You are Andreas Moller, an artist working in an abbey in 16th-century Bavaria. Over the course of 25 years, you must investigate a murder in a local town convulsed by the social changes of the era. Pentiment doesn’t sound like a typical video game, and it doesn’t look like one either, inspired as it is by late medieval art: the whole thing looks like a cross between a tapestry and an early-modern illustrated manuscript. The word pentiment means an earlier painting covered up by a later one, and the plot sees Moller scraping away lies to uncover the truth.
The game’s director Josh Sawyer at developer Obsidian has a degree in history, and studied the Holy Roman Empire in particular. “I’d always wanted to make a historical game,” he says. “And around the time that Microsoft acquired us [in 2018], I thought it would be cool to try to pitch a very small-scale game.” He chose the 16th century because it was an era of great social upheaval, not unlike the period we’re living through today.
