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

[Infinitron]

 

[Dadd]

Wow! Tumblr still exists!

 

[Infinitron]

https://news.xbox.com/en-us/podcast/pentiment-herman-miller-gaming/

SANDRO: Well, thank you. And welcome to this segment. I'm from Germany as you have heard. And today's game is also from Germany. That's why I'm here today. I'm talking about Pentiment. And I'm discussing it today with Josh Sawyer, game director at Obsidian. Guten tag, Joshua. Guten Morgen, eher.

JOSH SAWYER: Guten Moregen oder Guten Abend fur dich.

SANDRO: Dankeschon. I was really impressed when I heard that you didn't just do a game that's actually playing in Germany, but you also speak German. But let's not do this anymore today.

JOSH SAWYER: Sure.

SANDRO: Because I know most of the rest of our audience won't be able to understand it. But Pentiment, it's been out for a while now. And we wanted to record this interview a while ago. We couldn't do it back then for a technical glitch. But I still wanted to discuss the game with you in detail because I've played through it. And I have so many questions.

JOSH SAWYER: Awesome.

SANDRO: But before we start into it, do you want to give us a quick introduction? What is Pentiment actually about?

JOSH SAWYER: Sure. Pentiment is a narrative adventure game. It's set in 16th-century Ober-Bayern, upper Bavaria, in the fictional town of Tassing and the nearby Kiersau Abbey, which is a benedictine-double abbey. And you play a character named Andreas Mahler, who is a journeyman artist from Nuremberg. And he is completing his Wanderjahre, the years during which he travels through Europe, learns from different masters, and then returns home to become a master in his own right.

But while he is staying and working at Kiersau Abbey, he becomes wrapped up in a murder. His friend at the Abbey, Brother Piero, was accused of the murder. And it's up to Andreas to prove that someone else did it. And there are multiple suspects. And it's never really quite clear exactly who did it. But that one murder then turns into multiple murders and a conspiracy that spans over 25 years. And you get to see Andreas and the people around him change over that time.

SANDRO: And it's been so very, very positively received. I loved it. I loved every single--

JOSH SAWYER: Thank you.

SANDRO: --second of the game. I'm pretty sure we don't want to spoil the game, the story, especially the ending to anyone. So we will probably have to keep this a bit too after the recording because I want to know what I did wrong and what I did right.

The first thing that really popped out when I started it up was the very unique art style and the intriguing storytelling. Just with text, it's actually like a book, is it? How did you come up with that? Because it's so different from what I expected, at least.

JOSH SAWYER: I had some ideas for the art style. I really knew that I wanted to rely on something that felt inspired from the Late Medieval and Early Modern period. And the 16th century early in this time was seeing the end of manuscript production, or most manuscript production that is, hand-written and illuminated books. And it was moving into the realm of print.

So I wanted to borrow elements from both of those things. And I approached our art director Hannah Kennedy, who's extremely talented. And I said this is kind of what I'm thinking of. This is the perspective I'm thinking of. These are the sources I'm thinking of being inspired by.

Then she went and she did a bunch of research on her own, gathered that reference together, and then created the art style you see, which looks very period appropriate. But it is not it is not a copy. It is a synthesis that Hannah created. And I'm very, very happy with it.

SANDRO: And it was said a lot of times that it looks different, but at the heart it's still an Obsidian game. It still has that Obsidian DNA. I felt that, but what is it exactly. How can I point a finger to what is an Obsidian game? Even if it looks completely different than any other Obsidian game now.

JOSH SAWYER: I think the things that people respond to, that feel very Obsidian in this game, are the character development. We have a large cast of characters that are really diverse in personality and background. And the way they talk, I think, feels very human. Their relationships are very human.

And you have a lot of choice within the story, in terms of how you interact with people. The choices that you make can have big consequences over time. And I think all of those are things that feel very integral to the type of games that Obsidian makes.

SANDRO: Well, I can just echo that. When I played it, I felt so much love and sometimes anger with the characters. It was really well written.

JOSH SAWYER: Thank you.

SANDRO: And the ending, we can't discuss it now. But I have so many questions. While I played it, I often asked myself, did I do the right thing? Is there a right way through Pentiment?

JOSH SAWYER: No, there really isn't. One of the things that I had found when-- I a lot of detective stories, or detective films, or detective games. But in detective games, the thing that I never really liked so much is that they feel very puzzle like, in the sense that there's a certain logical combination of things that you need to arrive at. And when you do, you find the true answer that is definitively true. There are some games that subvert this a little bit.

