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Pentiment - Review @ PC Gamer

by Hiddenx, 2022-11-15 15:45:50

PC Gamer reviewed Pentiment:

Pentiment review

A brilliant murder mystery that understands class, community, and the march of history. 

There’s blood on the walls of Kiersau Abbey. Beneath a long mural of the Danse Macabre (opens in new tab) lies a jewel-festooned corpse: A visiting nobleman has been murdered behind the monastery’s doors, shattering years of monastic peace and jeopardising the surrounding village of Tassing, Bavaria. 

It’s 1518 and Europe is teetering over an ocean of blood: Martin Luther is threatening a thousand years of papal dominance of western Christianity, Tassing’s peasants chafe loudly under onerous taxes, and the rich and powerful are—as ever—guarding their riches and power with rough men ready to do violence on their behalf. If there’s ever a good time to find a dead aristocrat splayed across the floor of your monastery, this isn’t it. To make matters worse, the most convenient culprit for the powers-that-be to pin the whole mess on is the person that found the body: Your friend and mentor.

[...]

Layer Upon Layer

Pentiment is a rare beast: A relatively short, gameplay-light narrative adventure from a studio renowned for its lengthy, mechanics-heavy RPGs. Even stranger, the team pulled it off with aplomb. Yes, there are some mechanical quibbles, and it did take some coaxing to get me to accept the central mystery’s final resolution, but Obsidian’s tight grasp on its subject matter and thorough understanding of exactly what it wanted to do with Pentiment has produced a game that I wanted to launch again just as soon as I finished it. I want to see what happens when I pick a different constellation of background traits, pursue different leads, and pass the persuasion checks I failed (and fail the ones I passed).

At 20 hours, Pentiment is a short game compared to some of the hundred-hour titans we've seen this year, but it's a game I see myself replaying a lot in the years to come. I get the feeling that I'll need to spend a lot more time in Tassing before I even scratch the surface.

Score: 88/100 - A beautiful and beautifully-written narrative game that makes masterful use of its early modern setting. One of Obsidian's finest.

Thanks Henriquejr!

 

Information about

Pentiment

SP/MP: Single-player
Setting: Historical
Genre: Adventure-RPG
Platform: PC
Release: Released


Details