There is a pattern with very few exceptions in the way I experience modular narrative games. The beginning of the game lays out a structure—the game's mechanical thesis—and I begin to understand ways in which that structure can be used to tell brilliant intertwining stories in ways that haven't been possible before. And then, inevitably, as I begin to approach the end of the game, I realize that it will not live up to the promise of its own structures, and however beautifully it weaves its story it will live in the shadow of what could have been.

Pentiment's story is doubtlessly beautiful. It takes a small town in an unglamorized time in history and tells a gripping tale that combines religion, politics, and humanity together as deftly (and with as much research) as any lauded novel of historical fiction. The comparison to Middlemarch is perhaps obvious, but well-earned. And it gives the player ample opportunity to influence characterization without making the protagonist a cipher with no personality of his own.

In the beginning, Pentiment tries to give the player a similar level of control of the narrative with a brilliant structure in which the player is presented with a buffet of choices of what to investigate and who to dine with, but with only a few days to allocate between them so that many paths remain unexplored. Allowing a single playthrough to miss major chunks of content is absolutely necessary for a narrative game to truly be modular, and this structure facilitates that while also presenting the player with a meta-puzzle across multiple playthroughs: learn what each of these events gets you, what information you get or friendships you make, and what is duplicated across different events. Combine this with the player's chosen traits and dialog options opening or closing different paths, and then hide the heart of the game within this web so that only by deeply understanding the town outside the minds of the protagonist—by becoming in a way its protector-saint—can you truly understand its secrets and navigate its innermost channels.

Despite creating a structure in which this is possible, a genuinely inspired combination of Inkle games and dating sims, Pentiment instead lets this structure fall by the wayside to the extent that the last third of the game is almost completely on rails—the player can and probably will see everything the game has to offer at that point, no matter what. Although the narrative is still marvelous it's no longer modular, and it only functions as a game within the scope of a few conversations and the player's trudging between screens.

And, oh, what trudging it is. Although I mourn for its unfulfilled potential and there are increasingly many glitchy moments or unedited lines as the game goes on (the result of a rushed end of production?), the truest deepest flaw of Pentiment is surely the amount of time a dedicated player will simply spend moving from screen to screen. In every hour any part of the map could have a new event or new dialog—but almost none actually do. There are just precisely enough that the player is motivated to check everywhere over and over again, wasting cumulative hours of real human time.

But if Pentiment's mechanics are a little underconsidered and their quality occasionally slapdash, it's still a miracle that it exists at all. I never thought I'd see a AAA studio, a Microsoft subsidiary no less, make something like this that is so openly in conversation with this genre which has for decades been exclusively the territory of indie games (and indeed was rarely a big name there either). I dearly hope that this helps legitimize that space and expands both its popularity and marketability, and I dream as I always have of the day when someone makes a game that truly grasps the potential towards which games like Pentiment extend their hands.

Reviewed on Dec 05, 2022


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