But I was thinking about the genre. And I was also thinking about the difficulty of determining guilt, for example, in an era when there's very little science to use. There's no forensic science, really. There aren't really even police. And the way investigations are done is really foreign to what we would understand. And the ambiguity of that was really scary.

And I thought that it would be interesting to put the player in a position where there were people that were quite plausible. But their time and their ability to really figure out the answer is extremely limited. And the best they can do is figure out the people who are likely to have done it and then make a choice and hope for the best. And that's never going to really feel great. And you're never going to--

SANDRO: I feel so bad.

JOSH SAWYER: I know. And even a lot of people, like there's one person that a lot of people gravitate towards, especially in the first act. And it doesn't feel satisfying when you see them punished for it because it's messy. And it's not the thing that you expect it to be. And you have to live with that. And the community reminds you of the things that you did. And it feels bad.

SANDRO: Yes, they do.

JOSH SAWYER: So that was the focus, was to try to make the player live with that ambiguity and accept that they're forced to do something that's just inherently unpleasant. And they just have to make the best of it.

SANDRO: Well, you did an amazing job of making me feel bad about my choices because I, actually, felt bad. Now, looking at the era and the location of the game. Being from Germany, if I was a game director, obviously every game would be playing in upper Bavaria. It's actually quite near where I live. I'm from Munich. So Tassing, even if it's not real, I say it's right around the corner here.

But you're not from Munich. You're not from Germany, Josh. You're from California. So why are you so interested in this time period in the location and, also, why do you speak German in the ad?

JOSH SAWYER: Well, I'm actually originally from Wisconsin, you can see the flag behind me, which had a lot of German immigrants. And my grandmother was born in Bavaria. And her father was in the Bavarian infantry in World War I. And so we have a lot of family roots in that region. My mom's side of the family also was from other parts of Germany.

So I was interested in our family history. And I did a lot of research into that. And then as I got into college, I initially went to a conservatory of music. And I studied-- and was really interested in singing Liebeslieder, romantic music from the 19th century, a lot of it by Schobert or Brahms with Goethe lyrics and things like that. And so I got really interested in romantic poetry.

And then I switched over to getting a history degree. And I studied German history. And German language was kind of necessary to engage in that. And then I just continued speaking German after I graduated from college. I traveled to Germany many times. Role-playing games are a genre that is quite beloved in Germany.

And so I just continued that interest. And when I had the chance to make a game that was historical-- I know a fair amount about other parts of Europe, but the Holy Roman Empire and Germany and Bavaria are pretty central to what I do know about.

SANDRO: Well, I can just say, continue the work. We need more that are situated here in Germany. I was really fascinated by the details and how rich the history actually was and, well, I assume how detailed the everyday life of a 16th-century villager was depicted, not only the village, but also the Kloster. I forgot the English term for it.

JOSH SAWYER: Abbey.

SANDRO: The Abbey. Right. So how did you research that? And what went into all of the research?

JOSH SAWYER: So some of it came from my pre-existing university education and in getting a history degree. And I had a fair amount of knowledge there. But then I went back to a lot of the old texts that I still had. I still read history books. I tried to expand my knowledge there.

And then, we had three historical consultants in different areas of expertise, Dr. Christopher de Hamel, who's a world-renowned expert in manuscript production. And I talked to him about the end of manuscript production and how an artist might work and what was plausible and what wasn't. And then, Dr. Edmund Kern, who was actually my advisor in college, who knows a lot about the Holy Roman Empire and Austria, more specifically. And he was able to inform on a lot of legal issues and cultural things.

And then, Dr. Winston Black who was a classmate of mine when I went to Lawrence University. And his area of expertise is medieval medicine. And even though we're entering the Renaissance in the 16th century, a lot of the medical practices were still fundamentally medieval for decades and decades until progress or knowledge started to be uncovered by people doing new research.

So that was extremely, extremely helpful. And if you want to see all the things that we referenced, you can go into the bibliography in the credits and see all the works that we referenced.

SANDRO: During your research, what was the funniest and craziest historical fact that you dug up during the research? Or is there anything in the game, now that people have probably played it already, that you would point out people to look at a specific piece?

JOSH SAWYER: Oh, certainly. And it's funny because I talked about it. And there were people who were surprised about it. And there's a very mild spoiler here. So if you're really worried about spoilers, don't listen to the next thing I say. But the character of Martin Bauer in the game is based on a historical figure named Martin Guerre who was a French, or really Basque, man in the 16th century.

