Andreas is a hedonistic artist from Basel. He studied law and alchemy at the University but dropped before he could complete it. Before he can set up his own art practice in Nuremberg, Germany, he spends some time in an obscure abbey off a village called Tassing in Bavaria. To be clear, he would have a very different background in everyone’s game, based on our choices.
He stays with a pleasant farming family and makes a lot of friends in the village. His best friend is brother Piero—an elderly scribe at the abbey who he considers as wholesomeness personified. While Andreas has several squabbles with the Prior of the abbey on his numerous unfinished assignments, nothing raises tensions like a shocking murder at the abbey. Set in the 16th Century, Pentiment is a text-based adventure filled with intrigue.
Determined to find out the actual perpetrator of the crime, I, as Andreas, fight against the clock and set out early every morning to explore the town and find clues that may help me in the process. I skip work, lunch with strangers, dig -up graves, lie, break into locked rooms, solve ciphers—all to get to the bottom of the mystery. But all this is between the incredible narrative that spouts out a lot of gossip. I didn’t know what the Holy Roman Empire was, and would have gone the rest of my life without learning anything about it, if not for the game’s very interesting picturisation of society during the era.
To get this far into the game as to enjoy it, a player would have to do quite a bit of reading; it is a text-based game after all. I do hope they have faster text speeds in a later update, because I found the fastest speed in the current version still a bit slow, and they are unskippable. But to compensate, the artwork is splendid, as it attempts to take us through a book that was stylised based on the era. I do feel richer for playing Pentiment. At the very least, I come out of this experience with the very real knowledge that Pentiment is not a type of cherry pepper. The game is currently available for the Windows and Xbox platforms and is free-to-play with the Xbox game pass.