We are in 1518, and the artist Andreas Maler is passing through the small town of Tassing, located in Bavaria and therefore part of the Holy Roman Empire. Our hero works in the scriptorium of the local monastery and will soon return to Nuremberg, where his bride and a lavish career await him. But while he spends his days at his desk working on various illustrations, the murder of a baron disrupts his plans and the daily lives of the inhabitants. This context will inevitably remind moviegoers of The Name of the Rose, and it works just as well as in Jean-Jacques Annaud’s film. It must be said that the developers of Obsidian have not done things by halves and have decided to push the medieval, religious and literary atmosphere as much as possible, even if it means disturbing or even putting off some players. If the prospect of reading sentences like “the Englishman Guillaume d’Ockham gave us the Summa totius logicae, putting nominalism in the face of Plato’s realism” puts you off, take some time to adjust before you get caught up in the game, which is heavily dependent on its many dialogues.
Fortunately, the developers have planned everything to simplify your task. On the one hand, no historical knowledge is really necessary to advance the investigation. And on the other hand, the game multiplies the available information with a single click. Thus, most historical proper nouns or terms that are too obscure appear underlined in speech bubbles. Just click on it, and the game screen is embedded in an old book, and the definition of the terms in question appears in the margin, very nicely illustrated in passing. The process is elegant, practical, and it forms part of a radical but always coherent artistic direction. The 2D graphics seem to be taken from the illuminations of the time, while the typeface varies depending on the level of education of the interlocutor, ranging from fairly simple characters to block letters that go beyond Gothic letters. Voluntary mistakes are even corrected before our eyes by the virtual pen, which we also constantly hear scratching.
THE NAME OF THE PROSE
Condensed over fifteen hours and a single village, Pentiment paradoxically offers us dozens and dozens of interlocutors. If this abundance of characters is generally positive and welcome, it can also be a source of confusion because it is very complicated to remember everyone’s last name, face and function. Note, however, that the game uses the definition system on demand mentioned above, except that clicking on a fictional name displays a portrait of it in the margin, stimulating our visual memory. In addition, a journal collects our current objectives, the map of the village, the list of inhabitants and a more general glossary. There is even a tab called “Ex-Libris” which describes Andreas’ personality and past. Role-playing requires, these elements depend on your answers to certain questions presented at the beginning of the adventure, but also later. Depending on the chosen characteristics (hedonist, bookworm or rogue; Latinist, logician or occultist; having spent his youth in Flanders or Italy, etc.), the hero will have access to different dialogues and will be able, or not, to understand certain writing in Latin or French for example.
Each day is divided into different periods, and talking to this character, spying on another or performing this action will sometimes take a large amount of time, preventing you from exploring other paths. When you know that the most important goals must be achieved by a given date and time, it is again necessary to make often draconian choices.
Also note that the RPG aspect of the game is absolutely not translated by any battles or experience points, but by abundant dialogues, rich and which open different paths. We prefer to tell you as little as possible about the scenario, which has its share of surprises, but know that some of your choices will have important consequences (when it comes to convincing someone to do something later) and sometimes really big ones . If some relatively rare puzzles also light up the gameplay, the main difficulty of the adventure lies in its temporal aspect. Each day is divided into different periods, and talking to this character, spying on another or performing this action will sometimes take a large amount of time, preventing you from exploring other paths. When you know that the most important goals must be achieved by a given date and time, it is again necessary to make often draconian choices. It can even be frustrating at times, especially since the end game doesn’t answer all your questions. More precisely, it will not tell you whether some of your most important choices will have been the right ones or not. Once again, we prefer to remain in the dark so as not to reveal anything. But the game’s biggest pitfalls actually come from concerns that we definitely didn’t expect to find in an Obsidian production, as the studio is used to handling many more branches than here.
“AND WE DIVIDE HIS RING…”
On several occasions we witnessed misplaced scenes where the scripts did not properly account for our progress. Here we were told about a character as if he was still alive when his death had already taken place. And there our hero started talking about a book and its contents, when in reality we had not yet unearthed the book in question. From memory we have encountered problems of this type four or five times. A tolerable, even acceptable amount, but one that breaks the immersion a little too often. In addition, the nearly flawless French translation of two-thirds of the adventure suddenly goes off the rails in the third act. Sentence in untranslated English, mixing formal usage and familiarity in the same conversation, and male character speaking in the feminine (“sorry”, “I thought I’d gone crazy”…) thus invite each other to the party, and therefore spoil it a little. If a patch should ever fix these issues in the coming days, don’t hesitate to add a point or even two to the bottom line, because Pentiment has the huge advantage of standing out from the crowd.
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