“Pentiment’s” third act emphasizes the many layers of history
Despite its linearity, the final part of the game is essential to its themes
Over the Labor Day weekend my wife and I marathoned the game “Pentiment,” by Obsidian Entertainment, and its story about a murder in rural 1500s Bavaria has refused to leave my mind. My short review of the game is that, if you like story-heavy games you should absolutely play it. We played it on Xbox’s Game Pass service, but it’s available on just about every platform – PS4, PS5, Steam, Switch, the works (and the Switch version is on sale for just a little over $10 through the weekend if you want to jump on that).
The game plays very much like the TellTale style of narrative games from about a decade ago, with a lot of dialogue, you choosing how your character will respond, the game letting you know that characters “will remember” what you said or actions you did, which will determine who is willing to help you later in the game. While the game starts as a murder mystery, with your character tasked with identifying the real murderer before your kindly mentor is blamed for the crime, the story eventually reveals itself as a meditation on the nature of history, and who gets to write it down and assemble it into a narrative months, years, even centuries after the events in question have taken place.
And because of this, I’m not going to focus on the entirety of “Pentiment’s” story but solely the game’s third and final act, which breaks away from the structure of the rest of the game in order to fully reinforce its themes. So, BIG spoilers ahead for “Pentiment,” and if you haven’t played it I strongly recommend you bookmark this page for later, play it (it’s only about 10-15 hours long) and come back later. I promise the game is worth it!
Breaking with the past
By the time you reach the end of “Pentiment’s” second act, the player has settled into a pretty comfortable rhythm – as traveling artist Andreas Maler, you wander around the Bavarian village of Tassing, asking villagers what they know of the victim who was murdered near the start of the act, and spending the precious little time you have to uncover the murderer deciding what leads to follow and whom to interrogate. Based on what you’ve been able to learn, you present your evidence to a person looking to pass judgment for the crime, pointing the finger at whom you believe is most guilty. The game purposefully leaves the crime open-ended, so there’s no definitive “true” answer to who the murderer is.
Act 2’s murder, of the local carpenter Otto who was mobilizing the townsfolk of Tassing to oppose the oppressive tax laws imposed by the nearby abbey, ends up being a catalyst to a greater tragedy. No matter whom you as Andreas find guilty of causing Otto’s death, the act ends with the enraged townspeople storming the abbey and the mob’s leader setting the abbey’s library on fire. As the fire spreads to the rest of the building, the armed guards of a local duke approach and begin violently putting down what they see as a peasant rebellion. Andreas himself is last seen running into the burning library in an attempt to save as many books as he can. At the conclusion of Act 2, text imposed against the backdrop of the burning abbey grimly states that Andreas was counted among the many who died that night.
But the game doesn’t end with Andreas’ death. Instead, Act 3 picks up 18 years later, with the player now controlling Magdalene, the daughter of Andreas’ friend, Claus the town printer. Magdalene was just a baby at the time of the peasant rebellion, abbey fire, and Andreas’ death, but as the town’s most gifted artist she has now been selected to commemorate the village’s history by painting a mural in Tassing’s recently completed town hall.
This ultimately isn’t a story about one man solving murders – it’s about how history and stories get passed down across generations.
And here’s where the pace of the game completely changes. Yes, as Magdalene you’re still wandering around Tassing and talking to townsfolk, helping them make decisions in their life and asking about their history. But the game also becomes much more linear from here on out. Where Andreas usually had three or four different leads to choose from, Magdalene typically only has one, which she must complete in order to advance her story. And while most of the critiques I’ve seen of “Pentiment” are pretty positive, some criticism has been leveled at the linearity of this final stretch of the game. While I think the criticism is fair, I will say that it’s a choice that has made me keep thinking about “Pentiment” for days after I completed it. Because this ultimately isn’t a story about one man solving murders – it’s about how history and stories get passed down across generations, with Magdalene’s story making that message most clear.
Second-hand stories
For the first two acts of “Pentiment,” you’re making choices as Andreas that will affect the town of Tassing for years to come. Whomever is found guilty of the two murders he investigates is executed, and even if Andreas aims suspicion at someone and they aren’t killed that person’s reputation is invariably damaged. And now, with Andreas gone and no longer able to explain his actions, it’s up to Magdalene, a young woman with no real memory of him, to interpret his actions which so greatly affected her town’s recent history. Andreas isn’t here anymore, and all that’s left are the stories told by the people in town who knew him.
Act 3 doesn’t just focus on Andreas, either, as Magdalene’s research into the town’s history also leads her into learning more about the town’s founding first by Germanic tribes and then by Roman colonizers. Just as in the case of Andreas’ much more recent actions, Magdalene can only piece together the stories of these much older inhabitants based on tales passed down generation by generation, due in part to the fire in the abbey destroying any relevant historical texts. It is from these second-hand accounts that Magdalene must decide what facets of Tassing will be immortalized in her own art, literally deciding whose stories and whose version of history she decides to enshrine.
Does she choose to acknowledge the Pagan beliefs of her ancestors, which are still honored by some of her fellow townspeople, or does she leave those out so as to not upset the local Christian faith leaders and bring unwanted attention from the Catholic church? And when depicting Tassing’s much more recent peasant rebellion, does she frame the instigators as heroes standing up to a corrupt authority, or does she focus on the human tragedy that followed?
The stories available to Magdalene to commemorate are in part based on how Andreas interacted with the townsfolk in the earlier acts – for instance, a theory that Swiss immigrants helped resettle Tassing during a time when it was abandoned will only be shared with Magdalene if the story’s teller was earlier encouraged by Andreas to honor Tassing’s old traditions. In this way, “Pentiment” again represents how accounts of our own history can be greatly shaped not just by the teller, but how storytellers are influenced.
We’re always in media res
While “Pentiment’s” third act does suffer from a much more linear structure than the more free-wheeling Act 1 and 2, by letting the player take control of a character new to the tale Act 3 helps drive home what “Pentiment” has been about all this time – that we are all living in a story that started being told long before we were born, will continue long after, and through no fault of our own we may only understand a fraction of how this story started. It is our natural instinct as humans to want to impose meaning on our history, but that meaning is always going to be influenced not just by our own understanding but through that of everyone who has told the story in turn.
At the end of it, the picture we’re left with can indeed be beautiful, but there’s almost always more of that story that has been worn away or painted over.
Hey Bob, “Pentiment” sounds like it’s got a lot of interesting ideas in it! Does anyone else on the internet have some neat things to say about it?
Yup! Check out this piece by Marn Silverman, which discusses the character Brother Guy. Brother Guy is a monk you meet in Pentiment’s Act 1, who’s just kind of a dick. And when you meet him again in Act 2, he’s…still kind of a dick, but if you investigate him as a possible suspect you learn that he’s been embezzling from the church for the purposes of funneling the money to Jewish victims of the Catholic church’s Inquisition.
Whoa, I didn’t expect that from a jerkwad like Brother Guy!
Me neither! As soon as I discovered that, Brother Guy went from the top of my “we should pin the murder on this guy” list to someone who I wanted to protect (helped along by the fact that the more I dug into the murder, the less to me it seemed Brother Guy was behind it). He never stops being kind of a jerk, but at least there’s far greater context for his actions from that point forward. I can’t say what happens if you accuse Brother Guy at the end of Act 2, but I’m willing to bet that his motives for embezzlement get ignored and probably lost to history. Which, again, is part of the point of “Pentiment.” A person’s actual motivation for doing something can be swept away by time, and our histories, even those written with good intent, can easily miss or overlook why an important event happened in an effort to fit the past into an easy-to-follow chronology.