That’s a deliberate choice on the part of the designers. You will never know the real truth of certain events and that’s just the way it is.
As a history nerd i love the way Pentiment tries to inhabit the religious-steeped world it represents, and that waking up from the late-medieval quiescence of greenery and certainty of late medieval Catholicism and its broad reach into society to the early modernity of chill winds and uncertainty of Protestantism without infantilizing or obviously denigrating Catholic society but neither glossing over its many late-medieval problems.
The whole philosophical aside with the Tinkerer is kind of the rub about the third act - it’s interesting and erudite and shows the writer’s broad knowledge and imagination, but i’m not sure it’s more than setpiece dressing to the ebbs and flows of the time. Though, that seems to be in fact what the game is actually deciding it’s narrative goal is by the third act.
I haven’t finished the game yet, but the second to third act twist really seems to have redirected what the game is actually about. I’m not yet completely sure it will work though. At this point it looks like it’s going to be something about the social revolution of printing.
As for the “string puller”, i’m pretty sure at this point it’s going to be the Father whatshisname (Matthieu?) , the one that manages the chapel in town.
As for who actually committed the first two murders, - and forgive me i really can’t remember names unless i write them down - the Printmaker in Act 1 had a slip of paper (or whoever it was visiting the grave of the “two innocents”, and in Act 2 the slip of paper found under the chest in the Innkeeper’s house was brought there by the kids from Martin the Thief’s house, so it was probably Martin who committed the second murder. OTOH, i don’t know if it’s even possible to implicate these people in the game during those sections. I certainly couldn’t actually select the people i suspected during the sections in game without having discovered enough evidence to do so.
I’m on to the third act now, and the ending of Act II really hit me hard. I wonder how much of that was fixed, and how much was a result of my choices. I’ll definitely be playing through this again.
Finished this tonight, and it’s going to take some time to collate all my thoughts and feelings, but it’s an incredible game. I can’t quite compare this to other games, because while I would normally judge most games by the craftsmanship of their design, narrative, art, etc etc.–and this has great writing and fantastic art–it is just in a different category because it obsesses over things I am prone to obsess over. Seems like a number of folks in this thread feel similarly. Where you (or I, anyway) want it to pay off in terms of historical rigor or theological nuance or presentation of a vibrant community–where you would expect most video games to let you down or gloss over things–Pentiment instead just goes even deeper than you thought it might, or doubles down on its approach. Which I found just thrilling.
It’s clearly a game about the meaning and purpose of art, and because it’s clearly the personal project of a veteran game designer, I can’t help but see the career trajectory of a game developer in Andreas’ story. The “mid-career crisis” of Andreas in Act II is something I feel like I’ve experienced, and I have to imagine Josh Sawyer has too. How exactly it maps onto Act III… that’s trickier. But the plot point of the mural I think could map onto a project like Pentiment itself, as a project in truth-telling over mythologizing about what an artist or game developer does or, at least, can do.
Afterward on Vacslav: In my final mural sequence, on the “family tree” of Tassing, I saw Vacslav being burned at the stake! I was going to ask if you saw it too, then did some research and it appears that there’s an alternate version where Vacslav (and someone else?) is kneeling in front of a priest or friar, maybe getting baptized, so I guess there are other outcomes for him. I guess I didn’t dissuade him from his heresy strongly enough to save his life!
I also finished this on Xmas and I second this! Also, it turned out to be very seasonally appropriate, which I was not expecting. #PentimentIsAChristmasGame
Yes for me, and he was not the only one! I did some reading, too, and it sounds like maybe Ferenc is the one they can be seen kneeling to, which if you discovered certain things in Act 1 may not be too surprising!
oooooooooohhh…
I’m not typically an adventure game player anymore, even though that is one of the main genres I played when starting out on PC games back in junior high. I loved all the Sierra games - probably some other ones too. But with all the love for Pentiment I decided I should try it, as I have Game Pass after all and don’t make a ton of use for it because I usually have a game on Steam I’d rather play.
