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The RPS Advent Calendar 2022, December 6thPen to paper
Pen to paper
Today’s game on the RPS Advent Calendar is a story that spans generations, but you’ll need plenty of ink and paper to get it down. How’s your handwriting? Good, is it? Can you read Latin?
What else could it be butPentiment!
Pentiment – Official Launch TrailerPentiment has some of the best animation of 2022Watch on YouTube
Pentiment – Official Launch Trailer
Rachel:I don’t know how Obsidian made a detective game set in ye olde medieval times, but the result of their efforts is one of the best mystery games of the year. What makes Pentiment truly great - and what some of my other favourite detective games also do well - is that it gets back to basics with mystery solving. No flashy shootouts, no car chases, no brooding detective whose dead wife made him a trigger-happy, loose cannon, stick-up-the-arse. Absolutely no thank you. Let’s get back to basics: collect evidence, talk to witnesses, and then point the finger at whodunnit. If there’s a stonking good story that unfolds alongside it, that’s a bonus.
Pentiment is very much that, and also nabs that bonus for an enthralling story, too. You step into the gentleman’s tights of Andreas Maler, a travelling artist who’s set up shop in the monastery of the quaint countryside town of Tassing, helping the monks illustrate the church’s manuscripts. It’s all rather pleasant until a visiting nobleman is brutally murdered on monastery grounds - and Andreas’ mentor is accused of the crime. Wanting to clear his friend’s name, our artist sets out to find the real killer.
So yeah, in summary, Pentiment is very good, it’s also 15-ish hours so it won’t take up too much of your Xmas holiday. You can play it between watching Christmas re-runs of Agatha Christie’s Poirot.
The prettiest game you ever did draw
Alice Bee:It’s giving big The Name Of The Rose energy. My favourite thing in Pentiment is the text animation, which I havewaxed lyrical onbefore. Pentiment isn’t voiced, but a character’s text bubble will have different writing depending on if they’re a peasant or townsperson, if they’re educated, if they’re ecclesiastical… It is drawn on screen in front of you as if an invisible quill were writing on parchment. It’s one of the most beautiful things I’ve seen in a game. It’s basically pornographic.
Another thing that Pentiment does well is, while you can make meaningful choices and steer things in different ways, it has a definite tale it wants to tell you as well. A few key events can’t be changed, but rather than frustrating I think it was what allowed the rest of the story to have such strong foundations. The characters feel very realised, because Obsidian knows a lot about who they are and their motivations.