And I don't want to get into the details about it. But it's a real story. It's real thing that actually happened. And it's incredible. But it there's a whole record from the jurist that presided at the trial of the man. And there's a French film of it.

The consultant for it, Natalie Zemon Davis, wrote a pretty brisk-reading history book called The Return of Martin Guerre that is, I think, a really, really excellent history book, even if you're not really that into history. And I would highly recommend it because it's hard to believe, but it happened. And it actually happened multiple times.

SANDRO: Well, that's fascinating because that's the one story that I wouldn't have thought that was real. It felt so crazy.

JOSH SAWYER: Absolutely.

SANDRO: But now thinking back about it, totally makes sense, at that time at least. Cool. I've heard that one of the things that really made Pentiment special for me was the sound and the soundtrack. I will be honest. I, sometimes, I love just going into the game and leaving it there as a background sound.

But now I've heard that you're also releasing soundtrack. What can you tell us about the soundtrack? And I can hear it already.

JOSH SAWYER: So the soundtrack was developed primarily by Alchemy which is an early-music ensemble. And I worked with them extensively to develop the tracks that were used for the game. We use them kind of sparingly. We don't have a constant running soundtrack. They're mostly used for dramatic events. But when they happen it's usually for very important things. And it fits the tone of the game very, very well. They did an incredible job.

And then we have an epilogue track by Kristen Hayter, the artist Lingua Ignota, which is really incredible on its own. It's a perfect endpoint to the soundtrack. And we released it on Steam. It's available on many streaming platforms as well. And then we're going to be releasing a double album, vinyl, this year. Exactly when we don't know, but it's coming.

SANDRO: So vinyl, you didn't go as far back as to doing a manuscript of it, like handwritten?

JOSH SAWYER: No, unfortunately.

SANDRO: It's beautiful artwork that we just saw. I can say I loved the soundtrack. And if you have not played Pentiment yet, I definitely recommend download it. You can play it on Xbox and on PC. It's on Steam. You can play it on Game Pass. And if you play it and you just need a background sound, a very nice and calming background sound, I can recommend standing anywhere in the village and letting it play in the background.

[MEDIEVAL MUSIC]

There it is. It helped me stay focused during a very hectic December. Thank you, Josh.

JOSH SAWYER: Thank you for having me.

SANDRO: And any last words? What would you recommend people to look forward to?

JOSH SAWYER: Oh, just the soundtrack is coming. We are going to be making another update with little additions soon for the game. But otherwise, check it out. It's on Game Pass. And I hope people enjoy it.

 

[Infinitron]

Followed by a thread complaining about GDC.

 

[Pound Meat]

Who likes this game so much that they want to hear an elderly soiboi discuss it in person?

 

[HeroMarine]

Who likes this game so much that they want to hear an elderly soiboi discuss it in person?

Probably all that is left of Something Awful.

 

[Infinitron]

GameBanshee review: https://www.gamebanshee.com/reviews/127215-pentiment-review/all-pages.html

Introduction

There's a good chance you know Obsidian Entertainment's Josh Sawyer as the lead designer on Fallout: New Vegas and Pillars of Eternity. But if you've been following the man's career, you might also know him as a bit of a history buff.

As such, it's no surprise that following Microsoft's acquisition of Obsidian, which resulted in greater freedom to experiment with more unorthodox projects, he jumped on the opportunity to direct a very much historical title in Pentiment.

The game itself is described as a narrative-driven adventure focusing on character development, heavily stylized art, and choice-driven storytelling in early 16th-century Bavaria. And with it being the latest Josh Sawyer production, we simply had to check it out.

All the World's a Game

Pentiment, the game's title, is derived from pentimento, a not exactly commonly used word defined as "a reappearance in a painting of an original drawn or painted element which was eventually painted over by the artist."

As far as titles go, this one is surprisingly apt, since the game's themes all revolve around this idea of old and long-since-buried things reemerging on the surface and wreaking all sorts of havoc.

The title makes sense if we look at the game's central decades-spanning mystery surrounding a series of murders in Tassing, a fictional Bavarian town, and the Kiersau abbey neighboring it.

It makes sense when we start delving into Tassing's history which stretches all the way from pre-Roman times and to around the invention of the printing press when the latter starts to gradually push the abbey's renowned book-writing scriptorium into irrelevance.

It also makes sense once we involve ourselves in the lives of Tassing's commoners and get a chance to watch generations change, children grow up and older people pass away or become progressively crankier.

