Pentiment - Josh Sawyer's historical mystery narrative-driven game set in 16th century Bavaria

[Infinitron]

 

[†††]

Read that as Jews Slayer for some reason

 

[Infinitron]

Pentiment, the game featuring authentic medieval pig legs (but not snouts):



Kingdom Come: Deliverance did the same:

Screenshot of "Kingdom Come Deliverance". Here we find at least a partly accurate pig.

 

[agris]

If only I hadn’t recently completed Pillars of the Earth, perhaps I could have fooled myself into thinking the art for Pentiment was attractive

 

[mondblut]

Pentiment, the game featuring authentic medieval pig legs (but not snouts):

Don't start with medieval lions.

These badass mofos are totally misrepresented today!

 

[Infinitron]

 

[CyberWhale]

Pentiment, the game featuring authentic medieval pig legs (but not snouts):



Kingdom Come: Deliverance did the same:

Screenshot of "Kingdom Come Deliverance". Here we find at least a partly accurate pig.

 

[Ismaul]

sheeple
piggle
shiggle

 

[Duraframe300]

Caravan's problems extend far beyond the tutorial though. Mainly that its broken as fuck and thus just not very interesting at all.

 

[Infinitron]

 

[Pound Meat]

Shit like this is why I've been skipping that dang FF8 card game for two decades.

 

[rusty_shackleford]

maybe they can add a good game as an accessibility option too

 

[Infinitron]

 

[Darkozric]

We're drowned in a cesspool of VNs nowadays to the point they are polluting the adventure games thread. You picked up the trash from the RPG thread and threw it here.

It will be better if there's a VN category in the front page that you can dump all the garbage there.

It will be easier to find all these abominations in one place, for easy and fast shitposting. I sense this diamond will produce many quality memes.

 

[Infinitron]

 

[Darkozric]

Puzzles
"Think you could hang those papers on the table? I can't reach."

 

[fork]

Complete crap. Read any of Soyers tweets in the last decade? Seen any screenshots of this manure? Realise that this is Microsoft shovelware to attract some — any — niche?
Anyone who buys this is beyond hope.

 

[Infinitron]

 

[Infinitron]

 

[Fedora Master]

Puzzles
"Think you could hang those papers on the table? I can't reach."

 

[Darkozric]

I thought about it and I've reached to the conclusion that Soyer can not be convinced with words to stop producing shit, no matter how high charisma you have. There's only one way to stop him.

 

[Infinitron]

Fontiment: https://www.polygon.com/23447253/pentiment-xbox-obsidian-font-design-text-medieval-manuscript

Pentiment’s defining detail is its fonts​

Words have a life of their own in Obsidian Entertainment’s new game

Lettermatic makes fonts. Fonts you can buy and use, fonts that cover your Starbucks coffee cup, fonts in apps and on a NASCAR car. You can find their fonts everywhere, on all sorts of things — even in video games, like Psychonauts 2. You’ll find their letters next in Obsidian Entertainment’s Pentiment, the 16th-century narrative role-playing game that looks like it’s been pulled straight out of a medieval manuscript.

Pentiment plays out on the pages of one of those manuscripts. Its murdery mystery story is set in Bavaria, pulling inspiration for the world from handwritten late-medieval manuscripts to early printing processes. Pentiment’s main character, Andreas Maler, is an artist who works on illuminated manuscripts, writing them by hand and adding in period-appropriate flourishes: intricate designs, illustrations, and borders, sometimes with actual silver and gold.

Image: Obsidian Entertainment/Xbox Game Studios

Riley Cran and his small Lettermatic team built six different fonts for Pentiment, each of which has a different purpose in the game. Pentiment is not a voiced video game, so its fonts take the place of voices. “We can use these fonts to make characters exclamatory,” Obsidian producer Alec Frey told Polygon. “We can show [a character’s] education level, personality, and backgrounds through the fonts. It allows us to really give a voice to the characters and bring the world to life.”

Pentiment’s fonts feel like they have a life of their own. They’re dynamic; there are splatters and scribbles, ink bleeding onto parchment pages. The ink dries and sometimes dulls, with words crossed out and rewritten.

With a story so thoroughly embedded in the past, Obsidian wanted to ensure it got that important detail — its fonts — accurate, according to history. That’s where Cran and his team came in: They’re font experts, and they were eager to match Obsidian’s enthusiasm for the era. The goal was not only to perfect the 16th-century European Gothic and flourished script writing, but to also encompass more everyday styles of text, too — after all, not everyone was a master of specialized writing, or could even read or write at all.

“We have an entire shelf of books in our library that we purchased for research on this game,” Cran said. “We started the fonts during the pandemic, when it was harder to get access to physical archives. But we ended up realizing that a huge amount of scanned and photographed assets in institutions are available digitally.”

