It looks awesome that Josh Sawyer is working on a passion project. I hope this game will reignite his creative love for gaming instead of a full burnout with game designing (something that happened after PoE 2 hadn't sold well).
Also, I have to salute Obsidian for working on all kinds of games, even big experiments for them: first a survival game, now a 2D murder-mystery RPG set in a 16th-century illuminated manuscript. It's very neat they allow their creative leads to create games they would want to do, instead of focusing only on AAA games (which actually are also worked on by other teams in the company).
I tried Pentiment at Gamescom yesterday, and the overall surroundings and my total exhaustion at such a huge event had skewed my view a bit to the negative, so I thought I'd share my impressions after letting them settle and getting a good night's sleep first.
I didn't really see more of the game itself in the demo than you see from watching the trailer, but seeing and playing are always two different things, even if there's no complex gameplay involved.
I was lucky to find them, because Obsidian wasn't even listed, there were just 3 stations for Pentiment in the general Xbox and GamePass booth.
The woodcut artwork with the sidesliding characters and the medieval or maybe renaissance drawing and manuscript style sets the tone and atmosphere right away. I missed the prologue or introduction because the guy at the station clicked through stuff rapidly to get to character creation when I asked to use mouse and keyboard instead of a controller, but I knew the beginning. You're Andreas, a journeyman artist, and your friend has been accused of murdering a prominent person.
You can choose different background histories and experiences for Andreas, which will influence his skills in trying to solve the mystery. There are two or three out of multiple options to pick what he specialized in during university, for example if he studied foreign language and script (helps you read notes), enjoyed debate and diplomacy (persuasion), was more interested in nature, herbs and physical activities, preferred arithmetics and logic, or astronomy etc.
So there were choices to make between things like Latinist, Logician, Orator, Naturalist etc, and afterwards if he's a more hedonistic person, a bookworm, and so on.
You also choose where Andreas spent his wanderjahre, the travelling time you spend as a kind of practical apprenticeship after formal education, which influences your background knowledge on certain regions and people.
In the demo I didn't see too many of the different outcomes of those choices, obviously, but in some dialogues I was, for example, able to decipher a scribbled note and exclude potential authors from the type of handwriting, the language use etc, while with a different skillset I would probably have needed to follow other clues instead.
Gameplay is fairly simple, you click on a set path or area transition symbols to move forward, on people to talk, on objects to examine or read.
There's a map screen and a journal referring to quests, important events and people.
The demo sets you on the path to either talk to a few people who were involved somehow and might have seen something, or to go to the abbey, where a monk you know and are friends with will examine the corpse. I figured the village people would still be there later and opted for the post-mortem examination instead.
The abbot doesn't want Andreas around, but I had been told earlier which window to find to throw a stone at.
(The demo was limited of course, it's even possible that the areas where you can talk to other people were locked and the abbey was the only way to go, I don't know that).
The brother in the abbey examined the body very thoroughly, explaining everything he did and discussing the implications with Andreas. I didn't have that many dialogue choices to pick at this point, it was mostly clicking and reading through a fixed dialogue, but that's alright, because at this stage of the game we're still mostly gathering information and not drawing conclusions.
I realized later that there were already subtle differences in the small choices you could make, for example either jumping to conclusions like "That means this and that person can't have done it because they're too small or weak!" or describing and assessing objective facts like "This head wound shows signs that it has been inflicted with siginficant force. It must have been a very heavy object or from a height, you say. Is it also possible that a very strong person has done this?" - Monk "Very unlikely, unless the head was pressed against hard ground, but in that case there should have been an injury on the opposite side, too."
There's a lot to read and a lot of facts to take in, about forensic medicine, history, regional differences, language, habits, and every detail mentioned sprouts a long explanation if you decide to ask follow-up questions.
Example: The monk discovers a genital sore on the murdered person and says it's a sign of a sexually transmitted illness, which may be an indication of involvement with prostitutes but is unlikely to have any immediate role in his death. If you decide to pursue the topic, he will then lecture you about the "French disease" (syphilis) and where the name comes from, and why monks would know about such things, too.
And if you wonder instead why a monk knows so much about injuries, he will tell you of his time as a mercenary in several wars, with historical facts about them, before he chose to enter the monastery.
Since we talked yesterday in another thread about storywriting in games and particularly Obsidian overloading you with lore through dialogue in Pillars of Eternity, in this game the same concept seems fitting to me. It's a narrative, text-based murder mystery, reading a lot of dialogue is the whole point of it, and you can choose how much information you want. it may or may not influence the outcome of your investigation, but it's a nice way to learn some interesting facts in an interactive mode. Treat it like reading one of those books where you can pick how to continue, but with really nice medieval to renaissance style artwork (hit me, artists or other people with history of art knowledge out there, for mixing up or not knowing epochs and styles).
All dialogue, by the way, appears in a bubble on the screen as if written by hand with a quill on paper, very dynamically, with words being crossed out and corrected, ink blots, complete with the scratching sound of scribbling. The different fonts vary as indication of the speaker's education, social status and so on, which is a neat way to express that without voice.
After a while, that very thoughtful and artistic detail started to get on my nerves a little bit, because there was no sound except for the rustling of clothes and the constant scratching of the quill on the paper. I also didn't appreciate being forced to a certain reading speed, because obviously I couldn't read faster than the words were appearing. Now I don't skip dialogues or search for shortcuts, but I usually read fast and take shorter sentences in at one glance, so that considerably slowed me down even when wanting to take up every detail. and that in combination with the sound.
I have to add, though, that this was after 4 hours among thousands of people, in a booth surrounded by constant noise and flashy lights, knowing there were now people behind me waiting to try the game too, and definitely having far too little sugar and caffeine in my bloodstream.
I can imagine enjoying that style differently if I'm sitting somewhere quiet and comfortable in a mood to read a book, which is the whole point after all, so take that assessment with a grain of salt.
Additionally, I noticed later that you can speed up the process by clicking during the dialogue, which will make the whole sentence appear at once instead of word by word, only it's important to be careful in that case so that you don't accidentally click past the dialogue to the next speaker already.
The different fonts look really great, but who doesn't like them or struggles with some reading challenges can switch them off and choose clear, modern, easily readable letters instead. Good move on their part here to ensure acessibility, be it for people with dyslexia or just those who get distracted or are put off easily by visual details.
Well, that's about as much as I can say about Pentiment.
My conclusion is that I think it's going to be an interesting game that's mostly a lot of reading, gathering details, picking up clues, learning details along the way that are maybe irrelevant to the mystery but nonetheless interesting facts.
I like to read a lot, I like detective work and mysteries, so I can't imagine why I wouldn't like this game, when I'm in the right mood for it (obviously not the game to play when you feel like mindlessly smashing something), and think it can be definitely recommended to people who like the same.
There are small details like the fonts and the scribing that might be cool for one and annoying for another person, or maybe for the same person in different situations, but they can be customized and turned off.
For me personally, the fonts are a beautiful detail, the scribbling speed I can enjoy when I feel like it and speed up when I don't, and the sound can be turned off if it really continues to bother me when I play it while fed and rested
