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

[Skdursh]

So... is this a game?

Is Phoenix Wright Ace Attorney a "game"?

 

[Gahbreeil]

Watch this movie first - https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0091605/

If you like it, play Pentiment for more. If you like it, don't bother. If you don't, don't play Pentiment.

 

[Zed Duke of Banville]

Watch this movie first - https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0091605/

If you like it, play Pentiment for more. If you like it, don't bother. If you don't, don't play Pentiment.

Read this book first:

Then don't bother with Pentiment.

 

[Alex]

Even better, don't bother with either!

 

[The_Mask]

 

[Lhynn]

Hadnt watched zero punctuation in a long time. Its great to see just how much the format has changed and evolved during the years, its become nearly unrecognizable to tell the truth.

It is telling how well Yahtzee nailed sawyers personality and game design philosophy by just playing this garbage. Pretentious, misguided, boring, with the depth of a puddle, bringing nothing new to the table while failing to engage in any meaningful way.

 

[Jenkem]

Whatever was left of Sawyer's reputation is FINISHED after this scathing review from Ben "Yahtzee" Croshaw!

editor's note: I have not watched the review in question

 

[turkishronin]

Is this visual novel about sawyer feeling old

 

[turkishronin]

A line of dialogue only an American could write. Some of the most left-leaning antiracist Europeans lose their fucking minds when you bring up the subject of gypsies. A people with one of the absolute worst cultures.

As an aside, here's a pretty miserable story of what happens when a bleeding heart American lefty is exposed to Romani culture: https://www.peterdavid.net/2010/07/23/romania-travelogue-part-3/

In my country there were cases where Gypsies families intentionally crippled their own little children to get more begging money. It's baffling how Americans think they were just hated because they're brown

 

[Dadd]

A line of dialogue only an American could write. Some of the most left-leaning antiracist Europeans lose their fucking minds when you bring up the subject of gypsies. A people with one of the absolute worst cultures.

As an aside, here's a pretty miserable story of what happens when a bleeding heart American lefty is exposed to Romani culture: https://www.peterdavid.net/2010/07/23/romania-travelogue-part-3/

In my country there were cases where Gypsies families intentionally crippled their own little children to get more begging money. It's baffling how Americans think they were just hated because they're brown

It's imperial conditioning. They need to see the rest of the world as a problem to solve.

 

[CyberWhale]

In my country there were cases where Gypsies families intentionally crippled their own little children to get more begging money. It's baffling how Americans think they were just hated because they're brown

Complaining they are discriminated when it comes to being employed, only to steal anything that isn't nailed down the first day on the job. Or getting free housing only to rip it apart, sell it as raw materials and then complain about shitty living conditions because they've created a shanty town beside it.

 

[Beastro]

Hadnt watched zero punctuation in a long time. Its great to see just how much the format has changed and evolved during the years, its become nearly unrecognizable to tell the truth.

Dude got married and is a father now. It wasn't long ago the guy sneered at the idea of marriage and rolled his eyes at his brother for being a breeder and having children.

He's become quite nearly unrecognizable now himself.

 

[Infinitron]

https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/how-obsidian-entertainment-resurrected-dead-fonts-for-pentiment

How Obsidian Entertainment resurrected dead fonts for Pentiment​

Design director Josh Sawyer tells us no feature took as much time as the text rendering



It’s probably not a huge surprise to say that Pentiment, Obsidian Entertainment’s visually intriguing mystery set in 16th century Bavaria, required a lot of historical research during development. What may surprise you, however, is how deep these historical details run throughout Pentinment’s DNA, right down the game’s text fonts. Obsidian design director Josh Sawyer told me all about how the team revived long-dead historical fonts, to give them a new life in a modern format.

Pentiment puts you in the shoes of Andreas Maler, a journeyman artist working in an abbey in Tassing, Bavaria. His work as an artist is quickly waylaid when Maler finds himself tasked with finding the killer behind a shocking murder that rocks the town, and, like any good would-be detective, the player finds themselves interviewing the locals to get to the bottom of the mystery. Almost everyone, it turns out, has a secret. In the absence of voice acting, Pentiment instead relies on its fonts to help the player to get an understanding of both who its cast of characters are, and how they feel about the world around them.

The development team, in partnership with typeface experts Lettermatic, created six different fonts, which they allocated to characters depending on their social status and level of education. From the start Sawyer knew he wanted Pentiment’s fonts to be as historically accurate as possible, and while other games certainly pay attention to their font choices, few dedicate as many resources to them as Obsidian did with Pentiment. “It’s not an exaggeration to say that no feature set took as much time from all departments as the text rendering,” Sawyer notes. “They’re all custom fonts, many of which were created by handwriting them out, using pens that were physically like the pens that would have been used at the time.”

