Set in 16th century Bavaria, Pentiment will take players on a narrative journey through the eyes of Journeyman Artist Andreas Maler during a time of great social unrest. Led by game director Josh Sawyer, this game is brought to life by a talented team inspired by illuminated manuscripts, woodcut prints, and history itself.
What Is Obsidian’s Pentiment?
We spoke to Josh Sawyer about his decades-old ideas for Pentiment, and how he finally brought this medieval mystery to fruition.
While Sawyer is aware that Pentiment is a bit niche, with its deep exploration of medieval history, art, and culture, he feels that watching the trailer shown today at the Xbox Game Showcase is a pretty good benchmark to gauge whether or not an individual will like it. But he also says he wants to capture an audience interested in history or medieval art who may not necessarily be dedicated gamers or familiar with his past work. And his ultimate goal for Pentiment is for it to be, at least on some level, educational for anyone who picks it up.
"If people don't know anything about history, and they just like the look of it and the idea of it, I want them to play it and passively absorb knowledge as they go through it," he says. "I want them to enjoy the story, be entertained by it, but also gain a greater understanding of how people lived in the 16th century."
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rinks wrote:Had a horrible feeling it was going to be another delayed game when I saw the thread bumped.
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Go behind the scenes in Obsidian Entertainment’s upcoming title, Pentiment. Hear the stories of how this historical narrative-driven game focusing on character development, heavily stylized art, and choice-driven storytelling in early 16th century Bavaria came to be from the mouths of the developers behind it.
Listen in as Game Director Josh Sawyer, Creative Director Hannah Kennedy, Animation Director Cathy Nichols, Narrative Designer Kate Dollarhyde, Programming Director Brett Klooster, and Producer Alec Frey talk about what went into the development of Pentiment.
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Christian Donlan wrote:...And this is the trick, isn't it? The same trick that The Name of the Rose plays. Eco's novel is dense and complex and theoretically slightly off-putting. Do I really want to read a 400 page novel that spends so much time banging on about Thomas Aquinas? A book that has footnotes in Latin which it doesn't bother to translate? But you give it a go - a page or two - and the complexity reveals itself to be a kind of inviting richness. You get drawn in despite yourself to a treatise on semiotics that is simultaneously a great detective novel and a treasure hunt.
Pentiment works the same magic. Five minutes in I was wading through a tense disagreement on Martin Luther and wondering if this game was for me, but Obsidian draws you into this world by making it human, and by making it funny and kind and surprising and awful. And more: while I played Pentiment, the richest man in the world was muddling about at Twitter like a bored cat with a ball of crumpled paper, and this 16th century narrative of who gets to decide what is history, of who controls the flow of information, seemed surprisingly timely.