After studying the documents and other resources, Lettermatic built out a big ol’ family tree of Latin writing, one that spans time and geography, to be able to place Pentiment’s world within a timeline, ensuring its writing styles were ones that people of the time were likely to use or see. (Obsidian Entertainment and Lettermatic read so many books in researching this game that Pentiment has a bibliography in the credits, Frey said.) From there, Lettermatic and Obsidian developers pulled pieces of those fonts together to build Pentiment’s new fonts, which were designed specifically for the video game. When they figured that out, they started drawing the fonts mostly by hand, using writing tools accurate to the time period, Cran said. He estimated there are around 2,700 individual glyphs within Pentiment’s six fonts.

Image: Obsidian Entertainment/Xbox Game Studios

However, Obsidian and Lettermatic still wanted the game’s fonts to be accessible to all players, so they had to consider that while building the type. Not all of the fonts make the cut into the more accessible version with easy-to-read fonts; the player has the option to use all the fonts or just the more easily read ones, right at the start of the game.

“We want to make sure that if people are having a hard time reading [the fonts], we’ve got a way for them to do that,” Frey said. “We also have a text-to-speech feature in the game if you need the game to read itself to you. It’s not voice acting, but it is the automated voice.”

To implement the fonts in Pentiment, Obsidian received what Cran described as a “toolkit” from Lettermatic. These fonts are not like the ones you and I type with every day. After all, this text is supposed to mimic writing, which isn’t as consistent as most digital fonts. It includes considerations for how a person writing two E’s back to back won’t write each of them in the same exact way. There are other “spontaneous” details, too, Cran said — like little flourishes or swishes. “That’s one quality is that authentic feeling of spontaneous writing that’s not provided by a digital asset, and how to figure out how to make a digital asset that realistically captures a very analog type of typography.”

Image: Obsidian Entertainment/Xbox Game Studios

These are the sort of details that a player may not notice, and Pentiment has been designed that way. But if the details weren’t right, the game would probably feel different in some way — albeit on a minor scale. A detail as small as a font on the screen is as important as any other asset; they’re all little pieces of a big, big world.

“The work itself, it was kind of overwhelmingly apparent to us that we’re just part of one big story,” Cran said. “The folks at Obsidian working on Pentiment had such a clear vision for when this game is taking place, and where, so it was pretty straightforward to jump into some in-depth research.”

Pentiment is out Nov. 15 on Xbox Series X, Xbox One, and Windows PC.

 

[BlackheartXIII]

Reminder: Josh majored in theater history (with a fcous on the roman empire) with a theater minor from Lawrence University, he graduated with a 2.6 GPA.
https://news.xbox.com/en-us/2022/11/10/recommended-reading-of-medieval-history-from-josh-sawyer/

A Recommended Reading List of Late Medieval History From Pentiment Game Director Josh Sawyer​

Summary​

• Explore the inspirations behind the world of Pentiment with this curated list of books recommended by Game Director Josh Sawyer.
• Pentiment will place you in an illustrated world inspired by late medieval manuscripts at a time when Europe is amidst political and religious unrest.
• Pentiment will release on November 15 for Xbox Series X|S, Xbox One, Windows 10/11 PC, and Steam for $19.99. It will also be available on day one with Xbox Game Pass and PC Game Pass.

When it arrives November 15, Pentiment will allow you to explore one of the most unique and inspired gaming worlds this year. As Andreas Maler, an artist working at Kiersau Abbey near the town of Tassing in Upper Bavaria, you will live out your life in this 16th century early modern world over the course of 25 years. Kicking off the storyline of this narrative adventure is the murder of a nobleman whom your friend, Brother Piero, stands accused; it’s up to you to prove his innocence.

As you set off on this adventure, you will have the opportunity to pick a series of education and lifestyle-inspired traits that will help define Andreas, affecting the many options afforded to you via dialog interactions throughout the game. From Hedonist to Occultist, Medicine, or Theology, and even where he has travelled for his “wanderjahre” or wander years, you will have a wide variety of choices to establish Andreas’ background and knowledge to help immerse you even deeper in the game’s world.

Pentiment’s setting is inspired and informed by a mix of fiction and non-fiction works that we are sharing with you here today, personally recommended by Game Director Josh Sawyer. Each of these books can give you a better sense on how states and religious beliefs clashed at the time of Pentiment, how people can change over time, the life of late medieval peasants, and how education and literacy can put one at odds with the Church — many of these elements and themes will play out in various respects throughout your time with Pentiment.

You can learn more about each of these recommended works below.

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“Dürer’s Journeys: Travels of a Renaissance Artist” by Susan Foister and Peter van den Brink
“Wonderful compilation of essays exploring the travels of 16th century artist Albrecht Dürer and the impact they had on his life. Dürer kept a number of travel journals over the years and they provide incredible insights into how he thought about art, his contemporaries, other cultures, and the many changes that were rapidly occurring in his own homeland. This hardcover also contains many illustrations, both by Dürer and other European artists of the period.”

