3. Pentiment, dev. Obsidian Entertainment
Turns out Microsoft and their recently-purchased studios can still make games. Halo is a disaster, I don't know if we'll ever see Everwild again, and the jury is out - literally - on whether they'll ever own Call of Duty, but they made this! I'm not even being facetious, Pentiment is a game a giant trillion-dollar conglomerate can be proud of. Between Pentiment and Hi-Fi Rush (which I hope to play soon), Microsoft is actually achieving the promises of Xbox Game Pass. It is creating a stable financial foundation in which smaller, more interesting, more artistically daring games can be made. Obsidian's developers confirmed that there was no world Pentiment exists in without Game Pass.
Personally I'm suspicious of Game Pass. A "Netflix for games" sounds great until your remember how the "Netflix for movies" is doing right now. Also, I like to own my games, even if "own" is an increasingly abstract claim since ownership is just a few values in the Steam Cloud code. If you want to not pay for games, visit your local library, you may be surprised how good the selection can be. I honestly am concerned about how long Xbox can continue on this path considering the gruesome, pointlessly self-destructive layoffs we saw just a couple weeks ago. But hey, even if that new Fable game is doomed, people will get their Starfield, and I'll get my Pentiment.
If you have read my GOTY lists in the past, you'll know I'm pretty horny for games like Pentiment. This is typically the kind of thing that wins that much-coveted No. 1 slot. Let us remember such past winners such as Night in the Woods, Disco Elysium, and Kentucky Route Zero. I love a narrative adventure game, especially ones with Big Thoughts that resonate with how I'm feeling at that particular time. However, I can't be boring and predicable, even to myself, and after much painful discussion, I decided there two games I loved more in 2022. Pentiment is an incredible game, exhaustively researched, full of hundreds of unique characters across multiple moments in their lives. It has interesting ideas and questions about the act of deciding one's history. Simply put, it rules hard. Do not think the number in my post title means anything at all.
I'm gonna shift into middle school five paragraph essay mode for a moment here. Merriam-Webster defines "Pentiment" or "Pentimento" as meaning "a reappearance in a painting of an original drawn or painted element which was eventually painted over by the artist". This is useful to me because I had no idea what the title of this game meant. Its title is never used in Pentiment's script, which is pretty hard to do since this game has ten of thousands of lines of dialog and has things to say about a thousand topics. If you want to get into an argument about the continued relevance of ancient Greco-Roman medical texts, this is your scene. However, the "pentiment" is still a very useful idea to keep in mind when you consider the themes of this project.
Our protagonist is Andreas Maler, an apprentice in 1500s Bavaria, working on his "masterpiece", literally the work that will allow him to enter the guilds as a Master Artist. He is an outsider in this fictional town of Tassing, which is ruled by a grand medieval double monastery, Keirsau Abbey. By 1518, where Pentiment starts, this monastery is already a relic in its time, and your work of illuminated manuscripts is approaching obsolescence thanks to the adoption of the printing press. The game itself takes on that antiquated style, as every character is drawn like the 2D figures of medieval Bibles. However, this is not a game about medieval times, it's about the end of that period. Tassing is a bubble of the past even now, since the Early Modern Era is creeping in on all sides. Martin Luthor is causing a ruckus, proto-scientific ideas are developing, and the old power of the Church over society is breaking down. During the course of the game, set across several decades, you see how the worldview shifts.
This is represented in a million little details, but most prominent is the sense of time. In the early chapters, the parts of the day are measured by the movement of the Sun, and by the traditions of the Abbey, such as midday services. You need to consider such a thing as "Vespers". In the last chapter, Tessing has built itself a large public clock, so characters now imagine their day as we do, in twenty-four uniform divisions of time, "hours".
Andreas is the character we control and the viewpoint through which we discover Tassing. We make our mark on this place and its many petty rural politics and the Europe-wide grievances about religion, governance, and peasant freedom. He's our amateur detective, a learned figure with unique access to the nobles, the monastery, and the villagers. This is a murder-mystery game and through Andreas you must solve multiple cases, trying your best to help as many people as possible. However, Andreas is not really the star of Pentiment. That top billing should really go to Tassing itself.
Many might be disappointed learn that ultimately what you do does not really "matter". As in what you do will not cause the story to move in vastly different ways. A lot of games like this, especially the old Telltale model, really wanted to push the whole fantasy of choose-your-own adventure freedom. (And notably it was all fluff, Telltale never actually achieved that.) Andreas is not going to stop the flow of time to bring illuminations back into popularity, nor will he suddenly turn Tassing into a modern democracy or socialist utopia. He's not Geralt deciding the fate of everybody in The Witcher 3. You're just one guy. I failed practically every dice roll to get people to give up information to me, my Andreas was a dick, yet the story moved on basically the same as if I had charmed them all over.
For the most part, the cases are unsolvable, any of the suspects could have done the crime, you never find 100% perfect evidence for any murder. I ended up just fingering the biggest asshole in the line-up. If all you want is a puzzle, you will be disappointed. The cases are just methods by which you explore, learn, and develop a relationship with the real star of Pentiment, Tassing itself. By the of the game, in the final "case", you're making a much more profound and meaningful impact on the future than a simple decision of "did the widow, the thief, or the monk do it?"
Tassing is the pentimento of Pentiment. This is a place whose history goes back thousands of years. This is a town whose foundations go back to Antiquity, they're actually building structures on top of Roman stone. You can see the ancient aqueducts in the background. The old men of the village pass down folktales of a pre-Roman era and spit on their memory as violent conquerors. The saints of the local monastery have a mythology suspiciously similar to that of the pagan legends whispered in the woods. This is a place that has been re-imagined a dozen times, and the past has never disappeared. It's always hiding, still visible under the attempts to paint over it. So what really matters? The Germanic story, the Roman story, the Catholic story, whatever is coming next that we call "modern"? We see yet another revolution during the course of Pentiment, and it is a very difficult question who won and who lost. Life is rarely that black and white.
Pentiment ends up not being merely a historical game, it is a game that asks you to do the work of the historian. Historians do not just tell you what happened, they take evidence and sources and build a narrative around it. It is an act of interpretation, argumentation, it is finding values and meaning between what we know or what we think we know. Our knowledge is always going to be insufficient. You'll never know every little detail of what happened in Tassing. But you can decide what it means to you and what is most worthy of celebration.
No comments:
Post a Comment