For instance, Andreas is an artist with a university education, but players can choose what he excelled at in school. It’s a narrative adventure, he says, with mystery and murder elements, and where choices have consequences. But despite the detective story bent of Sawyer’s explanation, he’s averse to calling Pentiment a detective game, because he says it’s light on detective game mechanics. In total it covers a span of about 25 years, during which multiple crimes, murders and conspiracies occur that Andreas gets roped into somehow or another. Maybe it's the person you think that the community will miss the least.”īut the scenario Sawyer describes is just the beginning of Pentiment. That can be the person that you think should be punished, whether or not they did it. That can be the person that you think actually did it. You are basically deciding who's going to pay for the crime. You make your decisions based on whatever you think is most important.
“You have to investigate, find as much evidence as you can. “One of the key things in the game is that we do not ever definitively tell you, canonically, the murderer ,” Sawyer explains. That leaves Andreas to step up to the job, becoming a medieval detective of sorts as he speaks to the many suspects. His friend claims innocence, but no one seems especially interested in investigating who the real murderer is. While staying at a Benedictine abbey and working on an illuminated manuscript, his friend and mentor is accused of the murder of a prominent individual. As he explains it, you play as Andreas Maler, a journeyman on the cusp of becoming a master artist who’s traveling around Europe, taking on odd jobs as he goes. This time, his pitch won out, and Sawyer got to work on Pentiment: a 16th-century narrative adventure set in Upper Bavaria. Sawyer knew what he pitched would be niche, so he wanted a fairly small team and didn’t want to do anything too mechanically complex. It would incorporate exploring, talking to people, and little puzzles sprinkled throughout. It was not quite a murder mystery, but with mystery elements, with a strong visual style and gameplay, like Night in the Woods, Mutazione, or Oxenfree. During the lull after Deadfire, while discussions about a Microsoft acquisition were floating around, Sawyer revived his old pitch as a narrative adventure game. As Sawyer explains it, Urquhart was “not into” his pitch at the time, and felt people who wouldn’t know history wouldn’t want to play it.īut Sawyer disagreed, and the idea came up once more years later when the two were reunited at Obsidian Entertainment, where Sawyer was the lead designer on Fallout: New Vegas and Pillars of Eternity, and the director on Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire. There, Sawyer was a designer working on projects like Icewind Dale 2 and the original, cancelled Fallout 3. Sawyer first pitched the seed of what would become Pentiment to now-Obsidian CEO Feargus Urquhart back when they were still working at Black Isle together.
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