Obsidian Entertainment’s latest game, Pentiment, takes its title from the term pentimento, a change made by an artist while painting. Its origin is the Italian word pentirsi, which means to change one’s mind or repent. Pentiment’s aim is to show how history, like oil on a canvas, can be covered, then rediscovered or forgotten.
The game, which has been getting rave reviews, is set in 16th-century Bavaria in the Holy Roman Empire, an area that’s now part of Germany. The player takes control of Andreas Maler, a journeyman artist with a university education, embroiled over 25 years in a series of murders and scandals that take place in the fictional locations of Kiersau Abbey and Tassing. Inspired by Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose, the game tries, as Eco’s novel did, to capture the texture of history, the traces of font and ink, of manuscripts and print wood cuts.
It is, then, a passion project for the game’s director, Josh Sawyer, who’s probably best known for the much loved Fallout New Vegas, as well as helming the nostalgic and pioneering modern isometric RPG Pillars of Eternity. On Twitter and IRL, he radiates enthusiasm for Pentiment’s setting, a time of epic technological and social upheaval that began with the Reformation and ended with the introduction of Copernicus' heliocentric model of the solar system.
To learn more about Pentiment’s uncanny appeal, WIRED got on Zoom with Sawyer to talk about Eco, murder mysteries, double monasteries, and what this newer artform might tell us about early modern history. He recommended some great books too.
This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
WIRED: I'm interested in the relationship between Pentiment and this time in history. Why 16th-century Bavaria?
Josh Sawyer: In college, I studied early modern history. I like the late medieval and early modern transition, because there's so much social change going on. Changing religious institutions, academic institutions, social structures. Capitalism starts to sort of barely emerge. There's a lot of cross-cultural contact, because of trade that takes people across the world. So this period has always been really interesting to me, just because of everything that's going on.
The Middle Ages are often misunderstood, right?
People think the Middle Ages are this one long, uninterrupted period of nothing happening, or just wars or whatever. But there is a big spike and change throughout a few centuries, toward the end of the period. So that was always really fascinating to me. Also, my family history: My grandmother was born in Bavaria. So there were a lot of things that made it a more natural fit for me than some other parts of history, and it's something I just personally have an affinity for.
Why are there so many historical games, do you think?
I think it’s funny that we’re asking that now, when there was a real drought for a long time. History contains everything cool that has ever happened. It’s easy to build fantastic worlds and stories out of a well-researched historical context. When it’s done well, I think players appreciate that they are immersed in something that reflects back on the actual world we live in.
Did you set this game around an abbey because it's a place where a lot of these themes meet?
There's a couple of reasons for it. For one thing, this is inspired by The Name of the Rose, Umberto Eco's novel, which takes place almost entirely within the confines of an abbey. So we talk about Kiersau Abbey and Tassing, which is a town that is right next to it. It was very common for abbeys to be near communities, for there to be a lot of interaction between those communities.
Also, in this time period it was not uncommon for the abbot to be the secular lord of the lands that surrounded it. So there are religious aspects, but then also very practical material aspects. The abbot is a religious leader, but he's taxing people. And he's setting limitations on how the woods can be used, or not used, how the death inheritance tax works, things like that.
So that just causes a lot of conflict. And by having our central character be a secular artist who resides with a family in the town, the secular world, but works within the scriptorium, he has a unique perspective, because he's constantly moving back and forth between those two worlds.
The Name of the Rose is a book that's fundamentally about language, about text. Why did you think Eco might work in a game?
So playing narrative adventure games, Night in the Woods being one of the main inspiration points, I just thought telling a story within a game structure, where it's focused purely on exploration and relationships and communication, would be great. Also, being purely text-based, I thought there were very interesting things that we could do with language and translation within the context of the game. I don't know if you've read Baudolino by Umberto Eco?
No, just The Name of the Rose and Ur-Fascism, the entry-level stuff.
The first chapter of it is called “Baudolino Tries His Hand at Writing.” In the middle of a paragraph, it just goes into a black letter script, and it's Latin from a hymnal. Then it resumes, and he's like, “I'm sorry, I couldn't scrape that part of the parchment away.” It's like within the book Eco is recreating this idea of, through text, the barely literate, Italian young man trying to write Italian and transcribe German sounds, struggling to create a palimpsest by scraping a hymnal away. That idea of all that stuff coming through in text, not through voice, I just thought that was a really interesting challenge.
So that influenced the game?
