I don’t usually write video game reviews, mostly because I don’t usually play the kind of games that compel me to review them. I have no grand insights on storytelling from spending hours trying to unlock every card in Balatro, or the time spent in Crusader Kings murdering useless grandsons so their brothers can inherit instead. But Pentiment. Pentiment got to me.
If you’re wondering where I’ve been for the last week, I’ve been solving murders in 16th century Bavaria. It took me this long to get around to this because now is the first time I’ve had a device that would run the game. Because the thing is: I am the target audience here. I absolutely love early modern Europe. I fell in love with the time period in undergrad, and this game is too. I am so intensely the target audience for this that I guessed a plot twist at the start of act two after one interaction with a character by going ‘huh, is this supposed to be reference that famous 16th century legal case or am I jumping to conclusions because the names are similar?’ But it was a reference to it! Which was delightful! Stuff like this is so rarely on my level! I also loved the dedication it had to showing period accurate textiles, especially the time given to the spinning bee in act one, and the bright colors of certain outfits, especially on the musicians and the soldiers. A lot of works like this ignore textile history in order to conform to a modern idea about the past being in shades of brown, but this game shows textiles as vibrant as they really were.
It was also pretty accessible for me, a person who’s bad at video games. I had to google help two times, once when putting the shards of pagan pottery together as a puzzle, which I don’t think was a particularly hard puzzle, I just am That Bad at puzzles, and once when trying to find the hidden staircase in the Roman bathhouse, which was because I am: a little dumb. I really loved the dialogue system, and how you would never Really know what answers were Important until After you said them. It also functions as a fun little autism simulator: I kept trying to pick what seemed to me the most polite option, and then people reacted to poor Andreas like he was being sarcastic! Just like in real life!
But why I am really here is the Themes Of The Game. Pentiment is tackling a lot of things, exploitative power structures, faith vs truth, the responsibility one has to one’s community. But what got me was the trauma and the grief. A lot of recent stories claim to be about grief and trauma in order to buck accusations of being middling genre fair, I’ve seen it in Marvel stuff and subpar horror movies, but I am sure it is everywhere. These stories rarely delve into the emotions more than ‘it’s okay to be sad but don’t let it consume you!’ You know. Like a baby show would.
But not Pentiment. Part of it is, of course, the dedication to the setting. People die between acts because there is no modern medicine, women die in childbirth, children die because child mortality was simply That Bad, people starve to death, get the plague, just get old. And the people they leave behind grieve for them. Andreas grieves his lost son so hard his mind is taken over by a gigantic woman who is an avatar for his depression.
And then the peasant revolt happens. And the entire town grieves. Almost everyone in town lost someone that night. If you let Magdalene dig a little, and it really is worth giving her the ‘nosy’ trait for this purpose, you get that the wound is so close to the surface it’s festering, people tell you about their nightmares, about their lost loved ones, about their regrets. People tell you the bloodshed was for the best, or that it was all for nothing, or that it was God’s will. There is no right answer, just a sea of coping mechanisms in a town where no one wants to talk about what happened. It honestly made me cry a couple times, especially the stuff with Magdalene and her father.
Which is why the ending didn’t super work for me. Don’t get me wrong, the manipulation of Sister Amalie and her condition was super devastating and I felt it deep in my heart. But Father Thomas’s motivations didn’t rally jive with the themes of the rest of the game. Really, a lot of act three’s themes didn’t, except the grief stuff. The rest of the game is about power dynamics and hard decisions, but suddenly it’s about The Past and Honoring History. It would’ve felt more coherent if Father Thomas’s motivations had more to do with control than faith, or at least faith As control. A lot of people seem to be complaining about act three because the player character is a woman which I assure your is not my beef: I loved making Magdalene run around and be nosy at people. I just think suddenly the themes changed and it was a little clunky. Also: if the game wanted me to say yes to Otz’s proposal that badly they would’ve made him less annoying.
But third act clunkiness aside I really, really loved this. I want more of it, really. Not in Tassing, I get that story’s Done. But like. Let me be that mail carrier guy on his horse a while, delivering mail throughout the Holy Roman Empire. That sounds Extremely Fun to me. Or lean into the guild stuff in the cities Ester tells us about. Or something with the textile industry, making lots of dyes and such and perhaps also Solving A Mystery. There’s more room for stories here in this setting and this style, is what I’m saying.
All in all: absolutely do recommend. It’s as good as everyone says it is, and playable even if you are a little dumb with problem solving. And there is some beautiful, lovingly animated food that I want to Eat All Of. So that’s another selling point. Took me 25 hours but I tried to Do Everything. And also gain: sometimes got stuck trying to figure out the next objective bc: a little dumb. Probably it will not take you that long. I really loved this! Maybe you will too.
Signing off,
Marlowe
Marlowe Writes 