I haven’t played much, just heading out for my first day at work, but I really love the sound in this game. I’m usually a graphics snob too, preferring highly detailed, realistic, colorful graphics - but I love the scenes in this game. The characters and the dialog they spoke kept my attention. I hope I stick with it - because the art and sound are great. I just have a tendency to get bored with adventure games. I hope to give a try to some of the other highly praised ones too, like Norco, Immortality, Kentucky Route Zero and Citizen Sleeper.
I was really not satisfied with Pentiment. While I enjoyed much of it, I sadly have to agree with the negative reviews. It’s twice as long as needed, and the primary conflicts and plot resolution ruined my suspension of disbelief. I also ran into this scene scripting bug (dialogue about something that hadn’t happened yet). It works as an educational visual novel, but it fails as an interactive narrative experiment.
The book-based presentation was close to being great, but they should have doubled down on exploring the historical events and building the narrative through that framework and cut out the repetition and tedium of the unfocused walk & talk format.
I hate that you can influence the characters but can’t change the main events. If your actions could save the library, bring the thread-puller to justice, or fail to help Piero, I wouldn’t think my effort was wasted. The town situation ultimately improves because the most antagonistic characters die or leave, not due to my choices or their new council of door hinge inspectors.
I didn’t solve the central mystery, though my guesses were close. It was extremely frustrating to get my hands on key evidence (the burned page in the library, and later the stolen history book) and then be unable to do anything with it. Not that it would have mattered anyway.
Having recently played The Case of the Golden Idol, where you only seek to understand the scenes but don’t take part, I’m struck by how much worse it feels to have false narrative agency than none at all.
Pentiment is a beautiful history lesson, but a poor murder mystery and detective game.
Something got me thinking about Pentiment and how it handles the mysteries this morning, and I realized there’s an additional (maybe equally unsatisfying) layer to what the game is doing that explains why the murder mysteries intentionally don’t operate like standard, solvable whodunnits.
The game is about art and what it accomplishes. That includes:
- Written art (e.g., the scriptorium books, the print shop’s output)
- Visual art (e.g., Andreas’ masterwork, the Roman ruins, and Magdalene’s mural)
- Folk stories (e.g., the local myths of saints and spirits)
- Video games (e.g., Pentiment and the director’s past games)
I think we learn from playing the game that in all these cases, art enhances knowledge not by cutting to the factual core of its subject, but by selecting a version of truth to portray, layering on an interpretation, or changing people’s attitudes about what they have experienced.
Andreas is an artist, NOT a detective. So maybe it shouldn’t come as a surprise that he fails to find the real culprit, and instead creates a version of each story, in cooperation with the facts (some of them), that gives the community an explanation, but not perfect resolution. It’s almost crazy that Andreas thinks he can solve the murders, and that he puts himself forward as the one person who can. He makes pictures for a living! A couple characters seem to recognize what Andreas is and isn’t capable of: For example, in Act I, Mother Cecilia will ask you not to indict Sister Matilda (I think it was) in the Baron’s death despite her motive–she recognizes that Andreas’ job is inventing stories, not revealing them!
In Act III, Magdalene is similar. She is looking to portray the truth of the town’s past, but to do so she can’t avoid making choices about what parts to put in and what to leave out. I don’t know if the final revelation is meant to indicate 1) that together, with multiple perspectives, Andreas and Magdalene can home in on the truth, or simply 2) that in the course of history, the truth will come out on its own. Or maybe more accurately: That the inventions around the truth will fall apart as history proceeds and contexts change.
It’s interesting that what the artists in the story end up revealing–the dark truth about Tassing’s past–is that, in a sense, artists have always been at work there, building and shaping and reworking the central stories. We might say they’ve been dressing up certain common truths in new and different clothes as the centuries pass.