And it even makes sense on a personal level for our protagonist Andreas Maler, initially a young painter with a lot to look forward to in life, but eventually a man with plenty of regrets and things he wouldn't mind forgetting.

When it was originally revealed, Pentiment was positioned as a narrative RPG following in the footsteps of Disco Elysium. It was later rebranded into a narrative adventure. Games like Night in the Woods were mentioned among its inspirations. In fact, at some point, Pentiment makes a not-so-subtle nod to Dear Esther, a title you might know as a fairly prominent example of a "walking simulator."

And so, here we come to the rather tricky hurdle of defining what a game even is and whether Pentiment qualifies. Which is only slightly easier than defining what an RPG is.

It's generally accepted that for a piece of interactive fiction to be considered a game, it needs to have express or implied failure states. Pentiment doesn't go easy on us here, as it seems that even if you don't engage with the game in any way other than mindlessly clicking on its perpetually highlighted hotspots, eventually you'll end up solving its central mystery.

If all you care about is learning whodunit, then chances are you'll be disappointed by the lack of agency in figuring it out. However, if you engage with the game on its own terms, you'll soon realize that it's the journey, not the destination that matters here.

Throughout the game, Andreas, being an artist instead of a detective, will have to balance his crime-solving hobby with his professional duties at the abbey. And with Pentiment being set in the simpler times when people lived in communities and interacted with their neighbors on a regular basis, Andreas will also be building friendships and rivalries with the townsfolk.

And it's precisely those parts where you have plenty of room for failure. Once you become a part of Tassing, you'll be able to influence it in various, oftentimes unpredictable ways. Maybe you'll decide that you want to help out some family that's been kind to you or maybe you'll take it upon yourself to expose some crook. But making that happen can actually be quite tricky.

Moreover, it can be hard to predict how your actions will end up affecting Tassing and its inhabitants in the long run. And with the way the game is structured, you'll get plenty of opportunities to face the consequences of your choices.


On the more gamey side of things, this also results in a system where people remember their interactions with you, so when you have to pass a persuasion check with them, all your previous actions are taken into account along with your character's skills.

And the great thing about this is that you never know if and when you'll need to persuade any particular character, or what this check will be concerning, making it pretty much impossible to metagame your interactions, at least during your first playthrough. And this, in conjunction with the game's frequent autosave system, leads to organic playthroughs where chances are, you won't succeed at everything you do. And this makes Pentiment very much a game.

Another issue that may be preventing some from giving Pentiment a fair shot is its historical nature. It's very easy to look at a historical title and assume it wouldn't be very fun on account of its critical lack of ale-guzzling dwarves or fireball-flinging robe-wearing geriatrics.

A big exception to this in the realm of RPGs is Warhorse Studios' Kingdom Come: Deliverance which takes place in medieval Bohemia circa the 15th century. And it just so happens that the events of Pentiment transpire in roughly the same area about a hundred years in the future. So, in a way, what with these two games both being based on real history, Pentiment can be seen as a sort of continuation of Kingdom Come: Deliverance.

You'll get to see the changes in the way people lived, experience the increasing influence of the Renaissance period, and stumble upon frequent references to the events depicted or mentioned in Warhorse's open-world masterpiece. And that alone may very well be worth the price of admission.

The Devil in the Details

The game itself is presented as this medieval illuminated manuscript. Illuminated in this context refers to all the fancy borders and drawings on the margins, and not the act of shining a torch on a page.

As such, Pentiment's visuals are drawn in the rather odd but instantly recognizable style of those old manuscripts, with the game's action positioned as an illustration on a page. And if that alone wasn't enough, at any moment, you can press a button and pull the camera back to see more of a page with all the silly drawings of lopsided cats our ancestors loved so much.

The game then takes this approach a step further and whenever you encounter an older character, they're drawn to look faded and less detailed than their younger counterparts. And whenever you get into a discussion about some book, like the Aeneid, your characters will step from their own pages and into the pages of the book in question and spend some time there.

Being positioned as a book, Pentiment is separated into three acts. The first act deals with a murder of a nobleman and the ripples it sends through the community. The second takes place seven years later and revolves around the growing rift between Tassing and the abbey. And finally, the third advances the clock a whopping eighteen years and delves into the history of Tassing. The later acts are punctuated with elaborate murders as well, but there they serve more of a supporting role to the bigger story.

The third act also lets you play as a new character, which works more than it doesn't. So even though this change happens a touch too abruptly and could probably have been executed better, it also has some really clever moments where you'll be examining the same objects you did as Andreas, but you'll get a completely different perspective on them. And that balances out some shaky developments and a rather forced resolution of the whole murder plot.

