The sixteenth century was a busy time. While talented guys like Da Vinci and Michelangelo were working on the Mona Lisa or the sistine frescoes or whatever, rich people, the Valois and Habsburg dynasts, the members of the venetian senate and heads of christendom, are trying to convince poorer people that there might be something worthy in serving as a reisläufer/landsknecht/condottiere/aventurier and spilling blood for them. Meanwhile, an angry ex-augustinian friar with a piece of parchment, a hammer and some nails managed to end Catholicism's virtual monopoly on religion in Europe, a spark in the European bag of powder that would result in a bunch of people meeting their end at the sword or the stake (and some of the rich dynast guys getting richer by figuring out you can just rob the slightly less powerful clergy of their states).

Meanwhile, the Iberians (soon to be followed by the Dutch, English and French) just figured out you can sidestep the whole venetian-muslim monopoly on precious spices by getting your ships across Africa. Oh, and there's an entire previously unknown continent. This sets off a domino effect that would result in the sociocultural decline/genocide of practically all amerindian cultures, from the Yahgan to the Nahua to the Inuit; the mass deportation of African peoples as forced labour to (mostly) west and (also) east; what I like to call the end of the "golden age of the steppe" (the era when some people in the eurasian steppes could just team up and conquer the biggest empires of their day (Ottoman/Mughal/Qing) instead of being subjected to sinicization/russification by nation-states) and the creation of /pol/ (the 4chan board).

Throughout it all it is difficult to remind oneself of the life of the average man or woman, simple peasants who bothered mostly with gathering enough produce of wheat, rice, maize, yam or millet to last the entire year: the rule of life before the green revolution. We have great simulators for the history of institutions and wars (EUIV, Pike and Shot Campaigns) in this era, but not so much for what it was like to be an average human being. It's as if history in video games has stayed mostly stuck in the nineteenth century, without the insights of Febvre/Bloch/Thompson/Ginzburg.

Pentiment answers this by setting you up (initially) as an average person in Tassing, a small bavarian village/town in the (not) Holy (not) Roman (technically not an) Empire.

Your character is a guy named Andrew, the Painter, who (unsurprisingly) works as an artist in the neighbouring abbey. After the introduction, the game becomes a murder mystery, where you must figure out who murdered the local noble jerk and be swiftly and publicly subjected to lex talionis.

But the game is much more than just a detective game (though it does handle the detective bits very well). Actually, it is bold enough to have you never figure out who committed the the main murders of the first two acts. It does offer you a pool of possible prepetrators, but the focus of the narrative lies not in solving the mystery, but in the social backlash of capital punishment: how a community reacts to having one of its own members forcibly cut off in a violent display of power.

At its core, it seeks to explore how communities are formed and how history is made, reminisced or manipulated. It achieves this by having the main characters explore the local communities (Tassing + Kiersau, the secular and ecclesiastical worlds) throughly, by fleshing out each of the local actors and by being structured in three acts, each of which is separated by a timespan made of decades, which lets the player experience the long term consequences of their actions.

The main "antagonist", the perpetrator of the crimes, ties perfectly with the game's themes on history and memory. In the climax of the third act the main characters learn that Tassing's foundation myth was built atop of "pagan" roman/celtic/paleo-european mythology (much like the town is set above strata of many previous settlements). To cover up this fact, the local priest, a guy named Thomas, planned the murders of whoever got (conscious or unconsciouslly) close to the truth.

I was very satisfied with Father Thomas as an antagonist. He's a plausible perpetrator of the crimes, so the reveal does not hurt the plot's internal consistency. But what I found most compelling was his reasoning. Medieval(esque) media has been overdone with the tropes of the cynical/fanatical priest (e.g. Hugo's Frollo/Eco's Jorge) for quite some time. And though the trope can be charismatic or evocative, it has ran out of most of its creative fuel. What I found compelling in Thomas was the willingness to commit (or more appropriately in his case, to incite) murders without religion as a façade for sadism, to orchestrate a murder while regarding it as a sinful act. As a learned man in an era where religious myth is slowly beginning to lose sway over humanity, Thomas has to choose between preserving the comfort of myth or unleashing the harsh confusion of historical truth, he chose the former, whether due to his own ideological cowardice or unwillingness to place the souls of the faithful in Pascal's wager.