That's one of the reasons why we have all the different fonts and paper and structure and things like that. And then the mystery. You know, in The Name of the Rose, you come to a conclusive end. There's a lot more ambiguity in Pentiment. That's a way in which it is not like The Name of the Rose. But that's part of the medium.
The kind of choice and interactivity you get in games.
That's why I wanted to have a game where you make choices and see consequences. Again, because we go back to this idea of history, like there's not a lot to work with, and what we have to work with is very suspect. When you're doing this investigation, you're not a detective, there aren't forensics. You're mostly going off of gut and rumor and innuendo, and saying, like, I think it's this guy, and like I never really got to finish this lead. I don't know, maybe there's something more there that would have made me think that maybe he didn't do it, but I don't know. So it returned to this idea of ambiguity with your understanding of what facts are and what really happened.
So who is Andreas Mahler? How is he connected to this world?
Andreas is a journeyman artist. He has, by benefit of some finagling, a university education. His father basically used connections to the rector of the University of Erfurt to get him an education, which would have been very difficult for a middle-class person at this time. But Andreas kind of lost his way in his graduate studies and dropped out and went back to being an artist. So he's a journeyman, but he's a little old to be a journeyman still, which people bring up.
Familiar for a lot of WIRED readers I’m sure.
The nice thing about it is that that university background allows him to have academic expertise that comes up within the context of the later mysteries. So you're a journeyman and you've been traveling around, you get to pick the place where you've traveled to. You're always from Nuremberg, in Franconia, but you could have either traveled to Italy, to Flanders, or to Basel in Switzerland, which were art centers at this time. And that gives you different language backgrounds and understanding of different cultural things.
But as you're wrapping up your journeyman years, you are earning some money before going back to Nuremberg, at one of the last remaining monastic scriptoria in existence. Almost all the monasteries have stopped making manuscripts, because printed books exist now. So there are these few clients that are still paying for deluxe manuscripts. They're short-staffed, and they ask Andreas to help out. He lives with a farmer family in town, and he works at the abbey.
Then how he gets drawn into the central mystery is that there is a murder of a nobleman, and your friend and mentor within the scriptorium, an elderly monk named Brother Piro, is accused of the murder.
This is the mystery at the center of the game, right?
It's extremely obvious to everyone that he did not do this, but the abbot is so terrified of the consequences of not having someone to hand over that he gets blamed for it. So you take it upon yourself to prove that someone else did it.
You said in a previous interview that you played a game back in the ’90s called Darklands, and that was an influence on Pentiment. How did that game inspire you?
I liked it because it was the first historical role-playing game that I'd ever seen. And the way that everything was designed was very interesting, because I was used to things following the Dungeons & Dragons mold, where you have classes, you have fighters and wizards and magic users and clerics, and you have spells and you have levels, you have alignment.
Then I play Darklands, and you don't have character classes. You have social classes that you come from, that's your background, and then you have skills. And those skills are things like speak common, speak Latin, ride horse, wood wise, alchemy, virtue, things like that. Instead of spells, if you are a holy character, you know about the mysteries of saints, and you can call upon saints to do miraculous things. If you're an alchemist, you make potions, and you either drink or throw potions to produce effects. The entire world was the greater Holy Roman Empire, greater Germany.
So a similar setting to Pentiment.
But there were fantastic elements in it, but they were all fantastic elements pulled from mythology. So witches are real, other mythological creatures from German, pagan folklore are real. And that's the world they presented. The way time passed was all through canonical hours, the monastic hours. Every city you visited was a real historical place. It was just such an unusual and refreshing way to approach role-playing games, progressions, storytelling, and world building, that it really stuck with me.
How can games and gameplay complement our understanding of history? Was there a point in creating Pentiment where you thought a game could relay history better than a book or film?
I think that, again, because we are telling a story in which you are a character living in between these worlds, you're a little closer to the material reality of people's lives. One of the interesting details we spend a lot of time on, and I hope people appreciate it, is you have a lot of meals throughout the game.
Almost every time you go to work, between the work events, there's a meal event. And there are different families or communities that you can go to and eat with. And when you're talking, the characters have talking heads appearing, but you're looking at their dinner table, you're looking at what they're actually eating. And so you're seeing, this is how peasants eat, this is how middle-class people eat.
Anything else?
Because of the nature of the mystery that's involved, there aren't detectives, there aren't forensics. I knew from the beginning that I wanted to make a story where the true identity of the killers is not something you're ever going to get. Because people were very frustrated in this time period.
