“Good writing” is a phrase that gets used quite often, and it can mean a lot of different things. Is good writing a good story? An unguessable twist? Fancy prose or deliberate themes? I’m sure I’ve used it at some point when what I meant to say is really: “lots of long words I don’t completely understand.”
PentimentDeveloper: ObsidianPublisher: Xbox Game StudiosPlatform: Played on PCAvailability: Out 15th November on PC, Xbox One, Xbox Series X/S
Still, Pentiment has good writing – wonderful writing, actually – and in this case I do know what it means. This game’s writing is witty, it has tempo and timing, it is genuinely, wickedly funny. It is also, above all, natural – something that so often seems impossible in games, things where you’re so often controlling a character impulsively, pulling their puppet strings on a whim. How do you write around that? Pentiment, Obsidian’s surprise new thing that I am judging from an admittedly quite brief hands-on at Gamescom, seems to manage it remarkably well.
Things begin in Pentiment with you choosing a background, in a fairly typical, tabletop RPG-inspired way but with a nicely in-theme twist, whereby you play as a semi-educated bloke with a choice of studies and interests. I chose to have studied Logic and dropped out halfway through Theology, with an interest in the Occult, a mediaeval gap year to Flanders and a bit of a taste for Hedonism (although I was tempted to be a Rapscallion who liked scampering about picking fights and generally being a peevish little imp, like a kind of Dark Age Bart Simpson. Hedonism ultimately just felt like it suited a dropout Theologian a little better.)
Pentiment – Official Announce Trailer – Xbox & Bethesda Games Showcase 2022 Watch on YouTube
Your job is to solve a local murder, and in my brief time with Pentiment that generally meant walking around the village talking to people. This is, honestly, something I usually find to be a bit of a dirge, but Pentiment knows that if you’re going to spend a many-hours-long game doing not much more than having conversations, those conversations have to be at least quite interesting – and that often the most interesting conversations are the funniest.