All of which plays into one of the games main themes: the conflict between myth and history. The meaningful mirages we conjure against a reality composed of the continuous reshuffling of atoms. And although ideologians struggle to cover up that great panorama of reality, its details still remain. One only has to look closely enough with the right tools to perceive what once was, now as palimpsests or pentimenti.

Notes:

- this game reminded me of mrbtongue's (old youtuber) criticism on violence in video games. The problem lying not in mediatic violence being seen as inherently taboo (the old conservative view before young people tried to make being conservative rad and cool), but in violence being banalized. In pentiment, violence is never taken for granted, most of the game is set in a (relatively) comfortable environment with (mostly) agreeable people. When violence comes (from above or below the social strata) it is sudden, brutal and therefore memorable. Even when death happens off-screen, its consequences lingers in the minds of the witnesses.

- Pentiment is also a lesson on how historically accurate fiction can combat racism. Although the goal is commendable, some media often mess up in their attempts by introducing anachronisms or inaccuracies with the goal to create an anti-racist myth (e.g. Netflix's Cleopatra). Josh Sawyer is more experienced than that though, by being familiarized with the history of sixteenth century Europe, a place that was not far away from North Africa geographically and whose inhabitants' worldview was not affected by the byproducts of "scientific" racism (thanks, Linnaeus). So Sawyer knows just what kind of historically accurate/plausible (history more often works with gaps) data can be reasonably employed to upset a white supremacist. As such Tassing's patron saint is a legendary African soldier (Saint Maurice), one of the most interesting NPCs is Sebhat, a Christian Ethiopian priest (drawn in Ethiopian style!), Andreas' idealized symbol of royalty is the African version (contra Marco Polo) of Prester John and a few other side characters are not lacking in melanin (Vácslav).

- this is a game deeply in love with medieval art. From the marginalia to the employment of handwriting (or the use of print!) as characterization to the transition of canonical hours to mechanical clocks (humanized vs ahuman time), it all comes across perfectly

- Andreas had a wonderful arc of being wildly passionate about the world and art, until reality kicks him in the balls which leds to disillusioment and escapism until he can grapple with his inner demons in his mindscape. In a way I feel it corroborates with his possible relantionship with Lorenz, a well learned man who knows much about the interesting ideas being debated in the Renaissance and how exciting the times are, later revealed to be an absolutely despisable human being (this also goes for the Renaissance/Early Modern era in general, wondrous and cruel at the same time). Magdalene's arc was cool, a nice change of perspective from the usually patiarchal perspective of the era, but it didn't really take the spotlight quite as much due to the limits in time and scope.

- Unlike some reviewers, I did not really find the third act weak for a number of reasons: it initially desemphasizes Andreas to clearly establish Tassing as a community as the game's focus; it emphasizes the transition of time with Magdalene, whom we saw as a child in the second act, acting as a protagonist, and as such we get to play and witness the next generation of Tassing; it further develops the mystery of the murders; it shows the consequences of the peasant revolt; it shows the struggles women faced to establish themselves independently in a patriarchal society through Magdalene, offering a feminine perspective to a male dominated genre; it finishes Andreas' arc very well; it ties perfectly with the game's themes on history/memory.

- I loved the choice of having Illuminata being adamant on destroying Porete's Miroir manuscript. On one hand, Illuminata clearly spouses protofeminist (à la Christine de Pizan) views on patriarchy. On the other, she's a devout Catholic who is willing to censor heterodoxy in the name of her church. This results in the apparently contradictory scenario where a "feminist" woman is willing to help a (mostly) patriarchal institution to censor another woman (whose harsh condemnation might as well be due to her being a female heretic). It's a nuanced take on how our present criteria can be misleading for different cultures.

- the entire game was a masterclass in social storytelling, from discrepancies in cuisine, topography and literacy, the game shows how power structures affect and denigrate the lives of those set in the bottom of the social order. It takes a special kind of heartless individual to not empathize with the peasants' plight