Pentiment Reviews
Pentiment is a thrilling, Renaissance-style whodunit that forgoes conventional video game action by focusing on an engaging narrative, branching dialogue options, and character relationships.
While such digressions, to be fair, are optional, the game does encourage you to poke around every corner of its vibrantly rendered world to ensure that you’ve got the facts straight. In the end, though, Pentiment excels less as a mystery game and more as a portrait of a community. Because as a mystery to be solved and a mediation on how stories evolve over time, its focus wanders and ironically comes to fixate on elements like presentation and background lore that can all too easily overwhelm the basic tenets of telling an engaging story.
Obsidian Entertainment looks at European history with respect and lots and lots of study. "Study" means first of all commitment, passion, enthusiasm. It means love, and in Pentiment, there is so much love.
Review in Italian | Read full review
With its style, Pentiment is a playful work of art that is second to none, but can also inspire with its story.
Review in German | Read full review
Pentiment is the interactive choose-your-own-adventure story I’ve been waiting for my whole life. I love that I get to immerse myself in the game world without having to stress about button-mashing battles or jump scares. It’s delightfully engaging without being distressingly hard, and I’m loving every minute of it.
Pentiment is a narrative gem and artistic beauty, but it could be perceived very differently. Give it a try and it will surprise you.
Review in Spanish | Read full review
A lumbering historical murder mystery with little regard for tension or pacing, but one that packs in such dense detail you can't help but respect it. Pentiment immerses you in 1500s Bavaria and that's the main event.
A beautiful and heartfelt historical fiction with heavy themes of religion, purpose, and the influence we have on others over time.
A masterful tale of murder and history, Pentiment's strong narrative and choices make this beautifully illustrated game one of 2022's best releases.
Pentiment offers a tightly wound and gripping tale that is as optimistic as it is unique.
Pentiment's vivid art style, tight narrative, and choice-driven gameplay are a treat to experience. However, the restrictive save system and constant clicking to finish dialogue conversations can be detrimental to your enjoyment.
Pentiment does what it does with a magnificent blend of dialogue, characters, and narrative. The winding path you'll take has plenty of off ramps, and while all roads lead to Rome, the journey there feels unique to you. It's so fascinating getting to your specific ending, you'll probably even play it again to see what other decisions look like. Pentiment might not be for everyone, but for the genre, it's a magnificent and compelling work of art.
Pentiment is an incredibly enchanting adventure game that really is like no other. It doesn’t quite have the same depth and ingenuity that Disco Elysium has, but what it lacks in depth, it more than makes up for in charm. After a slow start, this murder mystery really becomes the talk of the town.
Pentiment won’t wow you with its graphics, probably bore you with gameplay and perhaps scare away with its limitations. But it really is a perfect story with a superb script!
Review in Polish | Read full review
Pentiment's unidimensional gameplay might not appeal to everyone.
Although its subject matter might confound and could be too heady for the general audience, Pentiment is a role playing game that has been considered and laboured over to the nth degree. It's a great reminder that some creatives just get it done, budget be damned. By God's will, Pentiment is making a late charge for Game of the Year.
Pentiment is a vibrant adventure that fully embraces its time period, artistic style, and sense of mystery. It’s methodical pacing and focus on dialogue won’t appeal to everyone, but Pentiment knows what it wants to be and does it exceptionally well.
Pentiment is a remarkable achievement in storytelling. If I were to play again and make different choices I'm sure I would discover new dimensions to these characters I've come to know very well. Thanks to the game's aesthetics, its meticulously researched writing, and the pedigree of its development team, the story of Andreas Maler is well worth experiencing. The game gracefully balances serious themes, soap operatic twists, and some very funny moments, revolving around a large cast of diverse, complex characters. Obsidian may have taken a risk making a game so unlike anything else they've made before, but the gamble has well and truly paid off. It's not just a game for lit nerds.
These human texts open up genuinely insightful questions about authenticity in art and what it will come to mean centuries later, as well as what to do when your history has been lost to you. It is a beautiful portrait of history that doesn't limit itself from commenting on labor inequity, parental loss, or artistic hopelessness, all things the medieval and early modern art it draws from portrays so vividly. In bringing some of those stories to us today, Pentiment accomplishes the remarkable goal of being both clear-eyed about the period's faults, and sincere about its masterpieces.