We are in 1518, and the artist Andreas Maler is passing through the small town of Tassing, located in Bavaria and therefore part of the Holy Roman Empire. Our hero works in the scriptorium of the local abbey and must soon return to Nuremberg, where his bride and a lavish career await him. But while he spends his days at his desk working on various illustrations, the murder of a baron upsets his plans and the daily life of the inhabitants. This context will inevitably remind moviegoers of The Name of the Rose, and it works as well as in Jean-Jacques Annaud's film. It must be said that the developers of Obsidian have not done things by halves and have decided to push the medieval, religious and literary atmosphere as much as possible, even if it means disturbing or even putting off some players. If the prospect of reading sentences such as "The Englishman Guillaume d'Ockham gave us Summa totius logicae, putting nominalism in the face of Plato's realism" puts you off, you will need a little time to adapt before you get caught up in the game, which relies heavily on its many dialogues.
Fortunately, the developers have planned everything to simplify your task. On the one hand, no historical knowledge is really necessary to progress in the investigation. And on the other hand, the game multiplies the information accessible with a simple click. Thus, most historical proper names or terms that are too obscure appear underlined in speech bubbles. Just click on it so that the game screen is embedded in an old book and the definition of the terms in question appear in the margins, very nicely illustrated in passing. The process is elegant, practical, and it is part of a radical but always coherent artistic direction. The 2D graphics seem to be drawn from illuminations of the time, while the font varies according to the level of education of the interlocutor, ranging from fairly simple characters to block letters, passing by gothic letters. Voluntary mistakes are even corrected before our eyes by the virtual pen, which we also hear constantly scratching.
THE NAME OF PROSE
Condensed over fifteen hours and a single village, Pentiment paradoxically offers us dozens and dozens of interlocutors. If this profusion of characters is generally positive and welcome, it can also be a source of confusion, because it is very complicated to remember everyone's surname, face and function. Note all the same that the game uses the definition system on demand mentioned above, except that a click on a fictitious name displays a portrait of it in the margin, thus stimulating our visual memory. In addition, a journal brings together our current objectives, the map of the village, the list of inhabitants, and a more general glossary. There is even a tab called "Ex-Libris", which details Andreas' personality and past. Role play requires, these elements depend on your answers to certain questions presented at the beginning of the adventure, but also later. Depending on the characteristics selected (hedonist, bookworm or rascal; Latinist, logician or occultist; having spent his youth in Flanders or Italy, etc.), the hero will have access to different dialogues and will be able, or not, to understand certain writing in Latin or French for example.
Each day is divided into different periods, and talking to this character, spying on another, or performing this action will sometimes take up an entire section of time, preventing you from exploring other avenues. Knowing that the major objectives must be achieved before a given date and time, it is again necessary to make often draconian choices.
Note also that the RPG aspect of the game is absolutely not translated by any fights or experience points, but by abundant dialogues, rich and which open different paths. We prefer to tell you as little as possible about the scenario, which has its share of surprises, but know that some of your choices will have important consequences (when it comes to convincing someone to do something later) and sometimes really major. If some relatively rare puzzles also brighten up the gameplay, the main difficulty of the adventure lies in its temporal aspect. Each day is divided into different periods, and talking to this character, spying on another, or performing this action will sometimes take up an entire section of time, preventing you from exploring other avenues. Knowing that the major objectives must be achieved before a given date and time, it is again necessary to make often draconian choices. It can even be frustrating at times, especially since the endgame won't answer all of your questions. More precisely, it will not tell you whether some of your most important choices will have been the right ones or not. Once again, we prefer to remain in the dark so as not to reveal anything. But the biggest pitfalls of the game actually come from concerns that we absolutely did not expect to find in an Obsidian production, the studio being used to handling many more branches than here.
"AND WE WILL PEEL HIS RING..."
On several occasions we witnessed misplaced scenes, the scripts not correctly taking into account our progress. Here we were told about a character as if he were still alive when his death had already taken place. And there, our hero started talking about a book and its contents, when in reality we had not yet unearthed the book in question. From memory, we have encountered problems of this type four or five times. A bearable, even acceptable quantity, but which still breaks the immersion a little too often. Plus, the near-flawless French translation of two-thirds of the adventure suddenly goes off the rails in the third act. Phrase in untranslated English, mixture of formal use and familiarity in the same conversation, and male character speaking in the feminine ("I'm sorry", "I thought I had gone crazy"...) thus invite each other to the party , and therefore spoil it a little. If ever a patch were to solve these problems in the days to come, do not hesitate to add a point or even two to the final score, because Pentiment has the immense merit of really standing out from the crowd.