There's a great book by the historian Joel F. Harrington called The Faithful Executioner. It talks about how frustrated people were by people getting away with murder. It was so easy, especially in rural areas, sometimes families were just found dead. And it's like, Who did this? I don't know. That's life.
I’m definitely going to read that.
It's one of the reasons why I think we look back and go like, “God, I can't believe that torture was used all the time. And I can't believe that things were so primitive.” But like, they had so very little to work with that, in many cases, this was like desperation or a desire to satisfy a communal desire for justice.
So I do hope that by putting the characters in these environments, they get a greater appreciation of how people lived and how they died. Taking place over 25 years, I will say, there's a lot of characters that just die out of nowhere. Because infant mortality was at times up to 50 percent in these areas.
Wow, brutal.
It’s unbelievable. It's hard to come to grips with. But there are characters that will just disappear between acts of the story, and like what happened? I don't know, they just got sick; they're gone. That's something the families deal with.
So there's a lot of ways in which the specific story we're telling, the mechanics we use, the fact that it takes place over a long period of time—I think all of these things help draw out a greater understanding of how people lived.
The murder mystery is a plot device that's quite similar to how you uncover history anyway. Was that conscious?
Yeah, absolutely. Every game other than this one that I've worked on, violence and combat mechanics are really central. There's a lot of leveling up and party management, and things that intentionally take your brain to a different place. With narrative adventure, it's just about character interactions, really. So how you interact with people, the choices you make, the consequences of those choices.
Let's talk about the game's art style, which is this mix of medieval manuscripts and early print wood cuts.
Absolutely. Again, this is a time in transition. So it's not that manuscripts are no longer being produced, but they're produced in smaller and smaller numbers. They were no longer typically produced by monasteries. They were made by trade guilds, like the Guild of St. Luke, or individual artists like Andreas. Historically, Albrecht Dürer is probably the most famous example. So print is taking over, manuscripts are going away, literacy is rising.
But with that, there's also a perfusion throughout Europe of all sorts of books about all sorts of things. One of the craziest examples from this time period is the Malleus Maleficarum, or Hammer of Witches, which is a witch-hunting manual. It was condemned by the church, but people were obsessed with it, because it talked about demons and how women were all witches, or have this great proclivity for it. And so there was this increased fear and danger of the spread of this stuff.
Sounds familiar.
But specifically, with regard to the art, the creation of art is sort of central to a lot of the elements in the story. We try to tie that to how the characters and the world are rendered. So we use a lot of the woodcut style for how our environments are portrayed.
Our art director, Hannah Kennedy, looked a lot at the Nuremberg Chronicle, which is a large compendium. It's hard to even describe; books are really weird in this time period, because they wander all over the place. But it had a lot of illustrations of towns, many of which were reused and had no relation to the town itself. But we use examples of that as perspective for how we build our environments.
And to bring the characters to life too?
Our characters, the older characters, especially, are rendered in more of an illuminated style. So they are painted, and as they get older, they actually lose chips of paint from them in the game. So you'll see wear on them. And then our younger characters are all printed or made in that style. So it looks like a dark black outline filled with color, which is a different approach.
I know a lot of effort went into the game’s fonts.
The fonts are another example. We have all these custom fonts that we made. And we're trying to convey the style of how people wrote, how peasants, if they could read and write, how they would write, how an educated person would write, how a monk or a scribe in a scriptorium would write, and how print looked.
You mentioned the Malleus Maleficarum. Hannah Kennedy pointed out in a different interview that she saw a parallel between the rise of print and games as a storytelling medium. I wonder if you noticed that parallel and if you noticed any technological parallels between then and now?
I always think “democratization” is a sort of loaded term. But the ability for more people to share information, for more people to make games or blog posts, or tweet, or whatever, brings with it certain fears about information and how it's transmitted, and how people receive it.
That happened during the rise of print as well. When the only way printed materials were created was by and large monasteries—writing, typically, in Latin, which was a language only spoken by a very small percentage of people—you had a very strong degree of control over how information was communicated and distributed over long distances. When print came around, I didn't want to make it sound like it was complete chaos, but there weren't really regulations, and so people could kind of just print whatever. There were concerns about that, and there was pushback about that.
Again, sounds familiar.
Similarly, we see now on the internet, people are constantly concerned about the veracity of things. We have a lot of silos and splintered ideas of what truth is, what reality is. And then, yeah, within games, there's digital distribution. So games have been around now for a while, and they're still a young medium, but I think the new thing to look at and think about, or not that new, is digital distribution.
