Pentiment Inspiration Games

I watched approximately 100000000000 interviews with Josh Sawyer and a couple of bits of Kate Dollarhyde and Hannah Kennedy after playing Pentiment and reading a biography of Albrecht Durer. I am in the process of finding a copy of The Cheese and The Worms and The Return of Martin Guerre. I will be listing here all the games cited as inspiration and log my thoughts for each. Games without a note I have not played yet

Disco Elysium
Disco Elysium
Admittedly JSawyer was adamant that he "wasnt going for a disco elysium because I don't think I'm capable of making something like that" but nevertheless appreciated some of the parallels and influence
Night in the Woods
Night in the Woods
The chief inspiration, I can definitely see its DNA in Pentiment in terms of structure and even themes. I admit I did not like it all that much but I am glad it inspired a favourite.
Oxenfree
Oxenfree
Another inspiration, I liked it a little more than NITW but it is the worse game overall, its just clever in ending itself sooner rather than later. I can see the parallels in the 2D talky adventure game genre here
Mutazione
Mutazione
A very interesting adventure game. It has more mechanics than the other two but I enjoyed its story the most out of the 3 adventure games on this list. It uses the Day Night cycle with elements which move it forward and others which dont which Pentiment adopted. It also characterizes dialogue with font colour, vfx etc which seems like a seed for Pentiment's font based character dialogue
Darklands
Darklands

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9 months ago

Edit : I now have a copy of The Cheese and The Worms. My copy of The Return of Martin Guerre will arrive any day now


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