“It’s not an exaggeration to say that no feature set took as much time from all departments as the text rendering.”

The earliest days of the game’s development were informed by his desire to have fonts that recreated the physical act of writing, though he hadn’t quite planned on the sheer number of custom fonts in the game. That number was forced to expand alongside the game’s cast of characters. In its earliest prototypes, the game’s world was largely confined to the Abbey, populated by the monks and nuns, for whom the gothic textura font seemed like a natural fit.


“As we went out into the village, I thought we should have a more natural cursive script,” says Sawyer. “But when the cursive script was being used by the peasantry, it felt too fancy and refined. It didn’t really look appropriate, we needed a different font for the peasants. These people are barely literate, so let’s see if we can derive a peasant hand from the cursive script. Something that is less refined, but still readable - so there’s a clear distinction where the player goes ‘oh, this is a person who barely knows their letters.’”

That use of font choices to communicate information about a character goes beyond simple class distinctions. A character's font will change as the player learns more information about them, reflecting Andreas’ changing opinion of that person. It was a feature that, as Sawyer himself admits, initially confused players during the testing stage, when a character would suddenly shift from one front to another.


For instance, when the player encounters Baron Lorenz early in the game, he speaks in cursive script as Andreas perceives him as a wealthy man who presumably knows how to read and write. However, the more Andreas talks to the Baron, he comes to realise that he is extremely well educated - and is well-read in many of the same topics as Andreas himself. As such, Lorenz’s font shifts to the same one Andreas uses, presenting the two characters on an equal intellectual playing field. “The more we used fonts to show how characters changed, or how Andreas’ perspective on them changed, the more people picked up on it,” says Sawyer. “I was really glad we didn’t need to have an aside where we said: ‘Andreas now thinks this!’ People just understood what it meant.”

Choosing the right fonts was just one hurdle to clear, however. Another challenge for the team at Obsidian were the text animations. The dialogue in Pentiment appears as if it’s being written before the player’s eyes, complete with spelling mistakes and ink splatters. It’s an effective technique in action, slowly drawing the player’s focus onto each and every line. When married with the custom fonts, however, it also turned out to be a huge amount of work.


The team spent a “solid month and a half” in conversations with Lettermatic’s Riley Cran, trying to determine if they should automate the process of creating the stroke masks - which determines how the individual strokes and letters come in during the game. “I was sceptical,” Sawyer adds, “and the more we talked about it the more complicated it seemed. We already knew from prototyping that we could do it by hand, so that’s what we decided to do. So for every single glyph that you see in the game, a human being created a stroke mask for every single stroke in that character. It was a huge amount of labour.”

The variety of fonts meant the team needed a variety of animation styles for them - with both handwritten and printed scripts in the game, each of which appear in their own unique ways. The more artistic Humanist scripts first appear as an outline, as in reality they would have been silver pointed in prior to inking them.

Animating the cursive scripts, however, presented a unique challenge. Given the nature of cursive writing, they could hardly have one letter appear at a time - the whole point is to keep continuous motion with the pen, after all. But the Obsidian team not only found a way to animate their cursive font, but did so in a way that recreated the physicality of writing with ink itself. At the start of a sentence, the game overloads the font, causing the ink to bleed past the edges. As the writing continues, the ink thins until it becomes a normal letter form, gradually becoming semi transparent as it starts to run out. That leads to a slight pause, as if the writer is dipping their pen back into the ink, before the font becomes overloaded again.

“When you look at it written out, you have that sense of the writer running out of ink. We even have the splatter effects to show when a character is getting angry,” says Sawyer. “We really wanted to create the sense of physicality, creating the sense of a human being actually doing this and the labour that’s involved in it.”

Both in the fonts and in the wider game itself, the development team went to great efforts to keep Pentiment as historically accurate as possible. Still, that’s not to say that they weren’t forced to make a few compromises. While the game has an accessibility mode that further simplifies the fonts, even the unaltered version of the game has made some alterations to the more fiddly ones. Some fonts required more work than others, with Sawyer paying particular attention to the print typeface Druckeryn, based on the work of French engraver Nicholas Jensen: “What I think is really striking is that you can go back to his original letter forms, and they're totally readable. It’s unbelievable how clear it is, and that it survived for hundreds of years and is still totally fine”

The same cannot be said, however, for fonts such as Fraktur, which became popular in Germany during this era. “Whether or not you know German,” adds Sawyer, “that font is difficult to read today.” As a remedy, Obsidian worked together with Lettermatic to take what was characteristic and stylish about some of the more problematic fonts in order to recreate a version of them that stayed as loyal as possible to the originals, while ensuring they were readable for players. So the dagger-form tails on Fs in the cursive scripts remained, while the illegible capital letters in the monastic scripts were updated to modern standards.


