Pentiment

Pentiment is Obsidian Entertainment's narrative-driven adventure set in early 16th-century Bavaria, designed and directed by Josh Sawyer with a tightly focused team. You play Andreas Maler, a journeyman illustrator in residence at Kiersau Abbey while finishing his masterpiece, and the story stretches across twenty-five years as Andreas becomes increasingly tangled in a series of murders that ripple through the nearby town of Tassing and the wider abbey community.

The game's visual identity is one of its strongest distinguishing features. Every scene is rendered as a living illuminated manuscript or early printed book, with hand-drawn characters, period-accurate typography, and an animation style explicitly modelled on the woodcuts and miniature paintings of the era. Dialogue text appears as if written by quill, with different characters' speech rendered in different scripts according to their education and station, and the player's choices about Andreas's own academic and social background actually change the conversational options available to him.

The investigation works through observation, conversation and deduction rather than puzzle solving. Each act takes place at a different point in Andreas's life and presents fresh murders to investigate alongside the ongoing consequences of his earlier decisions, which the game tracks across the full twenty-five-year span. Peasants, thieves, craftsmen, monks, nuns, nobles and saints all have their own concerns and biases, and the political and religious upheaval of the period — the Reformation gathering speed in the background — keeps shifting the ground beneath everyone involved. Whatever truth Andreas exposes becomes the truth the community lives with for generations.