representing options relating to Andreas’ background or skills, and even the option to ponder on important decisions, helping you gather your thoughts and choose wisely afterwards. These internal reflections also employ icons, only this time referencing characters encountered in Andreas’ dreams, so the scholar represents options relating to logic and truth, the fool will lead to disruptive or chaotic responses, and so on. Then, when there comes a moment where a host of actions and choices may lead to a new path, the skill check is displayed openly, showing positive and negative factors that influenced the outcome so you can clearly see how you did, and how and why things either worked out or didn’t. It’s a smart system that makes things mostly feel fair and potentially helps to unlock these branches on subsequent playthroughs, although it doesn’t reference actions you didn’t take — if you don’t see many (or any) influencing factors, you might want to explore around the situation a little more next time, since you clearly missed some important things.

From a gameplay perspective, Pentiment mostly plays like a fairly traditional point-and-click adventure, but you don’t need to worry about missing things as anything interactive is clearly labelled. You do, however, need to frequently try talking to as many people as possible in case you miss out on new conversations after fresh information comes to light. Fortunately, characters will just respond with a cursory greeting if they have nothing more to say, only cutting to a conversation close-up when they’re up for more of a chat. When it’s time to eat, you can choose who to sit down with, and mealtimes offer a perfect opportunity for more involved discussions — making smart choices about where and with whom you eat can yield crucial leads. Sometimes, interactions may also involve simple mini-games, some that can influence the outcome, and others like the order you eat the food in front of you during a meal being simply for flavour, if you’ll excuse the pun.

Pentiment plays out in three parts spanning 25 years, with large time skips letting you see the long-term impact of your previous decisions, as well as showing the wider impact of the rapid cultural changes of the period. It’s truly fascinating to return to Tassing after years away and see what has changed (and what hasn’t), and again, its small scale lets you really drill down into the daily lives of the townsfolk and makes for a much more personal, intimate affair, in turn causing interactions to carry more weight. There’s even a smart visual language to this cultural shift, with older characters set in their old-fashioned ways tending to be more stylised in their appearances (akin to illustrations from period illuminated manuscripts), while younger characters perhaps more open to change and new ways of life appear more realistically proportioned.

This isn’t the only way Pentiment is extremely smart with its visual design, either. The excellent overall art style certainly helps, but the stunning typography takes the crown here, especially with dialogue being the game’s most important feature. It’s rare that you’ll hear someone say that a lack of voice acting is a good thing, but that’s absolutely the case with Pentiment. You see, characters of different status and background ‘speak’ in different fonts, depending on Andreas’ perception of that character. Peasants, farmers, and children, for example, are represented with a scratchy scrawl, while the clergy tend to use a heavy gothic typeface. Since this is all based on Andreas’ cognition, it’s free to change as and when new information comes to light, shifting in real-time — discovering a farmer is actually well-read in modern printed papers might change their dialogue to be mechanically typeset, or finding out a monk isn’t the squeaky clean holy man you thought could see him ‘downgraded’ to a more primitive script. All of these are lovingly presented, each stroke hand-crafted to make the words flow onto the page, and each unique in how the letters and words are formed. People even make mistakes, typically correcting these quickly before dialogue moves on, and can have other slight imperfections like minor ink blotches or faded text due to uneven inking during printing. There are other novel features here as well, including effects like heavy ink splatter being used to represent anger or outrage, using coloured lettering for emphasis in place of bold or italic styling, and leaving spaces for any Biblical references only to go back and pen them last in red ink for heavier reverence. It’s an astounding amount of attention to detail, and few games come close to Pentiment in terms of typography.

Chances are that some of you, like myself, may not be especially clued up on 16th century Bavarian history, but Obsidian has us covered with an extensive interactive glossary, which too is worked into dialogue. When a term or name is underlined in red, a simple tap of the View button pans out to show the game screen as an illustration in a manuscript, with border notes (among various gloriously grotesque animal diagrams) linked to the key terms with comically extended Python-esque fingers leading to brief explanations. Terms use a dotted underline when you have already viewed their entry to save you from having to slap the button each and every time they appear for fear of missing something important, while prominent characters simply show their portrait so you can find them around Tassing as necessary. Not only does all of this help provide additional context as needed without having characters resort to unrealistic exposition, it also makes Pentiment feel more cultured than many games, like it wants you to learn about this important historical turning point as much as it does entertain you with its own tale. Dialogue is typically excellent and offers some wonderful options and choices tied to certain backgrounds, and putting all that info dump stuff in a separate optional section really helps keep conversations natural and engaging.

For all its confident visual strength, audio in Pentiment is far more understated. As mentioned, there’s no voice acting, and music is used sparsely but to excellent effect for pivotal scenes. Most of the time, you have little more than the typical sonic backdrop of a historical rural town — the hustle and bustle of livestock and street conversations, punctuated by the bells of the abbey ringing in each new portion of the day. Hearing the abbey monks in full song feels much more impactful with music so uncommon, and having such subtle audio for the most part really helps you to ‘hear’ each of the characters as you interpret what you think they might sound like based on their presented typeface, demeanour, and tone.

As for the Pentiment achievements, the list still hasn’t gone live at the time of writing so it’s hard to say exactly how much progress I managed to make towards the completion. There were pops following several major consequences and I get the impression that there will be multiple of these per major point of divergence — after speaking with director Josh Sawyer for our recent Pentiment interview, we know that a full completion is intended to take multiple playthroughs. I was engrossed enough by the game’s freedom of choice and how integrated its traits and backgrounds are to everything that I was already looking forward to seeing how differently things might play out on a second run before I had even finished the first. Text can be sped up and subsequent runs would likely be able to skip a lot of non-critical investigations to get straight to the desired outcomes once you know what you’re doing, so I don’t think it should be too bad once we have the list, although it is some 20-odd hours long and frequent auto-saves might make any kind of cloud save workaround shenanigans tricky.

Summary

Pentiment is an artistic triumph, and a fantastic choice-based adventure game/RPG with a protagonist that you can genuinely mould to your liking to make everyone's experience with the game likely to turn up different versions of events. It's refreshing to play something so laser-focused on a single setting, and captivating to see how the town and its people change both with time and based on the events that play out around (and because of) Andreas. The slow pace and amount of reading required may put some people off, but I'd encourage you to try it all the same — it's a fascinating period piece that tells both history lesson and original narrative while reflecting on the importance of art and stories, and comfortably one of the best examples of its genre in recent years and among the best Game Pass games.

* Luke spent around 25 hours exploring Tassing, unlocking a decent amount of achievements in the process but the list is not currently live at the time of writing. A review copy was provided by the publisher and played on Xbox Series X and Xbox Series S.

More Pentiment stories:

Review

Written by Luke Albigés

Luke runs the TA news team, contributing where he can primarily with reviews and other long-form features — crafts he has honed across two decades of print and online gaming media experience, having worked with the likes of gamesTM, Eurogamer, Play, Retro Gamer, Edge, and many more. He loves all things Monster Hunter, enjoys a good D&D session, and has played way too much Destiny.