In general, the game's first act is the most expansive and full of options. In fact, at first, it may feel overwhelming with all the characters it keeps introducing and all the places you can visit and investigate. But then, the following acts feel significantly more linear.

But in a way, this also makes thematic sense, because, during the game's early stages, you're basically a stranger in Tassing. You're not familiar with the streets or the people living there. But once you get to know all these people and involve yourself in their lives, Tassing starts to feel smaller, cramped even.


Initially, though, you'll just be playing as a young artist trying to help his friend who's been accused of murder. If you've seen any police procedurals in your life, you probably know that to prove someone's guilt in a murder investigation you need to establish means, motive, and opportunity.

Not having the luxury of dozens of seasons of Law and Order at his disposal, Andreas takes a more cavalier approach to his investigation. He mostly focuses on the means and motive parts of the equation, while opportunity becomes but a distant afterthought for him.

This starts to make sense when you consider that Andreas is not the detective on the case, and he's actually forced to solve the murder before that detective arrives. As such, cross-referencing alibies and establishing corroborating statements is not something you'll get to do.

In fact, while you'll eventually get whoever was orchestrating the murders, you'll never know for sure if the people you accuse are the actual perpetrators. The way the game is set up, several people could have committed the murders, and a major aspect of the game is figuring out if you want to put the heat on whoever you feel is most likely to be the killer or someone whose guilt will affect the community in the least negative way.

This is further complicated by the fact that you can't physically follow all the leads at your disposal. Now, the game doesn't have an actual time limit to prod you along. Instead, each day you have is separated into several segments. And while most of your actions are free, certain legs of your investigation, like unearthing a grave or eavesdropping on a secret conversation, advance the clock several hours.

You usually have a decent number of options in how to spend your time, and so you'll be forced to decide if you want to continue digging in a certain direction, or instead spread your attention between all the suspects and then make an educated guess with what you've got.

Assisting you with all this will be an assortment of skills presented as backgrounds and cultural touchstones. These are generally determined by the places you've lived before your arrival in Tassing and the subjects you've studied over the years.

So, for example, being able to read French, on account of spending some time in France, will help you out in certain situations, but at the same time, it will preclude you from being able to decipher Italian texts.

By the looks of it, there aren't any random rolls or skill checks in the game. You either know something or you don't. And when it comes to persuasion, it's all about your skills as an orator and your previous interactions with the character you're trying to persuade.

Another notable thing about Pentiment is the way it presents its dialogue to you. The game has no voice acting of any kind, but instead, it elevates its text-based conversations to a new level.

This is very much welcome, as for years, RPG dialogues have not merely been stagnating, they've actually been regressing. We went from Planescape: Torment's complex dialogue trees to Mass Effect's dialogue wheel, and then to its simplified version in Fallout 4.

But then, games like Disco Elysium seem to have reminded people that there's still a lot that can be done with plain old text. And Pentiment is a great example of that.

Keeping in tune with the game at large, whenever a character speaks in Pentiment, it's presented as a piece of parchment gradually being filled with writing. You get different fonts depending on who the character you're talking to is. Peasants and other barely literate people have their own simplistic scribbles, educated people write in a more legible way, monks impress you with their gothic font, while people working in the printing press business type out their words instead of writing them.

As that happens, you occasionally get typos that get fixed right before your eyes to simulate less-than-perfect speech. Parchments get covered in ink blots whenever a character is getting really steamed. And if you assume someone's level of education, but then realize you've misjudged them, the font they speak in will change from that point onward. It all absolutely oozes style and gives you a better feel for the characters than any voice acting.


This being an Obsidian title, it also uses the hyperlink system popularized by the likes of Pillars of Eternity and Tyranny. But here it's taken one step further. Whenever you click one of those links, an explanation of some term, person, or point of interest appears on the book's margins.

All of it looks really cool, but when taken in conjunction with the way Pentiment seems to know its own themes, its competent storytelling, and how everything in the game is set up and connected, you can't help but be impressed.

Sure, there's room for discussion about whether Pentiment is an actual game, but if we concede this point, then with the way it's executed, it may very well be the best Obsidian title since at least Fallout: New Vegas.

Technical Information

As we've already established, Pentiment's visuals are quite impressive. And with the way the game is structured, it's hard to decouple the visuals from the UI that's also presented in the same manuscript style. As such, while the menus can be a bit fiddly and slow to navigate, on account of them being stylized as bookmarked parts of a physical journal, just the fact that said journal is not a series of minimalistic transparent windows elevates it way above many of its contemporaries.