Then, at the meta level, I think the game is trying to say something about art today, and game development specifically. Does Pentiment present a historical time and place accurately? Does it accomplish anything by trying to do so? What about all those games that are, like Andreas’ commissions that weigh him down in Act II, just made for money, to maintain one’s standard of living? Especially when many others carry on with a much lower standard of living! We may want to say it is nobler for the artist to pursue truth with his art than to merely peddle to the self-aggrandizement of clients with money, but… that takes us back to all those problems above, regarding what art reveals and how.
Thank you for this post. I just finished the game minutes ago, and it’s something that will sit with me for a while and largely for the reasons you articulate.
Without getting into details or spoilers, having played the game a couple times through it seems clear that the mystery, the murders themselves, are almost ancillary to the overall plot. Mainly this game wants to talk about the stories we tell ourselves and each other and it chooses artists as the vehicle to deliver that message. Religion is one of the prime stories we’ve told ourselves over our time on this planet so naturally it would be a huge part of all this. I was very much taken with the game as an almost anthropological study more than a thing to be played but I can definitely get how someone hoping for something different might be unsatisfied.
Wow, nailed it. (And Golden Idol is fantastic!)
I just finished playing a few hours ago, and @Bobtree’s thoughts mostly mirror mine. The game’s dedication to immersing the player in this historical time and place is fantastic (how many adventure games/visual novels have a bibliography section in the credits?), but when I consider a second playthrough with different choices I just think of wandering the town for hours and hours for what will ultimately be a repeat of the same story.
(Spoilered from now on because it’s too much trouble to talk around story details, and everyone reading this has probably finished the game already)
And while I think @Nightgaunt is correct about the game not being about solving murder mysteries, that is the goal we are presented with as players. Asking me to pick a suspect to execute when it’s fairly clearly an arbitrary decision because none of the suspects “really” did it leaves a bitter aftertaste. I don’t want to invent a story about a murder.
Some other assorted thoughts:
The ending sequence in the villain’s underground lair felt excessively Scooby-doo.
The whole “pagan roots of christian saints and practices” and “lingering pagans beliefs into the early modern period” has no real historical basis as far as I know. Nor were occult practices as common as they seem here.
I like that the game’s equivalent of influence and skill checks often don’t go as I would have expected, but in ways that make sense. Offering unsolicited legal advice just makes people angry, and having a good relationship with Casper makes him refuse to leave. I don’t think I’ve seen that in a game before.
It’s the peasants’ lot in life to suffer, and trying to change that only makes things worse. Harsh, but anything else would have been a fairy tale.
Quarterlies voting is underway, so that puts some time pressure on me to check this game out in the next 10 days. On paper at least, this game is right up my alley, because of my fascination with history. I don’t actually feel like checking out a text heavy reading game these days, but the quarterlies have forced my hand!
It is mostly reading, but I think Pentiment is very good at keeping the length of the text digestible. Plus, it’s all dialogue, which I think is a bit easier to process than prose (for example, all the descriptive prose in Citizen Sleeper–which is great, but I just think takes more effort to read).
Anyway, I hope you find it that way, and that you enjoy the game!
This interview with Josh Sawyer just popped up in my google feed, figured it was worth sharing.
Lots of info about Pentiment, but also some interesting stuff about what game he would work on next if time and budget were not an issue:
I think if it truly was an unlimited budget, I think I would try Pillars 3 because I know what the budget was for Deadfire, which was not a whole lot and I have heard from multiple people what the budget was for Baldur’s Gate 3, and I’m not gonna talk about numbers, but if I got that budget, sure, I’ll make Pillars 3.
An Obsidian RPG designed for turn-based combat with the budget of BG3 would be awesome.
What I wouldn’t do for a Pillars 3. The Pillars games stand as two of my all-time faves in the genre. For me, they wouldn’t need a BG3 level budget to make a game I would want to play, although there’s something to be said for having enough funding to not have to make the tough cuts. Just as it’s worthwhile avoiding the bloat by not having too much money to spend.
But that’s just wishful thinking. They aren’t going to get tossed a budget of that size for Pillars 3 so no point in agonizing over it.