Pentiment. Obsidian Entertainment. 2022.
To grow up Protestant is to grow up with a very particular story: Martin Luther nailing the Ninety-Five Theses to the Wittenberg church door, rediscovering the Gospel’s basic truth, and transforming the course of history, In one heroic act, he cleared away the debris of medieval superstition and took a stand for freedom, giving voice to thoughts that Europe had barely let itself entertain. Gone was the dead hand of throne and altar. Christian liberty was here.
Of course, the story is more complicated than that. As soon as one starts to read a little deeper in theology and philosophy, tellers of a different tale emerge. What if the real problem was Luther’s revolt against established authority? What if old “Christendom” wasn’t so bad after all, and the real rot lies in the world his Reformation birthed? On this telling, being “Protestant” isn’t something to be proud of, but a badge of embarrassment. This tendency can be so strong that it leads to adopting various forms of hyphenated Catholic identities (“Augsburg-Catholic,” anyone?).
Often lost to view, in these conversations, is any reflection on the condition of possibility for these peculiar feelings, this sense of internal conflict between two rival stories. Such “meta-theological” reflections are the broodings of people for whom history, as such, exists—who consciously understand themselves as living within a social context that both precedes, and shapes, their commitments. History is something that exists both beyond and within the self, something to be argued about and interpreted and ultimately lived into.
And it is the discovery of this concept of history that forms the heart of Pentiment, Obsidian Studios’ fascinating little 2022 video game.
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In fairness, calling Pentiment a “game” may be something of a stretch. Closer to a visual novel, it features an intricate art style consciously modeled after medieval woodcuts and tapestries. As a text-based game told in choose-your-own-adventure style, Pentiment advances its story mostly through dialogue between characters, with the player allowed to select between various dialogue options to which other characters react.
What’s fascinating about Pentiment, though, is less its design than its setting. The game unfolds across three separate time periods—1518, 1525, and 1545—in the Bavarian village of Tassing, against the backdrop of the Lutheran Reformation and peasant unrest. Characters’ lives and stories sprawl across a vast historical canvas, but a canvas of which they themselves are unaware. They exist within history, while simultaneously lacking any freestanding concept of it.
As the 1518 chapter opens, young illuminated-manuscript decorator Andreas Maler finds himself embroiled in a murder mystery: the assassination of local abbey patron Baron Lorenz Rothvogel, who’s been blackmailing monks to support his occult interests. Andreas—the player—must investigate the town and accuse a suspect, but it is clear from the circumstances that the real culprit has likely gotten away.
In 1525, an older and wearier Andreas returns to Tassing. He finds the town a tinderbox ready to explode. Inspired by new political and theological ideas abroad in Germany, the local townspeople are prepared to rebel against the local abbot’s oppressive taxes and land-use policies. When a prominent local organizer dies in a questionable accident, suspicion immediately falls on the monks, and violence results. The abbey’s library—and its records—are destroyed in a great blaze.
The story then advances forward to 1545, where the player assumes control of young bookmaker Magdalena—a little girl in prior chapters. Only here does the player fully apprehend how dramatically the town, and society, have changed in the intervening two decades. With the spread of the Reformation, the rise of print-media culture, and changes in government, new life paths lie open to Magdalena—like rejecting her arranged marriage and leaving Tassing for the wider world.
Before any of that, however, Magdalena must complete a contracted project: a three-panel mural depicting, respectively, Tassing’s pre-Christian history, Tassing’s Christian founding, and the peasant revolt. In so doing, she must, for the first time, exercise a distinctive faculty of judgment: how to tell a history, accounts of which diverge so starkly? Tassing’s residents, for instance, disagree about the causes and legitimacy of the 1525 revolt. But that’s the easy part.
Far more unsettling are the implications of Magdalena’s investigation for the town’s constitutive myth, the local cult of Saint Moritz and Saint Satia. Their (headless) statues were discovered by Tassing’s earliest founders, and their relics adorn the local abbey. But in the game’s climactic scene, Magdalena uncovers a hidden “Mithraeum” beneath the local church. There the local parish priest, Father Thomas, has secreted away the missing pieces of the old statues. “Moritz” and “Satia,” it so happens, are really the pagan gods “Mars” and “Diana” under different names. Tassing’s Christianization was not a founding, but a rebranding. It turns out to be Thomas, not anyone associated with the abbey, who was ultimately responsible for the murders: murders committed to keep alive the faith of the townspeople.
How much truth, Pentiment wonders, is too much? What does this kind of knowledge do to people?
