Pentiment was a game that caught my interest immediately. The art style was instantly striking, and unlike anything I’d seen before. That along with the setting that style faithfully evokes, its emphasis on choice and narrative, and it reminding me somewhat of the 2D adventure games of old I grew up loving (Day of the Tentacle, Monkey Island and such), instantly spoke to me. 28 hours and my first completion later, I am not disappointed at all!

The story starts slowly, taking its time over its first few in-game days to introduce you to a life of relative mundanity, as the aspiring artist Andreas staying at an abbey in 1500s Bavaria to finish his masterpiece, while also doing script work for said abbey to get by. You wake up, chat to the peasants you are lodging with and the townsfolk on route to work, and then sit down to scribble for the afternoon, occasionally taking breaks to find someone less grumpy than the monks you work around to eat and chat with. Some may find these opening hours a turn off, but I’m the weirdo that enjoyed the plodding intro of Twilight Princess, hopping around the village doing odd jobs and learning about the place Link grew up. I love a good scene setting, but even if you do too, just accept that you won’t be gripped immediately, and don’t force it. I took my time playing in shorter sessions at the start, having a few conversations before leaving it there to play something else. Those opening hours do a great job however, at introducing you to the time period, the setting, and its people. You can immediately tell this was crafted by developers with a passion for history, so drink it up in your own time. Eventually, the claws will dig deep.

When the murder mystery kicks in, the pace never lets up again… well, for a walky talky game. The game’s structure begins to look a little like a Persona game, with multiple leads to follow and ways to spend your time on any given day, and not enough time to explore them all. Hence, the tension and decision making that makes up a good deal of the interactive focus of the game, is making judgements about what leads seem most fruitful to pursue, as well as choices in dialogue with the other characters. There is a brilliant persuasion check system during some key narrative moments, where your odds are decided by another character’s impression of you, which is determined by your past decisions in dialogue. You never know what dialogue choices will be key later until you make them, at which point the game tells you ‘this will be remembered’. The system does a great job of keeping you on your toes throughout, while also letting you understand throughout the journey what those key impactful choices were.

And what a journey. From the plot and mystery itself, to the wonderful cast of characters you get to know over multiple decades of their lives, to the cohesive and confident themes the story wants most to explore, it is one of the smartest, most engrossing, and thought provoking tales I’ve experienced in an RPG. The murder mystery at its centre is exciting of course, but around it, you have an insightful dive deep into the politics of the era, pushing and pulling between the hope of rebellion in the face of inequality, and the fear and dismay of wondering if fighting a losing battle against odds stacked relentlessly against that rebellion is worth the loss and sacrifice along the way. You also have a deliberately and beautifully untangling web of themes around what truth really means, to individuals and their perception of themselves and others, struggling communities in need of faith and purpose, and to art and history… the stories people tell, and is what’s really important what is told, or how, and to what end?

Of course you get to sculpt this story yourself somewhat, but there is a focus here weaving throughout your own agency. It is the profound glue holding everything together, and none of it is ham-fisted. You need to interpret the stories being told here yourself. Both the puzzle of solving these murders correctly, and the puzzle of appreciating the game’s many underlying themes, are the puzzles that bring this back around to having something in common with the puzzle adventure games of the 90s. Instead of combining physical items in strange ways to test outcomes, you are combining the threads of the story’s sneakily placed clues, and character motivations, to find answers. Whether those answers were worth finding or right to pursue in the first place, is for you to discover and decide.

I can’t review Pentiment without circling back to its glorious art style. The whole game looks like the art the artist at its centre might create.. all manuscript and scratching ink on paper as characters talk. Pentiment also uses music very sparingly, which might make some feel the game is almost quiet to a fault. But the scenes where music is used are so much more powerful for it. I’m reminded of Red Dead Redemption’s first horse ride into Mexico to the haunting melodies of Joźe González, where previous rides were accompanied by nothing but the sounds of nature.

I suppose I should find something to criticise. There are a few moments, common in many conversation heavy games, where the man behind the curtain shows his ugly face. It didn’t happen often, but there were a few times that I talked to characters slightly out of sequence from how the game would ideally like me to, which made some exchanges make less sense than they should have. There were also a few odd moments where you had only seconds to read key text before it disappeared, when almost all conversations in the game let you read at their own pace, leading me to have to capture footage of the text on my Xbox to go back and re-read it in my captures. But these moments were very infrequent, and generally everything flows and is delivered perfectly.

So yeah that’s Pentiment, and my first review on Backloggd! This game is legitimately wonderful and made me think and feel a lot of things, so I figured I’d have a go at writing a full review for fun. Thanks to anyone who read this far, and sorry if you aged a few years and your old paint has started showing through new cracks