Pentiment

Andreas: But books like this… it’s all the same kind of fantasy, isn’t it?
Illuminata: To die better than we are born.

Released by Obsidian Entertainment in 2022, Pentiment is a game crafted seemingly uniquely for my tastes. It’s a relatively small but richly written and illustrated mystery adventure - sometimes compared to Disco Elysium, though it’s not nearly as expansive (or trying to be).

It’s set in 1500’s Bavaria - technically the Early Modern period, not medieval, though it’s very much on the cusp - and is a microhistory. By densely watching the way one small town is impacted by the wider events, you can see a lot of the wider turbulent times reflected in them.¹

It also has a whole lot of scenes just showcasing period accurate meals. Players love this stuff.

I think a key insight is how you can delight by just focusing on the mundane and authentic, even when it’s unusual or not particularly Hollywood. It doubles down on using fun period gimmicks in its art, its storytelling, and so on in ways that really encourage me to dig into the same in this game.

Footnotes

1. This inspires some of my stance on handling the broader myth cycle. ↩