You are Andreas Moller, an artist working in an abbey in 16th-century Bavaria. Over the course of 25 years, you must investigate a murder in a local town convulsed by the social changes of the era. Pentiment doesn’t sound like a typical video game, and it doesn’t look like one either, inspired as it is by late medieval art: the whole thing looks like a cross between a tapestry and an early-modern illustrated manuscript. The word pentiment means an earlier painting covered up by a later one, and the plot sees Moller scraping away lies to uncover the truth.
The game’s director Josh Sawyer at developer Obsidian has a degree in history, and studied the Holy Roman Empire in particular. “I’d always wanted to make a historical game,” he says. “And around the time that Microsoft acquired us [in 2018], I thought it would be cool to try to pitch a very small-scale game.” He chose the 16th century because it was an era of great social upheaval, not unlike the period we’re living through today.
“You had Martin Luther and the peasant uprising, and then later on in the century the heliocentric model of the solar system emerged, and there was a lot of turmoil about social change at the time. I thought it would be interesting to focus on one small community, and a story that is really about that community, but is also being flanked and overrun by these changes that are going on in the larger society.”
Among the parade of similar-looking space shooters shown over the summer’s various video game preview events, Pentiment stands out like a medieval re-enactment enthusiast at a death-metal concert. With its simple aesthetic, it seems a million miles away from developer Obsidian’s previous games, such as post-apocalyptic Fallout: New Vegas or space-faring role-playing game The Outer Worlds.
“I think because we had been working on very similar types of games for a very long time, we just wanted to try something else,” says Sawyer. “I’ve made a lot of games that are fantasy, or post-apocalyptic, or they’re first-person shooters, and I just wanted to take a break and wipe my brain with a new experience and a new approach.” Pentiment is a palate cleanser, then: a small-scale, low-risk project made by a team of just 13 people.
Josh credits art director Hannah Kennedy for Pentiment’s striking graphic style. “I went to Hannah and I said, I have this idea: I want to meld late-medieval illuminated manuscripts with early-modern woodcuts and print,” he says. “I think that Hannah did a really excellent job of capturing the spirit of those.” The team looked at illuminated medieval manuscripts in the Getty Museum and Huntington Library in California for inspiration, as well as consulting with manuscript experts such as Christopher De Hamel. In fact, manuscripts are built into the game itself. “Every time you make a transition, we actually pull out of the 2D scene, and you see a 3D book – and the pages turn,” says Sawyer. Explanations about the people and terms used in the game are written in the margins of this book, just like the marginalia descriptions seen in real manuscripts.
Sawyer is well aware that Pentiment is unlikely to be a multi-million-selling phenomenon – but he’s fine with that. “This game was made to be niche,” he says. “As long as it finds its audience, then I think it’ll work out.”
Pentiment is out on Xbox and PC in November.
