Pentiment-Test, Adventure

News from Obsidian

During my interview in early summer, I already suspected that Design Director Josh Sawyer would seize his opportunity: As part of the Microsoft Studio family, he would create a completely unusual adventure for the Xbox Game Pass. As we reported recently, Pentiment would probably never have been created without the integration into Game Pass. What a loss that would have been! Because this game is a quiet but significant alternative to the AAA stagnation that games connoisseurs like to and often accuse the game industry of: Pentiment doesn’t give a damn about suitability for the masses, it bombards the player with text, text and more text – hello , Torment: Tides of Numenera – but doesn’t offer voice acting. It looks quirky, reminiscent of woodcuts or church paintings. And then you don’t play a superhero, a soldier or a space adventurer, but the Nuremberg artist and master candidate Andreas Maler, who currently earns his living in the office of an abbey and otherwise lives as a subtenant with a poor farming family in the fictional Bavarian village of Tassing.

I admit frankly: Pentiment is not suitable for every type of player – many will turn away because of the slow pace or simply have no interest in a text-heavy crime adventure without a puzzle component. But the themes this game deals with are so refreshingly different that it’s a pleasure to be confronted with them in a video game: Pentiment is about how much the abbot of a monastery is squeezing the peasants with ever increasing taxes, one experiences the social and moral constraints within a strictly religious village community. It is also about hunger and sick children, lack of freedom in marriage, envy and distrust between different social classes, adultery and abuse. At the same time, we see how people can achieve advancement through education or what effects the invention of book printing has, we experience solidarity within the monastic community and can watch protagonists who have grown dear to our hearts as they master their sometimes hard lives, raise children and celebrate festivals .

Pentiment is a colourful, tangible panopticon of life in the late Middle Ages, pointing a magnifying glass at people’s worries and moving the player without waving a moral index finger. I felt like the extraordinary film more than once boyhood remembered because Pentiment does not just show a short adventure or a turbulent episode in the life of these people – these characters really exist in the game world, they grow up or age, they despair of life or have offspring, and they remember for many years later to my player character. All of this gives the game a grandeur, a prominence that only relatively few games can match.

where are the puzzles

In terms of game mechanics, I wasn’t disappointed, but I was surprised at how much Pentiment puts the dialogues in the foreground. Apart from one or two small puzzle moments, there are no brain teasers à la Monkey Island. There is also no inventory, no combining items, no trying out solution options – Pentiment is much more visual novel than classic adventure. If you know that and aren’t annoyed by Mr. Painter’s somewhat sluggish movements, then you can embark on the adventure and sink into the superbly constructed game world. In the village there are many paths and buildings that you can walk through, you can get bogged down in the extensive monastery – there are also side scenes such as a mill or forest as well as a few extra locations that you explore once in the course of the story.

On the one hand, this game world gives the impression that you have a closed, manageable ecosystem in front of you, that you get to know really well after 15 or 20 hours of play, on the other hand, there are so many characters, rooms and paths that running back and forth as well as exploring never feels annoying. There are always new dialogue options and other constellations of people after events, you always chatter or come across an overlooked detail in the courtyard on the east edge or in the crypt under the church or a finally talkative person.