Pentiment: a game where the typeface says more than the line

Pentiment released on 15 November 2022 for Windows, Xbox One and Xbox Series, reaching PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5 and Switch on 22 February 2024. It was directed by Josh Sawyer, previously of Pillars of Eternity and Fallout: New Vegas. It won a 2023 Peabody Award in the interactive category and the Game Developers Choice award for narrative.

You are Andreas Maler, a journeyman artist from Nuremberg working in the scriptorium of Kiersau Abbey beside the fictional town of Tassing in Upper Bavaria. Three acts: 1518, 1525 and 1543. Years pass between them, children become adults, and the consequences of your decisions find you where you were not expecting them.

Typography as characterisation

The central device here is purely visual, and it works better than any amount of exposition. Every character's lines are written in their own hand or typeface, according to who they are. A peasant speaks in coarse gothic cursive with blots. A learned monk speaks in a tidy humanist roman. A printer speaks in set type, even and impersonal. Text appears as though a quill were writing it, with the sound to match, and when a character misspeaks the word is struck through and rewritten in front of you.

Within half an hour you are identifying a speaker's station and schooling before you have read the first word. No game before this turned a typeface into characterisation quite so literally.

An investigation without an answer

In the first act a murder occurs at the abbey and you are required to name the culprit. You do not have enough evidence — there is not enough evidence to be had, however much of the town you walk. Each day is limited: you can speak with a few people and take a meal with one family, which means part of the town will remain unknown to you forever.

You name a name. A person is executed. The game does not tell you whether you were right.

Then comes the second act, and you spend seven years living among the consequences of an accusation you were never sure of. That is the subject of Pentiment — not the solution, but the price of speaking.

There is no combat at all, and no puzzles in the usual sense. All interaction is conversation, reading and walking the town map. The accusation, the Peasants' War of 1525, the argument over indulgences and over the printing press all pass through the lives of specific families rather than through a chronicle.

What does not work

The walking. Half your time goes on the trip from abbey to village and back, and by the third act that road is familiar down to the individual stone. There is no fast travel by design — you are meant to feel the distance — but the design and the player's patience part company here.

The third act is weaker than the first two: the point of view changes, the pace sags, and the thread that carried two thirds of the game resolves across a few long conversations. The ending states its conclusion rather than letting you feel it.

Why 8.2

Because this is a rare case of a historical game in which history is not scenery: the arguments over faith, property and the printed word are played out through people with names, debts and children. And for the typography, a device worth studying on its own. Points off for the wearying geography and for a third act that falls short of its own plan. A modest eight: a thing the medium need not apologise for, though not a thing to recommend to everyone.