People have talked about how if you look at Steam each year, the number of new titles is just going up and up and up. I'm not sure if I'm drawing a great parallel here, but the democratization of this allows for a great perfusion of a lot of stuff. A lot of people can make a lot of things.
A lot of research went into this game: three PhD consultants, experts in manuscripts, experts in early modern music. What is the point of all this historical accuracy in a piece of fiction? Why does it matter?
History doesn't really exist. Hilary Mantel, she recently passed away, but there was a great quote from her about how history isn't even what's left of the past. It's what is left of records that people put down, which may or may not be even correct by their own reckoning. It's so fragmentary.
“History is a process, not a locked box with a collection of facts inside,” she said.
No, it's not facts. And so I wanted to try to create something that used those records, to the best extent that we knew, to create a fiction that is compelling within a historical context. Kiersau Abbey and Tassing are not real; these places never existed. But I hope they could have. The supposition that they could have is based off of that research and saying: There were double monasteries, they did exist. There weren't very many, but they were around; we have records that they existed. We do know that peasants had these issues.
So to create a compelling fiction within a historical context, to try to get players to understand and sympathize with people from the past, because I think that when history is told in a way that is overly simplified, and doesn't really try to dig deep, it runs the risk of making people from another time and place feel like they're very different from us. And I don't think they are at all, I think they're very, very similar to us.
Yeah, the game does a great job of highlighting these parallels.
I think the material reality that they lived in was in some ways different, but going back to the food that people eat, everyone struggled with this. There's a great book by Piero Campisi, called Bread of Dreams, which is basically like, everyone was starving prior to industrialization. They were constantly right on the edge of death by starvation. That's a very human need and human feeling. And I think that by trying to portray history accurately, to the best extent that we can, from records and to the best of our knowledge, we're trying to be true to the experiences of people in this time.
So for me, it's not purely about trying to cram historical facts into people's heads. It's not a history lesson. You can actually know very little about Martin Luther or the Reformation. You can go into our glossary and read some of the details, or later you can go on Wikipedia, and that's great. But it's the context and the humanization of it that was important.
Do you feel a different responsibility when you're making a game like Pillars of Eternity to making a game like this?
I tried to bring a level of historical materialism and attention to a setting like Pillars. But ultimately, it's not a real thing. It's not a real place. That creates problems in the conflicts we bring up in the story, because the physical reality of the world is very different from ours. But yeah, for something that is specifically historical, I do feel a greater sense of responsibility.
So for example, the fonts are historically inspired, but you still have to be able to read them. If we used real historical fonts, half of them would be completely unreadable to a modern eye. So we have to make compromises, but the spirit is still there: This is how people used pens. This is how they wrote, this is how they did this.
When you pitched a similar game back in the ’90s inspired by Darklands, it was turned down. Now you're releasing Pentiment in 2022. How has the industry landscape changed from when that game was turned down?
I mean, it's two layers of things. The first is digital distribution. So there was a big wave of change when physical distribution was no longer the primary means by which games were sold to people. Physical boxes on shelves are expensive to make and distribute, and if they get returned, it's a big pain in the ass. There was a whole raft of logic on the publisher side about, We're not going to make games unless they fit this model where we can estimate these units and presell them to retailers and convince them to buy in, sell-in and sell-through. Like, I can't remember the last time I heard anyone talk about sell-in and sell-through. Digital distribution opened up the possibility of a lot of games that wouldn't have worked in a brick-and-mortar retail landscape.
What’s the other reason?
The other thing is that when Microsoft acquired Obsidian, the fact that they have Game Pass, and that Game Pass, the stated purpose is to offer this variety of games of different types and different lengths and different genres, including very oddball things. I said, “Yes. All right. Sounds like a great opportunity to make something very small and weird.”
And that was a motivation?
Before being acquired by Microsoft, I don't think I would have pitched this game, because I don't think we could have found a publisher. Maybe we could have crowdfunded it. Maybe. But a publisher wouldn't have touched it, because it's very niche.
But the fact that it can exist on a platform like Game Pass, where you're already subscribed, so why not play the game with an artist with a flaming head, like “Sure, this looks interesting.”
My perspective on it is, I want players to look at it and within five minutes just be like “Nope,” or “Yeah, I'm super into this.” Because again, if it's on a platform like that, you didn't buy it, it's OK. You can tell what the game is very quickly from looking at it. And there's a zillion games out there for you to play that aren't this one, if you don't like it. But if you do, I really hope that you get into it.