“We essentially just Romanised them to make them work for a modern eye,” Sawyer explains. “But we retained the structural components, keeping to the spirit of the scripts. I think any book historian who looks is going to see that we made compromises, because they know it's really hard to read. But if the spirit is there, and it's conveying what we want it to, then we make compromises to just make it readable, because that's obviously very important.”

Those compromises certainly seem to have paid off. While much of Pentiment’s story is set against the backdrop of the advent of the printing press marking an end to the artistic lettering work seen in Kiersau Abbey. Technological advances may have left behind the work of people like Andreas, but I like to think he’d be happy to see it revived by them again - Albeit in an unexpected fashion.

 

[turkishronin]

They could spend all that effort making a good game

 

[gurugeorge]

https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/how-obsidian-entertainment-resurrected-dead-fonts-for-pentiment

How Obsidian Entertainment resurrected dead fonts for Pentiment​

Design director Josh Sawyer tells us no feature took as much time as the text rendering



It’s probably not a huge surprise to say that Pentiment, Obsidian Entertainment’s visually intriguing mystery set in 16th century Bavaria, required a lot of historical research during development. What may surprise you, however, is how deep these historical details run throughout Pentinment’s DNA, right down the game’s text fonts. Obsidian design director Josh Sawyer told me all about how the team revived long-dead historical fonts, to give them a new life in a modern format.

Pentiment puts you in the shoes of Andreas Maler, a journeyman artist working in an abbey in Tassing, Bavaria. His work as an artist is quickly waylaid when Maler finds himself tasked with finding the killer behind a shocking murder that rocks the town, and, like any good would-be detective, the player finds themselves interviewing the locals to get to the bottom of the mystery. Almost everyone, it turns out, has a secret. In the absence of voice acting, Pentiment instead relies on its fonts to help the player to get an understanding of both who its cast of characters are, and how they feel about the world around them.

The development team, in partnership with typeface experts Lettermatic, created six different fonts, which they allocated to characters depending on their social status and level of education. From the start Sawyer knew he wanted Pentiment’s fonts to be as historically accurate as possible, and while other games certainly pay attention to their font choices, few dedicate as many resources to them as Obsidian did with Pentiment. “It’s not an exaggeration to say that no feature set took as much time from all departments as the text rendering,” Sawyer notes. “They’re all custom fonts, many of which were created by handwriting them out, using pens that were physically like the pens that would have been used at the time.”

“It’s not an exaggeration to say that no feature set took as much time from all departments as the text rendering.”

The earliest days of the game’s development were informed by his desire to have fonts that recreated the physical act of writing, though he hadn’t quite planned on the sheer number of custom fonts in the game. That number was forced to expand alongside the game’s cast of characters. In its earliest prototypes, the game’s world was largely confined to the Abbey, populated by the monks and nuns, for whom the gothic textura font seemed like a natural fit.


“As we went out into the village, I thought we should have a more natural cursive script,” says Sawyer. “But when the cursive script was being used by the peasantry, it felt too fancy and refined. It didn’t really look appropriate, we needed a different font for the peasants. These people are barely literate, so let’s see if we can derive a peasant hand from the cursive script. Something that is less refined, but still readable - so there’s a clear distinction where the player goes ‘oh, this is a person who barely knows their letters.’”

That use of font choices to communicate information about a character goes beyond simple class distinctions. A character's font will change as the player learns more information about them, reflecting Andreas’ changing opinion of that person. It was a feature that, as Sawyer himself admits, initially confused players during the testing stage, when a character would suddenly shift from one front to another.


For instance, when the player encounters Baron Lorenz early in the game, he speaks in cursive script as Andreas perceives him as a wealthy man who presumably knows how to read and write. However, the more Andreas talks to the Baron, he comes to realise that he is extremely well educated - and is well-read in many of the same topics as Andreas himself. As such, Lorenz’s font shifts to the same one Andreas uses, presenting the two characters on an equal intellectual playing field. “The more we used fonts to show how characters changed, or how Andreas’ perspective on them changed, the more people picked up on it,” says Sawyer. “I was really glad we didn’t need to have an aside where we said: ‘Andreas now thinks this!’ People just understood what it meant.”

Choosing the right fonts was just one hurdle to clear, however. Another challenge for the team at Obsidian were the text animations. The dialogue in Pentiment appears as if it’s being written before the player’s eyes, complete with spelling mistakes and ink splatters. It’s an effective technique in action, slowly drawing the player’s focus onto each and every line. When married with the custom fonts, however, it also turned out to be a huge amount of work.


