The best novel that I read in 2022, if I’m being honest with myself, was Disco Elysium. Robert Kurvitz’s gonzo-murder-mystery fantasia1 made me guffaw, flinch, and weep, and even twelve months later, I can still recall specific lines,2 while lesser books have completely disappeared from my memory. The thing is, Disco Elysium isn’t a book—it’s a video game, albeit a text-based one, with graphics to illustrate the characters and setting. Some of the dialogue is voiced by actors, though I usually found myself plowing through the text so quickly that the story was, functionally, a reading experience. And it was some of the best (fiction) reading I did last year. I wasn’t alone in thinking that it might qualify as literature—not as a sop to justify the baying of nerds who want their hobby legitimized, but because Disco Elysium is fundamentally a piece of writing, and one done very well.
This wasn’t the first game to get literary buzz (Planescape: Torment also comes up in these conversations a lot, with good reason), but it’s a small club, riven with disagreement and faction. One thing everybody will probably be able to agree on, though, is a recent entry to the literary games club: Obsidian Entertainment’s Pentiment. I’ll be adding it to my list of novels read this year, and I expect it’ll be one of the best. Even better, it’s about books.
But first, let’s cover the basics. Pentiment is an adventure game that takes place entirely around the fictional Bavarian village of Tassing, in the early 16th century. You play as Andreas Maler, a journeyman artist completing his training at nearby Kiersau Abbey, a double monastery home to both monks and nuns (though they are strictly segregated). Early in the story, a prominent person is murdered at the abbey. Andreas’s mentor is identified as the chief suspect, though he is very obviously innocent and his arrest is politically motivated. As the abbey waits for a judge to arrive from Innsbruck, the abbot allows Andreas to investigate the crime and exonerate his friend.
The investigation, like everything else in Pentiment, happens entirely through text-based conversations. (There is no voice-acting of any kind.) Andreas runs around the town and the abbey, talking with monks, nuns, peasants, and shopkeepers who might shed light on the crime, the victim, and his relationships around the small, tight-knit community. Time is limited: important conversations advance the in-game clock, and there aren’t enough hours in the day to pursue every lead, check every piece of evidence, and follow every rumor. In a few cases, it isn’t even clear if a suspect’s suspicious behavior is actually related to the crime. Is the occult-obsessed monk really a suspect, or have you just been conditioned by too many Dan Brown novels to view his kooky pastime suspiciously?
Andreas’s opportunities are also informed by his background, which you get to shape in meaningful ways. Did your Andreas use his years in university to study theology, law, or medicine? Does he have a passion for Latin or drinking? Did he study abroad in Venice or Bruges? I rolled my own Andreas as a nerdy bookworm who speaks Italian, which opened up some new avenues in conversation. Unlike just about every other adventure game, though, these extra conversation options aren’t automatically the most relevant or useful answer: many of the bibliophile answers, I found out, were wildly inappropriate when trying to ingratiate myself with illiterate peasants. Playing Pentiment well is more about reading the room than reading the skill-sheet.
The rooms, by the way—and the rest of the village—are gorgeous. The entire game is illustrated in a vibrant, period-accurate art style. Characters, weather, buildings, animals, and everything else are based on real artworks, woodcuts, scripts, and fonts from the early 16th century.
Yes, fonts: instead of voice acting, a character’s manner of speaking is represented by different types. Older, conservative monks use the Gothic-style Fraktur, while more liberal monks (and Andreas) use clean, well-spaced Roman and Italic hands. Peasants scratch out most of their words in a hurried scrawl, and—for my personal favorite—the village printer’s words are typeset on the screen as he speaks. Any reference to God, His Son, or just His pronouns are even properly rubricated.
This makes sense for a game that includes a bibliography in the credits, and lists Christopher de Hamel as a consultant. I’m not a historian of 16th-century Bavaria, but Pentiment’s team clearly went to great effort to get the details right. Pentiment’s murder mystery is ultimately one of the weakest parts about it (see my spoiler-y thoughts in this footnote3), but it’s convincing and moving as a social drama. The best moments in the game come when you’re simply whittling with peasants and chatting about the St. John’s Eve festival, or looking at obscure manuscripts with the abbey librarian. Andreas himself is not a traditional blank-slate game protagonist, but a man with his own insecurities and secrets (along with a pretty sweet memory palace presided over by Prester John and Socrates).
Like all good historical fiction, Pentiment is full of details from the past—the stink of chamberpots, the gooey muck of village roads—without being overwhelmed by them. The Protestant Reformation and the Peasants’s War are important to the story because they were world-shattering crackups that affected everybody in their path, but different people were affected differently, and nobody at the time had an especially good idea of what was going on or where things would end up. That’s what history feels like when it happens to you, too: do you normally have long, didactic conversations with your friends about living through the Internet Revolution or the Anthropocene, or whatever future historians will come up to describe the early 21st century? You probably complain about work, worry about sick family members, or gossip about your jackass neighbor, just like the Tassingers do, and just like people have always done.
The game is admirably free of pedantic dioramas where we all sit down and learn about papal indulgences. There are some minor concessions to modern sensibilities, especially around gender roles and religious toleration, but within limits that are believable for these characters in these places. One of the Kiersau nuns, in an early scene, laments how few opportunities she has as a woman, but also admits that working within the confines of the nunnery at least gives her a chance to receive an education, travel, and work in a profession. The peasants are good, God-fearing folk most of the time, but can also form an angry mob without the patience or understanding to wait for due process. The abbot of Kiersau is an asshole, but…well, actually Father Gernot is just an asshole. One of the few times Pentiment gestures towards actual historical interpretation is its suggestion that the difference between Reformation taking hold in one village versus another might just come down to the competency of the local abbot.
Pentiment is unsentimental about its times, but it takes them seriously. Here are people living together, doing their best to live well and make sense of things with what time and fate have given them, just like us. And for that, it’s one of the best novels I’ve read—and played—this year.
From the Archives
A few months ago, I did a deep dive into a particular medieval manuscript which would have been perfectly appropriate for Pentiment. Read more about Hugh of Saint-Victor’s Little Book of Noah’s Ark below:
And that’s it for this week. Happy reading!
Disco Elysium’s plot and setting are rather hard to describe, but I’ve gotten a lot of mileage out of telling friends that it’s like Inside Out, only for a burned-out, alcoholic detective who lives inside a Tom Waits song, and you can put all your experience points into leveling up your art appreciation skills
“The funk soul brother at the back of his head has gone dark. Forever.”
“Help! There’s a head on my neck and I’m stuck inside of it!”
The notion that Tassing’s resident saints were actually adapted Roman myths seemed like a weird revelation for the last act, given that these connections are strongly hinted at throughout the early chapters. I thought these initial references were just a fun nod to how Europe was Christianized, but maybe these things only jump out to ultra-dorks like me. As for figuring out the conspirators, it’s not too hard by the start of Act III. If you just start eliminating characters who are, well, eliminated, you wind up with a pretty small pool of suspects.