The game's audio is also a joy to listen to, be it the soundtrack, the background noises, or the sounds of a quill writing the game's dialogue. Now, by the looks of it, not everyone enjoyed the latter, and as a result, following a recent patch, you can now make the dialogue appear instantaneously.

In fact, the game has a decent number of accessibility options that pretty much everyone can enjoy, like scalable text size. The weird thing about Pentiment's options menu is that you can only access certain options once you've started a game. Another annoyance in that area is a lack of graphics options. You get a vague visual quality slider and that's it. And, this being a Unity Engine game, it's important to point out that there doesn't seem to be any way to enable VSync or limit the game's FPS number. Thankfully, Pentiment doesn't seem to suffer from Unity's propensity to turn your GPU into a jet engine, but it still would've been nice to have those options.

Another frequent Unity quirk - game saves taking forever - doesn't seem to be present here, and perhaps that's why you only get autosaves that happen during scene transitions and no quick or manual saves.

Being originally developed as an Xbox Game Pass title, Pentiment was designed with a controller in mind, and as a result of that the default keyboard and mouse control scheme is far from ideal. When keys like [ and ] see prominent use in your game, you must know you've messed up. Thankfully, the abovementioned patch also added a new option that allows you to navigate the menus using the mouse, and that makes things significantly more pleasant.

Finally, the game seems to be fairly well-polished and the only bugs worth mentioning include a rare couple of game logic lapses where characters go through certain conversations twice.

Conclusion

With its stylish presentation, tight and competently told story, and numerous advancements in the realm of video game dialogue, you would be remiss not to play Pentiment purely on account of it lacking the usual trappings of an RPG.

If you like historical settings, murder mysteries, and touching personal stories, then Pentiment is definitely a game for you regardless of how you want to classify it.

 

[hivemind]

please stop posting these infi

it's honestly kidna sad

 

[Dadd]

Someone should tell him it's a good idea to reach out to art history professors to include this game in freshmen curricula to make them purchase and play this game for interactive education on illuminated manuscripts and stuff. It'll be like Game Pass.

 

[SunKing]

Yo when is the Pentiment dlc coming out?

 

[KVVRR]

Yo when is the Pentiment dlc coming out?

What would a DLC even be about? The story wraps up just about everything by the end of it.

 

[IHaveHugeNick]

New mystery of course: one of townsfolk accidently killed by a sherrif, causing a wave of mostly peacuful protests all across Bavaria.

 

[Butter]

Horse armor.

 

[Feyd Rautha]

 

[HeroMarine]

I'm able to defend myself against assertions made up ex nihilo.

 

[Pound Meat]

I'm able to defend myself against assertions made up ex nihilo.

Are you still Brazilian?

 

[Infinitron]

Josh gets a shoutout from his alma mater:

 

[Diggfinger]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=twLDXGUlzWY&t=3005s

This interview is interesting for J. Sawyer fans.

- 5 min: personal take on Sawyer's life from the period before and after Deadfire's release link. Talks about a huge break-up happening before Deadfire released, which lasted until after it shipped. That coupled with the game's initial failure sales wise, brought about a long spout of depression and thoughts about what he even wanted to do as a possible next game
- 36min: thoughts on Pentiment, and how its the closest Sawyer comes to 'telling a game about himself'. Compares Andreas' struggles as an artist for hire, with the struggles of launching a Kickstarter game

 

[Alienman]

Jesus, that background pic. Somehow I kinda expected that, being Sawyer and all.

 

[mediocrepoet]

- 5 min: personal take on Sawyer's life from the period before and after Deadfire's release link. Talks about a huge break-up happening before Deadfire released, which lasted until after it shipped.

Who was the lucky guy?

 

[Quillon]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=twLDXGUlzWY&t=3005s

This interview is interesting for J. Sawyer fans.

- 5 min: personal take on Sawyer's life from the period before and after Deadfire's release link. Talks about a huge break-up happening before Deadfire released, which lasted until after it shipped. That coupled with the game's initial failure sales wise, brought about a long spout of depression and thoughts about what he even wanted to do as a possible next game
- 36min: thoughts on Pentiment, and how its the closest Sawyer comes to 'telling a game about himself'. Compares Andreas' struggles as an artist for hire, with the struggles of launching a Kickstarter game

checked out their previous pod with sawya: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z4Zb9euxmjs

can't stop my eyes' rolling... especially his KCD takes

 

[Infinitron]

https://www.gamedeveloper.com/art/deep-dive-the-art-of-pentiment

Deep Dive: Behind the evocative medieval manuscript art of Pentiment​

"It's been so exciting to play in the space between printmaking and games and where they can visually overlap."