The team spent a “solid month and a half” in conversations with Lettermatic’s Riley Cran, trying to determine if they should automate the process of creating the stroke masks - which determines how the individual strokes and letters come in during the game. “I was sceptical,” Sawyer adds, “and the more we talked about it the more complicated it seemed. We already knew from prototyping that we could do it by hand, so that’s what we decided to do. So for every single glyph that you see in the game, a human being created a stroke mask for every single stroke in that character. It was a huge amount of labour.”

The variety of fonts meant the team needed a variety of animation styles for them - with both handwritten and printed scripts in the game, each of which appear in their own unique ways. The more artistic Humanist scripts first appear as an outline, as in reality they would have been silver pointed in prior to inking them.

Animating the cursive scripts, however, presented a unique challenge. Given the nature of cursive writing, they could hardly have one letter appear at a time - the whole point is to keep continuous motion with the pen, after all. But the Obsidian team not only found a way to animate their cursive font, but did so in a way that recreated the physicality of writing with ink itself. At the start of a sentence, the game overloads the font, causing the ink to bleed past the edges. As the writing continues, the ink thins until it becomes a normal letter form, gradually becoming semi transparent as it starts to run out. That leads to a slight pause, as if the writer is dipping their pen back into the ink, before the font becomes overloaded again.

“When you look at it written out, you have that sense of the writer running out of ink. We even have the splatter effects to show when a character is getting angry,” says Sawyer. “We really wanted to create the sense of physicality, creating the sense of a human being actually doing this and the labour that’s involved in it.”

Both in the fonts and in the wider game itself, the development team went to great efforts to keep Pentiment as historically accurate as possible. Still, that’s not to say that they weren’t forced to make a few compromises. While the game has an accessibility mode that further simplifies the fonts, even the unaltered version of the game has made some alterations to the more fiddly ones. Some fonts required more work than others, with Sawyer paying particular attention to the print typeface Druckeryn, based on the work of French engraver Nicholas Jensen: “What I think is really striking is that you can go back to his original letter forms, and they're totally readable. It’s unbelievable how clear it is, and that it survived for hundreds of years and is still totally fine”

The same cannot be said, however, for fonts such as Fraktur, which became popular in Germany during this era. “Whether or not you know German,” adds Sawyer, “that font is difficult to read today.” As a remedy, Obsidian worked together with Lettermatic to take what was characteristic and stylish about some of the more problematic fonts in order to recreate a version of them that stayed as loyal as possible to the originals, while ensuring they were readable for players. So the dagger-form tails on Fs in the cursive scripts remained, while the illegible capital letters in the monastic scripts were updated to modern standards.


“We essentially just Romanised them to make them work for a modern eye,” Sawyer explains. “But we retained the structural components, keeping to the spirit of the scripts. I think any book historian who looks is going to see that we made compromises, because they know it's really hard to read. But if the spirit is there, and it's conveying what we want it to, then we make compromises to just make it readable, because that's obviously very important.”

Those compromises certainly seem to have paid off. While much of Pentiment’s story is set against the backdrop of the advent of the printing press marking an end to the artistic lettering work seen in Kiersau Abbey. Technological advances may have left behind the work of people like Andreas, but I like to think he’d be happy to see it revived by them again - Albeit in an unexpected fashion.

Very cool. But (just musing) I always wonder with this sort of thing - what seems odd and curiously characteristic to us would have looked normal to people then.

It's like the bourgeois attitude to nature as a place of blank rest from the densely-packed symbolic life of culture - whereas for people in the distant past, nature would have been as brightly lit with signs as Times Square, many of them representing something dangerous and chaotic, to be kept at bay.

The idea is to put you in the frame of mind of "being there" in the past time, but you can never perceive that past time the way the people perceived it then, in fact, paradoxically, the closest you can come is just perceiving your present time however you perceive it (as normal, everyday, etc.). Which I suppose has been the point with some set designs and settings for modern productions of old plays.

 

[Konjad]

In my country there were cases where Gypsies families intentionally crippled their own little children to get more begging money. It's baffling how Americans think they were just hated because they're brown

Complaining they are discriminated when it comes to being employed, only to steal anything that isn't nailed down the first day on the job. Or getting free housing only to rip it apart, sell it as raw materials and then complain about shitty living conditions because they've created a shanty town beside it.

Yeah, when I was a kid living in a small town a building right next to mine was given to a (large) gypsy family by that town. Renovated and furnished. It wasn't a villa, but it was quite a decent and pretty multi-family tenement(?) or whatever it's called.