“The Faithful Executioner: Life and Death, Honor and Shame in the Turbulent Sixteenth Century” by Joel F. Harrington
“This fascinating bit of microhistory looks at the life of a single executioner, Franz Schmidt, who lived during the latter half of the 16th century in Bavaria. Schmidt’s father was forced into the executioner business through a shocking and cruel twist of fate. Once the family was in the business, they found it almost impossible to get out due to the heavy shame associated with the profession. Franz kept a meticulous diary — rare if not unique among executioners — that reveals an unusual level of professionalism and piety as well as a lifelong desire to restore the honor of his family. The book also gives an interesting view into the consolidation of the power to execute justice under the state — the nascent belief that the state held the power to avenge injustices against the people through their reviled agent, the executioner.”

“The Return of Martin Guerre” by Natalie Zemon Davis
“Zemon Davis authored this book after consulting for a film based on the same 16th century historical case, Le Retour de Martin Guerre. It is the wild but true story of a young man from the Basque town of Hendaye who disappeared for eight years and returned a changed man — a very changed man. After resuming life with his wife, son, and extended family, details started to emerge that cast doubt on the man’s identity. It resulted in a unique court case that the Toulousain jurist Jean Coras recorded for posterity. It is a quick read and the film’s worth watching, too.”

“Peasant Fires: The Drummer of Niklashausen” by Richard Wunderli
“Although pre-dating the more famous peasant revolt in early 16th century Swabia, the small 1476 uprising of peasants in Niklashausen is no less interesting. A farmer named Hans Böhm said he had received visions of the Virgin Mary. Among other things, Hans said that Mary told him the people needed to overthrow their corrupt clergy. The festival atmosphere of Carnival emboldened the peasants, who gave up their work to travel to Niklashausen and listen to the visionary. You may have already guessed that it did not end well for them, but it’s an interesting look at a community turned upside down by a single charismatic peasant.”

“The Cheese and the Worms: The Cosmos of a Sixteenth-Century Miller” by Carlo Ginzburg
“Ginzburg was one of the first historians to start popularizing micro-historical examinations of what could today be classified as weird little dudes. The dude in question, a Friulian miller named Domenico Scandella (aka Menocchio), was certainly very weird. He learned to read at a school established in his region for the purpose of free public education. He used his literacy to read a wide variety of books that contributed to his formulation of an extremely unorthodox cosmology — so unorthodox that some (e.g. inquisitors) might (did) consider it heretical. At the heart of it all was his belief that all the elements combined at creation into a cheese-like mass out of which worms appeared. The worms ate through the cheese, one of him became God, and the rest is history. Much like Hans Böhm, things didn’t work out for Menocchio in the end, mostly because like Hans, Menocchio simply could not shut up about his beliefs. Fantastic book.”

“The Name of the Rose” by Umberto Eco
“Already an established medievalist and semiotician, Eco decided to write fiction at the age of 48, a time when he said you either ‘escape with a Cuban ballerina and abandon [your] family or you write a novel.’ He started with a list of names – names of monks. When he finished, he had ‘created a murder mystery set in a 14th century Italian monastery during a tense debate between the Roman Curia and the Franciscans over apostolic poverty. The Name of the Rose manages to be a gripping thriller populated with colorful characters while illuminating the setting’s historical context in incredible detail. Despite his extensive use of historical research, Eco chose to set his story in an unnamed fictional abbey, which gave him the freedom to create the labyrinthine Aedificium, containing ‘more books than any other Christian library.’ It’s a fantastic novel (my ‘favorite), a huge inspiration for Pentiment, and I highly recommend it.”

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We hope this list has invigorated your interest in the upcoming world of Pentiment and late medieval history and literature. Pentiment will release on November 15 for Xbox Series X|S, Xbox One, Windows 10/11 PC, and Steam for $19.99. It will also be available on day one with Xbox Game Pass and PC Game Pass. Pre-orders for the game are available today as well as pre-installs with Game Pass.

 

[Alienman]

This comes of as a school project to me somehow.

 

[Rahdulan]

I'm not sure if this makes you lose faith in humanity.
https://steamcommunity.com/app/1205520/discussions/0/5568165891212377297/

You cannot find the real killer. John Sawyer´s ruined the game for me...

I am reviewing the game for a website and since the embargo ends on November 14, I will not say anything about the game´s quality. I just want to say that one fact I learnt from IGN´s interview has totally ruined the experience for me and I have even no desire to finish the game, let alone to play it again.

Spoiler

The game has no cannonical killer.

This is not a spoiler, this is the game´s feature. You cannot find the real killer in the game. You only can come to a conclusion. A conclusion. And that´s it.

I knew that I had made some decision that might have affected the final outcome so I was looking forward to play the game again, to explore every hidden detail, every thing I have missed so far, so that I could find the culprit that time around, but now knowing that whatever I do the real culprit will not be revealed, I just don´t care anymore. I cannot see any point in playing the game again only to see a different outcome that will be just an outcome, not a real ending.

Yes my decisions affect people and the world around me but the real mystery is the murder. I dont really care about how my decisions affect the peasant because why would I care about them? The most interesting thing is to find the killer. Sadly, nobody will ever find him or her.

This game is actually just about something you do and watching how it affects everything around you. The main point is, however, missing.