The protagonist, Andreas Maler, is an artist working during a time of societal upheaval, who ends up getting involved in investigating a series of murders. As the player, you must scrutinize nuns, nobles, peasants, thieves and saints to solve crime. Maler’s work includes examining the murder victim’s body and questioning villagers’ motivations, or sometimes just helping them around the house.
“Pentiment” is not a role-playing game, developer Obsidian Entertainment’s usual fare. The studio is known for role-playing games like “The Outer Worlds” and the crowdfunded “Pillars of Eternity,” and licensed titles like “Fallout: New Vegas.” Instead, the main character, Maler, already exists with set characteristics that the player can’t customize, though dialogue choices do affect the story’s outcome. Obsidian credits Xbox with allowing the smaller-scale, historical, narrative-driven game to happen. Xbox announced its acquisition of Obsidian in 2018.
“I thought that Microsoft would just be more willing to allow us to try something unusual and experimental,” said “Pentiment” game director Josh Sawyer during a late August preview of the game. “If we had tried to fund this through traditional publisher methods, I don’t think that would have worked very well at all. Maybe we could have crowdfunded something like this, possibly. But as far as traditional publisher-developer relationship, I really do believe that whatever ideas I had about me possibly doing something like this, they didn’t really seem achievable until Microsoft was going to acquire us and Game Pass was a clear platform for it.”
The name of the game comes from an art term, referring to an element within a painting resurfacing after an artist painted over it.
Both Sawyer and art director Hannah Kennedy had an interest and fascination with art history and history more broadly, which seeped into “Pentiment’s” design.
“Art history had a huge impact on the creation of this game, in part because it is a history game.” Kennedy said. “At its core, this is a story about the experience of working artists at the time. So there was a lot to learn from art history, to inform that character and how they exist within this world about also inform how the space looks. It was fun to get to directly reference different art pieces within the story, make little nods to that because we feel that our audience will share a lot of interest with those same things that we find interesting.”
Kennedy said her background attending a Western art school informed her knowledge of how artists in that time period worked, and added that given that there were no cameras back then, developers based their historical depiction on era-appropriate paintings.
“The main draw that we feel this game presents to players is a very unique art style,” Sawyer said.
The developers said they designed accessibility options and tried to keep gameplay simple and straightforward so it could reach the widest possible audience. For instance, the historical fonts and scripts in the game can be swapped out within the game’s settings for better readability.
“While we do have a number of minigames throughout the game, they’re designed more for vibes and immersion rather than a challenge,” Sawyer said. “We’re not trying to give the player very complicated things to solve. We’re not trying to give the player precision tests or reflex tests.”
