Pentiment teaches players by the food at the table

In Pentiment, you’ll spend a lot of time eating at dinner tables. Conversations touch on all sorts of topics, and the discussions help you learn more about the fictional Bavarian town of Tassing and the mysteries you’ll be investigating. Every so often, you’ll get to take a bite of bread or cheese of varying quality depending on who you’re eating with. Sometimes, someone might just go on and on. It honestly felt like a warm-up for Thanksgiving (though at my Thanksgivings, I’m not trying to figure out who committed a murder).

But pay attention, and you’ll notice that Pentiment uses the meals to subtly teach you about the people the game’s protagonist, Andreas Maler, is eating with. The more wealthy companions will offer better food and finer dishes. While they might be able to serve larger portions, the less fortunate may not be able to finish their meal. It all depends on their occupations or status. People will share different food options, places, and conversation topics that can help you understand how they fit in the society.

All the context that the developers use to inform the players can be seen at the tables. Pentiment’sIn an interview with Game Director Josh Sawyer, Josh Sawyer stated that the setting was 16th-century. The Verge. “I didn’t want to put a history lesson in front of you,” Sawyer said. “I wanted to put everything into a beautiful setting and a cool story in context, and then let players, through osmosis, pick this stuff up.”

Another clever tool is “The.” game’s fonts. All conversations in Pentiment happen in written dialog boxes, but the actual font in each box will vary based on the person you’re talking to. A peasant might use a handwritten scrawl as his font. The font for a baron riding into town might be a more intricate style, but this changes as you get to know him better. I’m a big fan of the font for the town’s printer, which appears all at once in clean type, as if it were actually pressed by a printing press.

Sawyer stated that the font can differ even between people who appear to be in similar positions. While the monks and nuns are mostly dressed the same, he pointed out that a handful of them “speak” with a very elaborate script as a sign of how educated they are. It’s a clever subconscious trick to tell you more about each character. (Sometimes the fonts can be tough to read, but there’s an “easy read fonts” setting you can flip on that’s quite helpful.)

PentimentIt cleverly makes use of its vast cast to tell a larger societal story. “I didn’t want any singular character to necessarily be representative of everyone within a certain type,” Sawyer said. The abbot and scriptorium staff are not all kind. People in the abbey are a mix of many personalities and pay attention to details. Pentiment feel like they’re part of a real community, and while the setting might be hundreds of years in the past, the broad strokes of what the characters go through are intended to be relatable human issues.

“The same kinds of motives and instincts and anxieties and fears that we have manifest themselves in the early 16th century,” Edmund Kern, a college professor of Sawyer’s and a historical consultant on the game, told me. Pentiment takes place in “a very different time, a very different setting, but also not all that different from a certain perspective.”

Sawyer spoke to me during our interview about his experiences playing the 1992 game DarklandsThis was set in the 15th Century. “It was really buggy and really weird. But I was like, ‘Wow, this is really cool actually having a game set in this historical context.’” With Pentiment, Sawyer hopes it “does the same thing for me when I played a historical game when I was a teenager and I was like ‘man, I ought to look into this history stuff.’”

PentimentIt is now available on Xbox Series X / S, Xbox One, as well as PC.