Game Thoughts: Pentiment
I also finished Pentiment [Spoilers] over the weekend!
The game's 16th Century European art style was thoroughly enjoyable and surprisingly expressive when animated. Even more enjoyable was the game's use of fonts. I never thought I'd be praising fonts but holy hell. Every character uses a font corresponding to their spoken language or background -- Peasants and priests have completely different lettering which added so much unexpected character to a game with no voice acting. The printing press guy had printing press text boxes!
I also want to praise the game's ambiguity in finding the murderers in the first 2 acts. There's just so many little threads for the player to follow to open up potential culprits, and I was completely engaged in the murder mystery segments in act 1 and 2. You legitimately can't know whether you got the right person, and just need to trust in your not-so-professional deductive abilities.
The story in the first two acts is fantastic, and the game is full of so many memorable characters. I wanted to spend my meals with many of them just to read the dialogue -- the fact that many would reveal hints and clues about potential motives or give character backgrounds was just a bonus. You get to know the characters and the town and the abbey so well by the end of the second act that when (if) you follow a specific thead and find additional locations it's thrill. Finding little interactions between characters and the little stories peppered around town and over the time period of the three acts is a joy.
For the record, the game also manages to stick in some absolute asshole characters which keeps the cast colorful and makes the good ones all the better.
I loved the way your skill choices in the game could also give you a free pass or completely mess up a potential route in some cases. I will admit, however, that the skill selection process is vague as hell, and I was pretty apprehensive to chose skills right out of the gate with no idea how they'd impact the game.
With all the praise out of the way I want to address Act 3, which I really didn't like. Act 3, while full of many of the same people and places really outstayed its welcome for me. I found myself annoyed with the protagonist, with the townsfolk, and with the task assigned when compared with the first 2 acts. While you do get to see the impact of your choices from the first 2 acts, the story isn't as impactful, interactions were more flat, most of the new characters are bland, and the primary task didn't draw me in much.
I was also disappointed with some of the reveals that happened in Act 3. The big reveal was kinda meh, and while the overall mystery was solved and there was some excitement in the final couple hours of the game, I wish we got more time to sort though the protagonists' internalized problems and face more consequences for being wrong.
While I can't read minds I feel like the developers wanted to have the story branch more -- to have more direct repercussions and vary the final act more depending on your character and choices in acts 1 and 2, but it may not have been possible without making the game way more complicated. I could be wrong, and perhaps there's a lesson intended here in how one person can only impact the world so much.
All in all, I loved the game. I love the idea of the player / protagonist being wrong in a detective game and that not being an endgame state, but rather something that has repercussions in the game world. I love how the game had something to say through its gameplay and narrative, even if I didn't necessarily like how it ended. It was time well spent.