Game Developer Deep Dives are an ongoing series with the goal of shedding light on specific design, art, or technical features within a video game in order to show how seemingly simple, fundamental design decisions aren’t really that simple at all.


Earlier installments cover topics such as how art director Olivier Latouche reimagined the art direction of Foundation, how the creator of the RPG Roadwarden designed its narrative for impact and variance, and how the papercraft-based aesthetic of Paper Cut Mansion came together with the developer calls the Reverse UV method.

In this edition, art director Hannah Kennedy explains the art pipeline of Pentiment and the team's approach to various visual challenges during development.

I’m Hannah Kennedy, art director of Pentiment, a 16th-century narrative adventure game by Obsidian. Our game is set in Upper Bavaria, where you play as Andreas Maler, a journeyman artist that gets caught up in a series of murders and scandals in Kiersau Abbey and the town of Tassing over the course of 25 years.

The concept for Pentiment has been a passion project of game director Josh Sawyer’s for a long time, though his vision of how it might look has changed a lot since its inception. Other recent narrative adventure games like Night in the Woods, Oxenfree, and Mutazione set the precedent that a rich narrative experience could be crafted in a less traditional RPG format, and that opened up the option to really experiment with the art style of the game. While our game has RPG and mystery aspects to the gameplay, the core of the game’s identity has always been focused on the impact of the story experience and a setting/environment founded in history that incorporates the visual language of real art from this time into the style of the game itself.


When Josh initially approached me with the pitch that this would be a 2D game, potentially with an art style evoking European block prints, I was thrilled. As a concept artist coming from an illustration background, it’s been so exciting to play in the space between printmaking and games and where they can visually overlap.

Our team was small and focused (around 13 developers at peak production) so everyone adjusted to a dynamic where being flexible and able to iterate quickly was a big advantage. My role on the team was focused on defining the visual language of the game and creating a base of assets for the rest of the team to reference, plus ongoing collaboration with our animation team and supporting concept artists during production. With a team this size, most of us were able to communicate directly with each other, and each person learned to fill the spaces where we had a need but were missing a dedicated team member to perform that role. Working on something experimental is challenging because there isn’t a blueprint for how things should proceed, but that is also extremely freeing! I’ll share some examples of these highs and lows and how they impacted the final look of the game.

Art Follows Story or Story Follows Art?​

The broad narrative vision of Pentiment was anchored early. We had specific moments in the story and cinematic touchstones in mind, but how they connected narratively and how they integrated with the gameplay was unclear for a lot of development. On a larger team, there may be more budget for the narrative team to have dedicated pre-production time to lock down more story specifics before art gets involved with creating specific assets, but on a team this size, both narrative and art had to be moving forward on these things at the same time.

Some characters we knew early to be the main cast (Andreas, Caspar, Magdalene, Piero), and so we worked on them first to set the standard for the rest. Otherwise, the art team would be provided with a short bio explaining their age and build, who they are related to within the town and a brief description of their personality. Beyond that, we didn’t necessarily know much about what else they would be doing in the story, how much screen time they’d get, and if they were going to be significant to the plot or just present as set dressing to make Tassing feel more alive.

Our final (rigged) character count in-game is 157. We couldn’t afford to work every character up to the finish standards of the main cast until we knew how much they’d be featured… which we couldn’t know until the narrative had a complete pass. Until then, the concept team had to work from simple descriptions on a first pass with no emotions or specific person gestures and send them to animation for rigging. Since all our facial emotions are hand-drawn for each character and expression, we needed to budget that much later once we knew more specific info about story moments for each character.

Emotion states for various characters.

This situation created a unique opportunity for the narrative team to use the in-progress art of characters to inform a character's tone and personality before all (or sometimes any) of their dialogue had been written. It was fun to see this circular relationship between the art and narrative teams. One of the risks of this is that we’d get the character’s vibe totally wrong for their final role in the game and need to revisit the design later. My first pass of Father Thomas’s design is a great example. I understood from his bio out of context that he needed to have a trustworthy look and feel more open and “for the people” than the abbot. I didn’t fully realize his significance to the overall story, and that he’d also need to be stubborn and intimidating in moments where he felt the church was being challenged. This is a great example of the story developing further and impacting the character designs.

