Pentiment

Pentiment is such a good, soulful experience, that I really doubt we'll ever see another project of this quality from Obsidian Entertainment. Especially not with the current Xbox Game Studios management. They'd very much prefer The Outer Worlds 3, or something else that digestible. I didn't expect this game to be this cool. And yet it is. Not knowing medieval and religion history doesn't ruin the experience. However, knowing the context makes Pentiment so much better, I guarantee. The story of Andreas Maler is definitely touching, and watching the changes (often influenced by your own actions) happening to one small European hamlet is satisfying, to say the least. The villagers feel so lively, so amazing in terms of both writing and visuals, that you'll have no problem learning who is who and remembering what happened to each and every one of them.

A very solid game. It looks great, tells a pretty engaging story. I'm not super into mysteries, hate puzzles, and I find Catholicism and theological quandaries to be about as interesting as a blank wall, but the story and characters were still interesting enough to keep me pretty interested through most of the game. This has no gameplay to speak of. Other than a handful of small puzzles and mini-games, the entire game is walking from place to place, talking to people, and collecting clues. The only real mechanics, other than managing the limited time you have to explore, are persuasion checks which are handled with a sort of reputation system. So beware that that is all you'll be doing, and if that is not appealing to you, you're not going to like it. The story reminded me a little bit of Twin Peaks, playing as an outsider in a small and very insular town, trying to solve a murder that keeps spiraling out into larger and more complex things. And like Twin Peaks, it becomes clear early on that the murder is not really the focus of the story, just a narrative device. The real story is about the town, learning the stories and personalities of the many different people living there, seeing how they all connect to each other, and in particular uncovering their many secrets, some harmless, others pretty bad. And also like Twin Peaks, solving the mystery is not really the point, and no matter what decisions you make, there are a lot of tragic events that can only be lessened or redirected, not avoided or fixed. There are some flaws and minor issues. The biggest is with pacing. The three act structure and time mechanics are great for giving you a sense of the town, its history, its future. All of that is great. But this game comes to the end of what should be a normal story, then pumps the brakes and gives you several hours more of content before you can realign and finish the actual narrative. It’s awkward, and while it probably wouldn’t be an issue on subsequent playthroughs where you know what is happening, on the initial experience, which is most important, it’s off putting. The last act of the game makes you feel like you’ve finally gotten to the end of a race, and it’s now forcing you to stop and wait at a red light so it can go through the slowest, most introspective, and least connected parts of its larger narrative. Didn’t like how that was implemented, really should have been handled differently. -It is somewhat frustrating that you can make sound arguments to convince someone of something, even something they already said they agree with, but then the game will present you with a scorecard for your interaction and say, sorry, you didn't say that this guy's hat was cool three hours ago, so he rejects your suggestion. It creates scenarios where someone will ask you obvious questions, like, should I take the free college education to vastly improve my life? I really want to. And you say yes, and the game is like, no, you didn’t accumulate enough brownie points with this person, they refuse to go improve their life. There are times when this makes sense, when you’re trying to get someone who doesn’t agree with you to act against their instincts and interests, and you need to have done everything right to sway them in that moment. But other times it feels arbitrary, like the story being forced to conform to a game mechanic, rather than a game mechanic helping you to engage with the story. -The game was often unclear about what it wanted me to do. There were multiple situations where I could not proceed until I talked to every person in a building, but it didn't tell me that. Or where it told me I needed to eat, but would only let me eat in one place in town, and I'd run around asking people to have lunch with me and they just wouldn't do it, but the game gave me no indication I needed to go eat lunch with one specific family. -There are certain spots on the map where the travel to next zone icon is poorly positioned, and you'll wiggle back and forth trying to click it and can't get your guy to just go through the door. Super irritating. -Having a little sound effect for a quill pen or a printing press every time a dialog box appears is a fun idea at first. But it gets annoying very quickly. Same for having people’s dialog appear in Italian, then reappear in English. This doesn’t need to happen every single time. It stops being immersive and just becomes irritating. -The journal is very poorly implemented. It gives you very loose details on what you are trying to do and what you've already done. It sometimes does not make entries for things you even said in dialog you wanted to do, or in some cases, an NPC would say, you should talk to these 4 people, and then I would open the journal and it would say talk to these 3 people, and not list one of them. Since the game has such strict time limits and a huge cast of NPCs, a really detailed journal would be so useful. -There is apparently something I hate more than mazes, and it's mazes where the exit disappears right before you reach it and you have to backtrack through the whole maze once again. So thanks for that, Obsidian. Overall, though, this was quite good. I put it off for a long time because I'm not really interested in Catholic monks solving a murder, and because Obsidian has been putting out mediocre games for years now. But it's refreshing to see they still had some good storytelling in them when they put their mind to it. It's a shame this kind of deeper and more nuanced storytelling didn't make it into some of their bigger budget RPGs. They would have benefited from it.

One of the most unique and visually compelling games I have ever played. While the gameplay left a bit to be desired on my end, the story and ability to fall into the world was well worth the price of admission.