Backlog Bingo 2025: Pentiment

Pentiment is a 2022...viiiiisual novel?? Uh, let's go with "adventure game"? from Obsidian; this was what they dropped after Outer Worlds and Grounded, but before Avowed and Outer Worlds 2. (Hey, look, even here, knowing what I wanted to write in this sentence, I typed "Outer Wilds".)

I am writing the last three entries of the year at the same time, having powered through the last two games in the same week during bottom surgery recovery. Pentiment, however, I finished a bit ago, and just never got around to writing about. I honestly think that says a lot: Pentiment was fine. It is certainly gorgeous, with a great art style, but at the end of the day, Pentiment is a game that I thought really cooked for its middle 70% but which started extremely slowly and which completely fell apart.

The former of these is pretty forgivable: plenty of games like this are slow burns, and it gives you time to inhabit the world a bit before the game's inciting event. (A murder of a baron, which the player character is assigned to investigate.) The slow burn leading up to this is, well, slow, but it works. Pentiment spends the next several hours of its runtime doing a thing that I really really enjoyed: hard-refusing to confirm any major decision as correct or incorrect. You can accuse no one, but then a mob is going to kill someone, or someone is going to be executed, etc etc. The game manages to stick this for a long time, and it's legitimately really cool! I loved inhabiting the world in which the consequences of your choices are canon to your run, with the important bit of every decision not being "was it objectively correct or not?" (which the game goes out of its way to avoid confirming) but "what are the ramifications?" How good do you, the player, feel about the investigations you did? You couldn't be everywhere at once, maybe you missed something. It doesn't matter, though: if you can't or won't make a decision, the powers that be will make one for you.

I loved this! I spent a lot of time talking to my partner and ex (yeah, not going into that one here) about how much I loved that it hard-committed to every run being canon, focusing entirely on the ramifications of your actions or inaction...

...and then chapter 3 has a character just show up and say "oh yeah I did every murder in the game". Motherf-

It was incredibly disappointing! Even with maybe fifteen minutes left in the game at that point, it reframed the entire experience in a way that I hated, from "I will never know if I was right, and that's the point" to "there was never a way to be right, and that's the point". This isn't an uninteresting direction to go...but it also isn't one that remotely worked for me.

And.

Boy I sure am still thinking about this game despite finishing it in July?? So, it's a Doll Scale 3/5, but with a mile-high asterisk in that I don't really think the writing will land for a lot of people I know for the same reasons it fell apart for me.