Pentiment: The Manuscript as Murder Mystery

The first time a peasant speaks in Pentiment, the words appear in a rough, uneven hand, scratched across the page as if by someone who learned letters late and under duress. When a monk speaks, you get blackletter — dense, formal, expensive-looking. When a humanist scholar speaks, the script is clean and Italian and self-satisfied. Nobody explains this. The game simply hands you a different typeface per mouth and lets you work out that you are reading class, education and self-image directly off the shape of the letters.

That’s the game. Obsidian shipped it on 15 November 2022 on Xbox and PC — day one on Game Pass, which is how most people found it — and brought it to Switch, PS4 and PS5 in February 2024. Josh Sawyer directed it, which is to say the man who made Fallout: New Vegas and Pillars of Eternity spent his studio-earned favour on a 2D adventure game about a journeyman artist in sixteenth-century Bavaria. It’s the best thing his studio has made.

Typography as a system

Push on the typeface idea and it keeps giving. Characters make mistakes as they talk, and the mistake appears on the page and is then scratched out and corrected in real time — a scribe catching his own error, mid-sentence, in front of you. A slip of the tongue becomes a visible act of revision. You are watching people edit themselves.

When a character’s education or standing changes, the hand changes with them. When someone is writing rather than speaking, the ink behaves differently. The game’s entire presentation is the conceit that you are inside a manuscript being made, and the manuscript has opinions about who’s talking.

I’ve seen a lot of games use art direction as a mood layer painted over a system. This is the opposite arrangement: the art direction carries information the mechanics need. You judge credibility partly by the hand. That’s a UI decision with a moral edge on it, and the game knows exactly what it’s doing, because the whole story is about who gets to write things down and whose account survives.

Time is the only resource

There is no inventory puzzle in Pentiment, no lockpicking, no combat. The scarce resource is hours in a day, and the game spends them the way a real investigation would.

You are Andreas Maler, working at Kiersau Abbey and living in the town of Tassing, and when a murder happens you have a limited window to investigate before the verdict is delivered. Every conversation costs time. Every meal you eat with a family — and the meals are a mechanic, a whole scene each, warm and slow and full of the small facts you actually need — is a meal you didn’t eat with somebody else. You cannot see everything. The design guarantees it.

So you build your case out of a partial record, and here is where Sawyer’s structure closes its jaws. At the end of the act you must accuse someone. Not “may”. Must. And your evidence is a set of half-corroborated impressions gathered from people who all had reasons to lie, in the time you happened to have, on the topics you happened to think of.

Andreas’s background makes it worse in the best way. At character creation you pick where he studied and what he studied — theology, medicine, imperial Latin, logic and rhetoric, the occult, and so on — and those choices unlock conversation options that let you understand some evidence and stay blind to the rest. A theologian reads a Latin document and knows what it means. A craftsman looks at the same page and sees ink. Your build determines which facts are legible to you, which means two players investigating the same murder are looking at two different murders.

That’s the sharpest character-build design I’ve seen in years, and it works because there’s no optimisation in it. No build sees everything. You are always choosing your own blind spots.

The thing it refuses to give you

Pentiment never tells you whether you were right.

You accuse. Someone dies. The town lives with it. The game moves on, twenty-five years across three acts, and the consequences of your accusation compound in ways you can watch — families altered, children grown into the shape of what you did — and at no point does a screen appear confirming the killer’s identity.

This is the single bravest decision in the game and it’s the one that made people angry. It’s also the correct one, because the game is about historical record rather than truth. The whole frame is a manuscript, and manuscripts are made by people with agendas, time pressure and partial sight — which is exactly the position the design put you in. You produced a document with a body attached, and the game calls that what it is.

Compare Return of the Obra Dinn, which validates in batches of three and is a puzzle: there’s a right answer and Lucas Pope will confirm it. Or The Case of the Golden Idol, which withholds hand-holding and still, in the end, marks your work. Pentiment removes the marker entirely, and by removing it converts deduction into judgement. Those are different activities and the medium almost never attempts the second.

The ancestor

The obvious reference is Eco’s The Name of the Rose — a monastery, a murder, a scholar, manuscripts as the murder weapon — and Pentiment wears the debt openly.

The game-shaped ancestor is La Abadía del Crimen, Opera Soft’s 1987 Spanish take on the same novel for the Spectrum and Amstrad. I came to it late, through emulation, and it’s remarkable: an isometric abbey running on a real clock, monks with schedules, a routine you had to obey — be at prayers, or you fail — and a mystery you investigated in the gaps. It failed at almost everything it tried and it understood the one thing that matters here, which is that a monastery is a timetable, and a detective story set in one is a story about what you can’t be present for. Thirty-five years later, Obsidian shipped the version with the budget.

For the other end of the argument — an RPG where the build determines which reality you perceive — the modern companion is Disco Elysium, which does with skills what Pentiment does with an education.

Where it fights itself

The middle act sags. Act II jumps years forward and spends a long time re-establishing a town you already knew, and the investigation it hangs on has less to grip than the first. Movement is slow — Andreas walks, and Tassing is a lot of walking, and there’s a fast-travel system that arrives later than it should. The Switch and PS4 ports fixed nothing about the pace, though they did put the game on the machine a lot of people actually read on.

There’s also a real accessibility cost to the central conceit: the historically accurate hands are genuinely hard to read, and while the game offers a legibility option, taking it throws away part of the system. That’s an honest trade and the game should be praised for offering it, and it’s also a reminder that a mechanic made of typefaces excludes some people from the mechanic.

The verdict, argued

Pentiment is a game where the font is evidence, the clock is the antagonist, your education is your blind spot, and the ending refuses to grade you. Every one of those is a design decision that a bigger game would have sanded off, and Obsidian shipped all four in one object, on Game Pass, at a price that suggests nobody expected it to matter.

It matters. It’s the strongest argument I know that historical games can be about historiography — about how the record gets made and who makes it — while still working as an adventure game you play for the people. The meals alone would carry a lesser game.

It’s on Xbox, PC, Switch, PS4 and PS5, and Game Pass remains the cheapest door. Give it your attention rather than a second screen; a game made of typefaces punishes glancing.

Play next: Return of the Obra Dinn for deduction with a scoreboard, or Disco Elysium for the build-as-perception idea at full volume.

Spoilers below

Act III is where the design reveals what it was for, and it’s the reason the withheld answer holds up.

You stop being Andreas. You play Magdalene, a young woman in Tassing, decades on, and the town you investigated is now a place shaped by things you did as somebody else. The accusations from Acts I and II are in the ground. The families are altered. Andreas is a figure in other people’s memories, and the memories are wrong in the specific way memories go wrong — flattened, moralised, useful to whoever’s telling them.

And then Magdalene’s task is to paint a mural of the town’s history — to decide what the record says, panel by panel, choosing which version of events Tassing will look at for the next two hundred years, using evidence that is itself the residue of your own partial investigations from thirty years earlier.

The game hands you the manuscript and asks you to be the one who writes it. Every constraint that annoyed you — the clock, the blind spots, the refusal to confirm — turns out to have been the game teaching you what it costs to produce a history. You were never being tested on the murders. You were being shown how the record gets made, from the inside, by someone with too little time and the wrong education and a deadline.

That the murderer’s identity is available if you dig hard enough, and irrelevant to the mural either way, is the last joke. Tassing doesn’t get the truth. Tassing gets what you painted.