rikard.me/blog/003.txt                                Sun 01 Jan, 2023


                        Thoughts on Pentiment


Pentiment is Obsidian's first venture into the point-and-click
adventure game genre, and it unfortunately shows.

The game consists of three acts.  During Act 1 and 2 you play a
painter, Andreas Maler.  The main objective of each act is to solve
a mystery, more precisely a murder, within a limited span of time.

During Act 3, you play as a different character, Magdalene Drucker.
Magdalene was a very young child during Act 2, and you had no
significant interactions with her.  She is barely established in the
story by the time that you get to control her.

Act 3 does not have the same basic plot that Act 1 and 2 does, you are
not solving a mystery, instead you are gathering information about the
history of the town in which the game takes place.  In doing so, you
are many times retreading ground from Act 1 and 2.

There is a whole section of Act 3 where you gather information about
what happened during Act 2.  You, the player, know perfectly well what
happened during that act, but the character that you play does not.

I understand this as a narrative device.  The idea is that you're
supposed to see the events of Act 2 from different points of views.
However, from a player's perspective, going over things that you
played through not more than two hours ago, feels like nothing short
of padding.

It does not help that there are too many characters in the game, many
of which die throughout the game, or have children which you're
supposed to remember the parents of.  Of all the characters that you
meet, I can name no more than ten.

From a gameplay perspective, there are many design decisions that I
disagree with.  For example, if you wish to talk to someone, you would
expect that simply clicking on the person would be sufficient.  Here
you have to click on a tiny bubble, located underneath the person.  If
you wish to go to another screen, the intuitive thing would be to move
your character to the edge of the current screen.  Here, you have to
go to the edge of the screen AND click on a tiny bubble.

These bubbles are not inherently bad, if your character is stationary.
However, you will find yourself running around most of the time, and
clicking on these tiny bubbles while the screen is moving along with
your character can prove quite difficult.  Why this unnecessary
precision clicking?

There is an option to toggle instant text in the settings, but it
doesn't make the text instantly appear.  The text appears in a speech
bubble above the person who's talking.  Granted, the text itself is
instant, but the speech bubble is not.  You can left click to break
the speech bubble animation, so you still have to double click in
order to get through text that you might be able to read the moment
it's displayed on screen.

It's clearly optimised for a touch interface, which translates poorly
to a regular desktop experience.  It leads to a lot of friction in the
moment-to-moment gameplay, and I'm surprised I have not developed
carpal tunnel syndrome from the amount of clicking.

Conversations seldom progress the story.  Every single conversation
you have does not have to advance the story, but in a short,
story-driven game, you would expect dialogue -- which is the central
part of the gameplay -- to have a somewhat bigger impact.

Instead, dialogue often serves to inform us, the players, of certain
historic things of which most of us probably have never heard of.
This is all well and good, I have nothing against learning something
new, but it does really come across as the game trying hard to be
smart.

The dialogue also feels lacking in places.  You will sometimes
discover information that you wish you could bring up with certain
people, however, you simply can't.  One of the big revelations during
Act 2 is that one of the people whom you suspect are part of the
mystery that you're investigating, actually isn't the person he says
he is.  As such, you don't really know who the person is or what he is
capable of.  Would it not make sense to be able to bring this up with
him?

The fact that you often retread old grounds, the fact that you talk
about things of which you have already talked at length about, makes
the dialogue feel annoyingly padded.

There is no voice acting, and barely any music.  The game is played
almost entirely in silence, with the exception of some background
ambience, which varies in volume.

One of the first ever conversations you have is held in complete
silence, with the exception of farm animals that are loudly making
noises in the background.  I often found myself removing my headset,
simply because the background noises distracted me too much from the
text I was reading.