Meant to post this a full month ago but I forgot, whoops! Pentiment is so incredibly my shit, to the point that I’m not sure if other people would like it as much if they haven’t taken a couple college courses on medieval history. But you’ll definitely enjoy this if you enjoyed Fallout: New Vegas for the writing (and there’s an excellent glossary for all the 16th century Bavaria info!). It’s as if, given free reign, the team at Obsidian finally were allowed to drop 3rd-person exploration and combat mechanics to focus only on writing/dialogue/decision-making, and it slaps. These people know how to write a damn video’d game.
Reasons this game is awesome:
- Period-specific visual style
- Amazing audio design
- You can pet every animal you come across
- Character class selection involves choosing where you went to college (Basel, Flanders, or Italy) and your favorite renaissance university subject (you know, theology, imperial law, latin, the classic liberal arts curriculum).
- All of your decisions matter, and even the ones that don’t actually matter FEEL like they mattered. In the grand scheme of things, your character as an individual can’t change pivotal events by themselves. But they can decide how to treat people around them, and this has a gigantic impact on the story. NPCs will like, take your marriage advice seriously and start a family or not based on your input. I almost cried when I saw that a woman who had stolen the main character’s hat as a toddler gave it to HER DAUGHTER as an adult. And of course, the biggest decision is who you decide to accuse of murder in the murder mystery. It really drives home the brutality of 16th century law, where it’s never quite 100% clear who actually did the murder, but someone important died so SOMEBODY has to be punished. And even if one person seems more guilty than another, it doesn’t always seem worth it to throw them under the bus. Regardless of who is guilty, what’s best for the community? The murder victim was kind of an asshole, is the town actually better off now? Is the death penalty solving any problems or is it just making everything worse? It’s all a lot to think about every time the game forces you to make a call.
- Dialogue isn’t as simple as “be nice to people and they’ll help you.” Sometimes the character-background-specific options are WORSE than the default ones. Sometimes being kind to people leads to worse outcomes for them, and sometimes being mean to people makes them more likely to help you later. You actually have to think about how you’re behaving and you never have perfect information on what you could be doing to pass future dialogue checks. It’s a lot different from “your speech skill gives you a 38% chance of success” in a lot of other games.
- Really amazing portrayal of the Holy Roman Empire during the renaissance. You can tell the team that made this are huge history nerds and did their research. They took care to represent things that aren’t often talked about, such as the two gay monks, or the monk who’s visiting from Ethiopia, or Sister Amelie being an anchoress, or the still-incredibly-pagan local customs of the townsfolk that the church super doesn’t approve of but they keep doing anyway. Overall it’s such a cool moment in time to set a game in, such a major transitional period that is ripe with conflicts to write stories about. The sheer volume of period-specific tidbits stuffed into Pentiment makes it almost feel like an educational game at points.
- sister amelie dig her own grave with a spoon!
So yeah I recommend this, and also DO NOT LOOK UP ANY SPOILERS, you will regret it, I’m serious!
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