2022 was an especially rough year for Microsoft's game development efforts. Although Xbox Game Studios failed to launch a single product, Microsoft-owned Obsidian Entertainment released Pentiment ($19.99), one of the most memorable adventure games in recent years. The historical whodunit lacks action, but makes up for it with a unique art style, meaningful decision-making system, and simple RPG elements. As a result, the excellent Xbox Series S/X game (also available on Xbox Game Pass and Steam) earns our Editors' Choice award for adventure games.

Pentiment's Gameplay

Set in the 16th-century Bavarian town of Tassing, Pentiment follows Andreas Maler, an artist working as an illuminator at Kiersau Abbey. When one of the abbey's major benefactors is murdered during a visit, Andreas launches an investigation to prove that his friend, Brother Piero, did not commit the crime.

Pentiment isn't a game filled with action, special abilities, or leveling. Instead, it's an adventure game similar to Night in the Woods or Oxenfree. You move Andreas from scene to scene, interact with objects, or talk with people. That's it. Traversal is relatively mundane; Pentiment lacks open-world exploration or much location variety. Instead, you only move back and forth on a set path across a handful of locations.

You converse with the people in Tassing and Kiersau, learn their stories, choose your dialogue, draw conclusions, and hope for the best outcome. Your interactions with other characters have a profound narrative impact. What you say during one conversation may change how a character responds later on—and what information they choose to share.

For instance, the game has a hidden mechanic where you must convince certain characters to give up private information. However, they will only do so if you previously said the right things to them. You won't know what those are, and the game won't let you try again if you fail, which can be frustrating. At one point, I questioned a monk who was clearly hiding something. However, he refused to reveal what he knew due to my dialogue choices, so I had to move on.

I wished Pentiment was clearer about when one of these vital moments appeared, so I could better consider the available choices. However, I eventually understood that this is the nature of the game—you make choices and deal with the consequences. In the end, it is a necessary friction that rewards and punishes your decisions.

The game also includes a fascinating day-night cycle, where certain conversations and actions take up a set amount of time, advancing the time of day—and the story. This means you won't have enough time to investigate every thread, so you must choose wisely. For example, you will need to choose someone to dine with when it's time to eat. You will then be able to hear fresh stories and gather more information, but you can't eat with everyone.

An Illuminated Video Game

Pentiment's art style and presentation take cues from Maler's own work, with the game being presented as part of a Renaissance-era manuscript. The art has a hand-drawn quality to it, and pages literally flip when you change scenes in the game world. Pentiment has minimal music, so the sound of a scratching quill is all you hear as people speak for much of the adventure. Despite coming from a studio owned by Microsoft, Pentiment gives off the creative airs of an indie game.

A built-in, encyclopedia-like feature offers contextual definitions of certain locations, people, words, or phrases that the average player might not know. This is vital for anyone who isn't an expert on the Protestant Reformation or doesn't know what Prague was like in the 1500s. Certain words, names, or phrases have a red underline, indicating that there's more information available. When you look up a word, Pentiment zooms out to show that everything takes place inside an illuminated manuscript, which is an incredible way to frame the game's historicity.

Pentiment also features an impressive array of era-appropriate fonts, with certain styles of writing used for different characters. For instance, the town printer and his family have speech bubbles that appear as typesetting from a printing press. Meanwhile, the monks who work in the abbey's scriptorium feature elaborate script in their speech bubbles. Some of the fonts can be hard to read, so the game includes more modern lettering if you need them.

Throughout the game, Andreas takes detailed notes about his investigations, and you can see the contents of the notebook in the settings menu. There, you can check character details, the game map, and active quests. Unfortunately, the map isn't necessary—since there are so few places to visit—and the quest-tracking page seemed incomprehensible, with its dense script, crossed-out entries, and paragraph-style notes. Overall, the notebook has a nice lived-in feel, but it's mostly unneeded.

Build Your Own Renaissance Man

The game also includes some minor RPG elements that let you choose your character's background. At specific points, you can decide the subjects you studied at university, where you have traveled over the years, and the interests you have picked up. Although these choices don't drastically change the story, they color the dialogue options available to you in certain instances and even grant certain "skills."

For example, if you choose a background in medicine, you can assess the severity of a person's injury. You can also say you're a fan of nature, which gives you extra lines of dialogue about the natural world in some conversations. Choosing a background where you spent time in Italy means that you can understand Italian.

Some choices are probably more useful than others, but there are no wrong choices to make. Anything you choose should work well, whether practically or comically. This at least gives you the ability to customize your character a bit and change how Andreas sees, and interacts with, the world around him.

The Details Are in the Story

Pentiment styles itself as a murder mystery. You question people, gather evidence, investigate hunches, and blame someone for the crime. However, the game only sort of cares about the truth. No matter who you peg as the killer, there are no definitive answers. Instead, you must live with the consequences of your actions.

The game cares more about stories and our perception of truth. Tassing is a town with a long, winding history. It was founded by Romans, settled by Pagans, and is currently populated by Christians. The passage of time makes the truth hard to discern, and over the game's three acts, you see how the truth changes depending on your perception. What Pentiment lacks in exciting gameplay mechanics, it makes up with meticulously crafted branching dialog options.

Though the game's third act suffers from some uneven story and pacing decisions, Pentiment ultimately sticks the landing for a truly rewarding story. In the end, it's entirely up to you—both literally and figuratively—to determine how the past is remembered and the future is written.

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