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Pentiment is heavily inspired by Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose (in all the best of ways). It’s a murder mystery that doubles as a commentary on the entire late-medieval period, with a thematic payoff that works because it actually grasps the thought-world within which its characters reside. Indeed, it’s shocking to find a semi-mainstream entertainment product that can boast of this depth of research—ranging over such topics as Marsilio Ficino, the Swabian League, the controversy over double monasteries, and so much more. There are many ways this story could’ve been told. In novelistic form, it might’ve—like Eco’s novel—been content to leave its ambiguities unresolved.
But as a “game” of sorts, Pentiment boasts the added dimension of interactivity. Passivity before the course of human events is not an option; the player, like the residents of the medieval age, must choose what to do. And there are real consequences: across the closing credits, the projected effects of the player’s accumulated decisions across three generations spill out onscreen. Perhaps, the game darkly hints, decisions made in haste might lead to loved ones dying at Inquisition hands.
From a theological perspective, the most interesting set of choices involves one’s attitude toward the Reformation itself, which kindles into full flame across Pentiment’s three acts.
While it is undoubtedly true that at the level of doctrine, there was continuity between the Catholic and Protestant camps across a wide range of topics, Pentiment’s village-level perspective allows the Reformation to be glimpsed once again as a new and challenging thing.
Pentiment’s characters are denied the privilege of hindsight, whether Protestant-inflected or Catholic-inflected. They lack the big-picture framework that would allow them to speak of “social movements” at all. But what they do encounter are strange and surprising ideas calling the status quo into question. The simple insight that the grace of God is not a kind of spiritual technology dispensed by corrupt authorities was, in fact, profoundly disruptive to a society based around obedience to ecclesiastical power. It called into question the very bedrock of everyday social order. This was a shock. Perhaps it was a necessary shock. But it was a turning point nevertheless.
Five centuries later, assessments of that shift may vary. But Pentiment captures the stakes as ordinary people would have understood them. (Despite my intention of playing the game without reference to background knowledge, I found myself trying to stop the impending historical catastrophe of the Peasants’ War by advising townspeople against rebellion. Alas, to no avail.)
The most important player choice, of course, lies at the game’s climax: to reveal the truth about Tassing’s pagan history, or to bury these facts forever. This side of 1525, it feels so very obvious to note that, as Christianity spread through Europe, local cults were often assimilated to a larger Christian tradition to create various syncretic fusions. (The Mexican folk cult of “Santa Muerte” may be a more recognizable example of the phenomenon.)
As Pentiment rightly understands, though, this was not at all the case for much of Christian history. In a medieval context lacking a robust theology of intellectual history—that is, devoid of a C.S. Lewis-style framework for articulating pagan myths as shadows of a Christian truth—how could such a revelation not have been seismically destructive? How could the rude discovery of history, that their patron saints were repristinated Roman gods, not have made shipwreck of the townspeople’s faith?
Reader, I chose to bury the truth. It is a player decision that—despite the fact that Pentiment rewarded me with a relatively upbeat finale—does not sit well with me. In hiding the facts, I found myself in the position of endorsing a kind of ecclesiastical authoritarianism, running off the basic logic of the Index Librorum Prohibitum. Better that the ordinary people not know something that might ruin them, even if it’s true. And in that moment, for the first time, I felt a kind of compassion for the villains of Reformation history, all the corrupt popes and cardinals and functionaries who buried their heads in the sand and tried to block out harsh truths.
Not sympathy, to be clear—I know their decisions, and mine, were the wrong ones. The truth cannot be suppressed forever, and when it bursts forth—in the hands of Spinoza or Reimarus or Strauss or any other historical-critical demythologizer—the record of shoddy attempts at concealment will prove far more destructive to faith than the original “harsh truth” would ever have been. The truth will out—as it must. But the fear of chaos, of total social breakdown if cherished illusions are shattered, is a very powerful fear. And it can become overwhelming.
Discovering history—among other things, discovering that the Bible could pass judgment on received tradition—was a painful process. But it was necessary, and the Reformation can be thanked for accelerating it. Both Catholic and Protestant theologies today wrestle seriously with their relationship to tradition, to the affirmation of perennial truth amidst the contingencies of history. As they must. For there is no epistemological path “back behind” this insight, to the serene ignorance of pre-1545 Tassing.
In any case, Pentiment is a triumph sheerly in virtue of its recreation of a lost world, a world in which theological and political issues are authentically central. There is no trace here of the anachronistic secular cynicism that so often marks depictions of the Middle Ages. This is a story of the medieval age as its inhabitants understood it, and that makes it remarkable.
John Ehrett is a Commonwealth Fellow, and an attorney and writer in Washington D.C. His work has appeared in American Affairs, The New Atlantis, and the Claremont Review of Books. He is a graduate of Patrick Henry College, the Institute of Lutheran Theology, and Yale Law School.