So gypsies moved in. Soon afterwards the thievery increased all around. Before it wasn't an issue.

I saw them begging a few times (walking door to door in neighboring buildings), they didn't work, I saw adults sitting in front of the building most of the day, talking, drinking etc.

They lived there only a few years, then left the building in a completely destroyed state so much that it seems it was apparently not worth renovating by the town again, so it's left abandoned an in ruin since about 15-20 years ago up to this day.

 

[Matalarata]

He's (Yahtzee) become quite nearly unrecognizable now himself.

He released a game on Steam in 2015. A survival horror roguelite which is (imo) one of the best Lovecraftian titles currently available:

Spoiler

The Roguelite elements makes it a bit too easy, once you played through a few times. That said, it's the only real criticism I can provide. There are loads of good ideas in this one, if you enjoy the genre and can stomach the low production value. Very well made gameplay loop and resource management. You must use deducition and hints actively, first to identify the Outer God that is about to enter our world and the dynamics linking it to the other two, as one of them is the antagonist you need to invoke to stop ITZ from happening. Even the magic system follows similar rules, you get fragments of spells and must use deduction and/or trial and error to ascertain each spell effect and its uses.

It's also pretty cheap and frequently on sale, anyone vaguely interested should def check it.

 

[Fedora Master]

Soyer shown up by some randos:
https://af.gog.com/game/inkulinati?as=1649904300

 

[Hercule Parrot]

Randos shown up by Sawyer would be newsworthy; Soyer shown up by some randos is just another day in his life.

 

[BlackheartXIII]

Well, Yaza games are also credited in Pentiment's special thanks section:

Also: https://nitter.net/jesawyer/status/1560314218028470272#m

I think that during Pentiment's pre production Sawyer noticed Inkulinati manuscript style and revamped pentiment's art direction accordingly, therefore Josh's promotion of Inkulinati might be an attempt to redeem his "creative theft". although his behavior is positively approved by yaza game dev (https://nitter.net/YazaGames/status/1560509149502328833#m):

Yaza Games | Inkulinati@YazaGames
19 Aug 2022
Replying to @jesawyer
Thanks for your support Josh, and we mean that from the bottom of our hearts. Ever since Digital Dragons from years ago you've always helped us with kind words, spreading info about our game, and just being a top person. The industry needs more people like you. Don't ever change

Aug 19, 2022 · 6:09 AM UTC · Twitter Web App

The hypothesis of Josh's motives to promote Inkulinati are based on my observation of Josh's address the game through social media/ streams, i think it's worth investigating.

 

[Nano]

Sawyer does mentioned in numerus interviews that he wanted to applied to Edmund Kern's class on magic in medieval history, and Kern's refused due to his (Sawyer's) bad scores.

This him?

 

[Gahbreeil]

"Our favourite hero", pretty pretentious. Where did he learn medieval magic?

 

[rojay]

It's seems that Josh went to a conference tour/vacation in Europe: an FIS games summits conference in Galway, Ireland in 23/2 and an Dstar conference in Padua, Italy in 24-26/2, I wonder if Microsoft foot his traveling bills.

An intreasting note, Josh's contact in Dstar, Giulia Zamboni is credited in Pentiment as an Italian hand gesture consultant.

That's creepy specific information about a guy you dislike so much.

Man, this fucking website sometimes.

 

[Konjad]

I'm trying to play it but it's tl;dr trash with nothing interesting happening, and I feel like choices don't really matter. I'm nor far though, does it get better later? I have a hard time trying to play more to get to better parts, the beginning is extremely tedious.

 

[NJClaw]

I finally played this and I enjoyed it well enough, to the point that I wouldn't mind them doing again something similar in the future.

I'm usually fine with whatever genre a developer decides to slap on a game (I have no problem calling Disco Elysium an RPG), but saying this is an adventure game almost makes me uncomfortable. This is a walking simulator (which usually get advertised as "adventure games", I guess) where you can marginally affect small details of the story through your actions. There isn't any gameplay to speak of: you decide which leads to follow and which people to talk to, and then decide what to do with what you learnt. Your character's background mainly affects the flavor of dialogue choices (sometimes giving you modifiers to the success or failure of certain interactions) and unlocks one or two "big" actions related to your fields of expertise, which you may very well not even see since often they're only available IF you decide to follow a specific lead AND make specific dialogue choices.

Saying anything more about the gameplay or anything at all about the plot would just spoil an already short game and wouldn't serve any real purpose. If you're fine with walking simulators and the idea of solving a murder mystery in a Bavarian village in the 16th century intrigues you, this game is for you. Otherwise, it's not.