“Good writing” is a phrase that gets used quite often, and it can mean a lot of different things. Is good writing a good story? An unguessable twist? Fancy prose or deliberate themes? I’m sure I’ve used it at some point when what I meant to say is really: “lots of long words I don’t completely understand.”
Still, Pentiment has good writing – wonderful writing, actually – and in this case I do know what it means. This game’s writing is witty, it has tempo and timing, it is genuinely, wickedly funny. It is also, above all, natural – something that so often seems impossible in games, things where you’re so often controlling a character impulsively, pulling their puppet strings on a whim. How do you write around that? Pentiment, Obsidian’s surprise new thing that I am judging from an admittedly quite brief hands-on at Gamescom, seems to manage it remarkably well.
Things begin in Pentiment with you choosing a background, in a fairly typical, tabletop RPG-inspired way but with a nicely in-theme twist, whereby you play as a semi-educated bloke with a choice of studies and interests. I chose to have studied Logic and dropped out halfway through Theology, with an interest in the Occult, a mediaeval gap year to Flanders and a bit of a taste for Hedonism (although I was tempted to be a Rapscallion who liked scampering about picking fights and generally being a peevish little imp, like a kind of Dark Age Bart Simpson. Hedonism ultimately just felt like it suited a dropout Theologian a little better.)
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