Pentiment - Ishvii Reviews

Pentiment is hard to review - especially without spoiling. It's not at all what I expected based on the trailer. Primarily, it's a text-heavy game about a fictional town in Germany, its inhabitants, a visiting Artist and the events they participate in that shape the town's history. It takes place across multiple time periods in the early 1500s, which makes it interesting to see how things change. The characters are believable, the town feels alive, and I think it does an excellent job of exploring the history of the time. I am glad that I experienced it, but it definitely falls into "game as an art form" rather than "enjoyable game". 3/5 for me, 4/5 if you like reading. Finished in 13 hours

Pros

It feels like a unique idea for a game. It's not one I particularly enjoyed, but it is unique
The artwork is beautiful
Although it’s not voice acted, when each character speaks they have different handwriting depending on their status or education. The commoners have handwritten dialogue, monks have gothic lettering etc
Character animations and expressions are good. Although they're relatively small and hand-drawn, you can see believable expressions on faces
As the dialogue is written out, the characters sometimes make mistakes, then erase letters and correct them after finishing a sentence
Time passes when you take actions that would take a few hours (like sitting down with a group of people to chat) and it usually warns you in advance. Normal conversations don’t make time pass
It does a fantastic job of exploring early Renaissance history, relationships between the abbey and the town, social classes, commoner life and many other issues of that time period
Although I didn't like it, the game does do a good job of making you feel unsure of your decisions. In acts 1 and 2 you are required to name a suspect for a murder. You're not given enough time to make a good decision, but you're forced to name someone anyway

Cons

Although I think the hand-writing and spelling mistakes are a nice idea, considering how much of the game is reading and how short people's sentences are, I quickly found them a barrier to the reading and switched to instant display of dialogue
Actually moving your character is clunky. There's an acceleration on it so you start moving very slowly and speed up (well, speed up to "leisurely"). It makes precise movement or changing directions frequently annoying
The gameplay consists of about 70% reading, 30% walking from one end of town to the other. The primary loop is to wander around talking to people until you've talked to everyone, then the story progresses
None of the choices you make actually change anything
There's no music, and almost no sound effects - the game is frequently silent
You don't get enough time to investigate all leads for the murders - and in my case, not enough time to even finish investigating ONE lead, which means (as Yahtzee said) "you end up just pinning the murder on whoever you investigated the most"
The game is unclear about how time works. I went to eat with people hoping to uncover information, but really it’s a mechanic to advance time and get to know people
I failed every single “convince this person” dialogue challenge
It’s often unclear what you’re meant to do next. There is a journal, but it often doesn’t give you an objective, so you just wander around talking to everyone
You cannot solve the murders - there is no correct answer. I was kind of under the impression this would be a murder mystery game, but it's more like "We're telling a story, and you're going to listen"
At the end of the game where everything is explained, there were some extremely confusing explanations for what was going on (which I won't go in to in detail, but I felt unsatisfied about several things)