Obsidian’s Pentiment is one of the most interesting games of the last several years. Set in 16th-century Bavaria, the game tasks you—journeyman artist Andreas Maler—with figuring out who keeps doin’ murders in the town of Tassing. There are plenty of potential suspects you can point the finger at, and you have to choose one whether you’ve got damning evidence or not.
Spoiler: you will never have damning evidence. Regardless of who you send under the headsman’s axe, you’ll always have a queasy feeling that they might not be the one who did it.
In a chat with PCG at this year’s GDC, Pentiment director Josh Sawyer said that’s entirely the point. “From the very beginning I said, ‘I think that for this to be compelling in the way that I want it to be, there cannot be a right answer'”. In fact, it sounds like Sawyer himself doesn’t have a clear culprit in mind for the game’s evildoings. “People on the team would ask me [who the culprit is], then people at Xbox would ask me, and I’m like, ‘No! There isn’t!’ And I will say that there are people who, in retrospect… seem more likely to have done it, but that doesn’t mean they did it.”
Sawyer, who also led development on games like Fallout: New Vegas and Pillars of Eternity, approached the issue of (not) selecting a culprit from the perspective of an RPG maker. “When there’s always a right answer and it’s a puzzle and you kind of either get it right or you get it wrong… I just don’t think there’s a lot there from an RPG developer’s perspective.
“It made me think, well, what if you didn’t know and you just had to keep going, right? And in the way that we do RPGs: choice and consequences, we say, ‘You made this choice. If you have second thoughts, you’ve just got to live with that'”.
And the role you have in Pentiment? Andreas. “You’re not a detective, you’re a fucking artist. You’re not good at this,” says Sawyer. “You’re doing the best you can to prevent a good friend who—very obviously—is not the person who did it, from dying.” That’s Piero, the lovely old monk who’s initially fingered for murder.
“That was the other thing… Andreas, the character you’re playing, he is motivated to prevent Piero from dying, and will never offer him up, because it’s inconceivable to him that Piero could have done this. That’s sort of like, sorry player, Andreas will not allow Piero to die. You have to pick someone else.”
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