Pentiment

Pentiment is a clever Medieval detective story with a gorgeously-realized world that I can hardly recommend highly enough.

Pentiment too often limits its most enjoyable pieces to reach an ending that makes sense but is still unfulfilling.

A brilliant narrative adventure that is filled with intelligence and heart.

A beautiful and beautifully-written narrative game that makes masterful use of its early modern setting. One of Obsidian's finest.

Because even though Pentiment is set in the past, it demonstrates how history is never static, and how it influences places, communities, and individuals. 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.

"Many developments are outside of your control, yet rarely in games does the passage of time feel so intimately significant."

Despite some issues with the audio and the slowness of the third act, Pentiment is a wonderfully unique storytelling experience overflowing with respect for the historical era it strives to recreate. Much like the game’s themes of stories persisting over time, I’ll be thinking about Andreas Maler and the town of Tassing for years to come.

An evocative recreation of 16th-century Bavaria examines how the tide of history crashes against the lives of everyday people, all framed by an intriguing crime story

The game’s name refers to the reappearance in a painting of an element that an artist had painted over. As much as characters in “Pentiment” might fight to maintain the status quo, or to turn away from history and heartbreak, they’re no match for the forces that send humanity hurtling forward. While I initially started “Pentiment” hoping for a riveting distraction, what I ended up with was a game about uncovering history and past trauma. In many ways, it is more admirable, brutal and perhaps healing to just face these problems head on.

Learn to move at Tassing’s sedate pace and patience will be rewarded as a seemingly simple murder mystery makes way for a rich portrait of village life and the difficult choices that come to define it.