First pass (left) vs. final design (right) of Father Thomas.
Inversely, there were narrative moments that began as a small artistic detail included in a character design (e.g., Andreas and Bert’s hats moving between characters over time) which ended up evolving into their own little conversations and cutscenes.

A hat thief.

Navigating the Page​

Another challenge we encountered early was how to make a world that feels expansive and that you can really explore, where navigation is also clear to understand and feels good. Again, the priority of the scene art is to serve the story and mood of the world, this isn’t a puzzle or combat game. Without those systems to define the visual structure of a scene, our first tests mimic the layouts of how a scene looks in a book.

An early scene art test, featuring characters from Name of the Rose.
In order to pull off the extreme stylistic flattening that we wanted, we decided early that restricting player movement to tracks was the right call. It provided more control over the camera framing in different scenes and also allowed us to play around with depth without getting too spatially confusing. However, tracks can end up being very time-consuming to walk along, and we were concerned by how much we would need to populate along a path in order to not make the experience incredibly boring. There are also angles that end up being particularly difficult to show clearly, like walking “up” into a scene to reach something further away. In the historical woodcuts we were referencing, people are almost always shown in front or ¾ view. We considered scaling the characters to represent distance from the camera to solve this, but I didn’t like how this would vary the weight of the character detail size against the fixed world around them, and just ended up avoiding paths laid out in that way entirely.

Terentius, Comedies. Strasbourg: Johann Grüninger, 1 November 1496
Another thing we noticed early was that it was easy to become confused by how different scenes connect to each other, especially inside the abbey building. You can’t rotate the camera around in 2D space in order to get your bearings, so to help make transitioning between scenes feel more natural, we chose to almost always face the camera orientation to “north” in our world. This eased some of the disconnects between the in-game cardinal directions and stage left vs. stage right on the camera.

The map of outer Tassing.
These ended up being the “level design” factors we needed to consider when creating scenes in Pentiment, but the hand-drawn style of the final art was way too time-consuming to revise repeatedly in response to story and design changes. We needed to work out a way to greybox that would still feel bespoke for each scene without taking too much time. The compromise was implementing simple, uncolored roughs of each scene and playing with them in-game as we worked out the quest structures and story. By prototype, we had a handful of scenes that were visually finished, but the majority were still rough sketch versions.

Actual prototype gameplay.
Being this informal and flexible about our development did sometimes feel like we were taking a big risk. It made it take a lot longer to understand what the time cost of a finished scene was and to budget in the final schedule accordingly, but the benefits outweighed those risks. I believe we would not have been able to cover the breadth of content we did had we been more structured and precious about our pipeline too early with such a small team. I’m really proud of what everyone was able to pull together for the final game, and it’s been so exciting to finally see players exploring the world we brought to life in Pentiment.

 

[CyberWhale]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=twLDXGUlzWY&t=3005s

This interview is interesting for J. Sawyer fans.

- 5 min: personal take on Sawyer's life from the period before and after Deadfire's release link. Talks about a huge break-up happening before Deadfire released, which lasted until after it shipped. That coupled with the game's initial failure sales wise, brought about a long spout of depression and thoughts about what he even wanted to do as a possible next game
- 36min: thoughts on Pentiment, and how its the closest Sawyer comes to 'telling a game about himself'. Compares Andreas' struggles as an artist for hire, with the struggles of launching a Kickstarter game

checked out their previous pod with sawya: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z4Zb9euxmjs

can't stop my eyes' rolling... especially his KCD takes

What is wrong with Amerikwan libruls? I mean these people are completely insane.

 

[Tyranicon]

Josh gets a shoutout from his alma mater:

Man, that article was one sloppily written ad for the school.

History, theater, storytelling, and gaming—all nurtured during Sawyer’s time as an undergraduate at Lawrence University in the late 1990s

Lawrentians deepen the experience...​

Sawyer's Lawrence influence..​

While Sawyer has tapped into his Lawrence education many times...

And especially

Lawrence expertise helps fuel historical role-playing game drawing rave reviews

Oh shit guys, here we go again.

Also interesting to note, J-Saw's major was history apparently.

 

[BlackheartXIII]

Josh major was theater history with a minor in preforming arts, moreover i see that the Lawrence article omitted Josh's GPA (2.6). Sawyer does mentioned in numerus interviews that he wanted to appliy
to Edmund Kern's class on magic in medieval history, and Kern's refused due to his (Sawyer's) bad scores.