Pentiment review: Role-playing murder mystery shakes up the Renaissance

In Obsidian Entertainment’s PentimentHistory is always building upon itself. When traveling artist Andreas Maler visits the Bavarian town of Tassing, it’s already dealing with class division, liturgical disagreements, and community drama, all influenced by everything from interpersonal conflict to centuries of religious change to the political specifics of the 16th-century Holy Roman Empire. Now the crime spree begins.

It takes place over 25 years. Andreas and other townsfolk accumulate their histories with time. These are, of course, driven in part by the player’s actions. The game’s narrative roots are deeper than this, and it is always revealing. PentimentThis is history both as a force and as a time.

You spend Andreas’ days exploring the town and speaking to its inhabitants, trying to understand the murder mystery that the artist has been drawn into. You can chat to as many people as you like, but they’ll sometimes invite you into longer activities in the form of small, simple minigames, like spinning wool or playing cards. The plot will move forward as time passes.

One of Pentiment’s illuminated manuscripts shows a conversation playing out in a cellar

Pentiment’s art style is inspired by the late illuminated manuscripts and early printed books of the Renaissance era. This is translated into some gameplay easily, such as the ability to click any unfamiliar word to cause the page to zoom out to display the decorative edges and a definition of the word. These bizarre and fantastic animals are found in the margins of these manuscripts. They instantly add style and flair to an otherwise dry history. Pentiment This kind of lifeliness is all-encompassing.

However, the game’s bookish feel is not for everyone. While some elements initially seemed jarring, they soon blended with the overall mood. For example, the harsh sound that is made when someone speaks, which is often accompanied by quill-scratching sounds, was a bit of a shock. Others parts of this manuscript idea just did not work well for me. I have found that characters who speak often make mistakes when their lines are written down. They do not blend in with the overall aesthetic and instead stop the conversation from moving forward.

Where the game’s push to evoke a living history succeeds much more consistently is in the town itself, and its people. It is noisy everywhere. Talking to the locals makes small tasks feel tangible and tactile. The days are divided and often include two meals. These can then be enjoyed with other families in the area. These familiar moments ground Andreas’ story despite its setting in the past. In doing so, PentimentThe setting feels alive and not buried by dust, which is what it excels at.

Pentiment offers players a choice of Andreas’ background as he speaks to a farmer, with manuscript pages hovering over the scene

This sense of place is vital to sustaining its characters. Pentiment. The town’s dozens of inhabitants each have their own concerns, relationships, and secrets, and understanding — and helping — them is key to unraveling the mysteries of the town. But their struggles and dreams aren’t simple. They deal with poverty, political repression, and unfair hierarchies, and don’t always agree on the solutions to their issues. This is how they deal with poverty, political repression and unfair hierarchies. Pentiment doesn’t fall into the trap of conflating their political and personal demands with modern ones — but it does highlight that, despite its archaic trappings, the people at Pentiment’s core are nuanced, and their issues reflect those of today in complex ways.

The game uses that complexity to explore how much of a community’s direction can be influenced by one person. It’s not Andreas or the player that really propel Pentiment’s main storyline, but a complex web of interpersonal and cultural interactions. In fact, for most of the game’s run time (10 hours played quickly, probably 15 if you stop to pet all the cats), there’s a real sense that Andreas can detect but not fully comprehend the full scale of knock-on influences going on. This is like an electric current that drives you to learn more, but it also makes the story seem impossible to comprehend.

Andreas speaks to a scribe in a dimly lit room, who has just made a joke about a fellow scribe, in Pentiment

There’s always more to do than time allows. Andreas has only two days left to find a suspect in the murder. He also gets more leads that he can reasonably locate. Whoever you end up pointing the finger at, it’s not likely to feel satisfying; even less so when time passes and the people you inevitably upset hold an all-too-reasonable grudge.

Instead, dominoes fall, pushed by both Andreas and others — sometimes others who lived thousands of years before him. Its conclusion does tie together all of its threads in a fulfilling way, although it’s very much in keeping with the best of Obsidian’s previous work, like New Vegas, Fallout, in that there’s no easy choices, no “best” options that will lead to the “good” ending.

For even though PentimentThe past is the setting for this film. It demonstrates how history can influence places, people and societies. That’s something that’s easily lost when we look back through time, but Pentiment’s living characters and spiraling mystery won’t let you forget it.

Pentiment On Nov. 15, the game will release on Windows PC and Xbox One. Xbox Game Studios gave a pre-release downloading code to the PC gamer. Vox Media also has affiliate relationships. Although these partnerships do not impact editorial content, Vox Media could earn commissions for products sold via affiliate links. Find out more. additional information about Polygon’s ethics policy here.