Pentiment Preview: One Monk Invents a Murder in Fallout New Vegas Director’s Latest Adventure

ign.com:

Years ago, I frequented a website called The Toast that ran, alongside wonderful columns and criticism, various literary nerd gags including a recurring bit called “Two Monks.” Two Monks was written as a dialogue between the titular religious duo who were, in most of the episodes, trying to figure out best practices for medieval art by bantering about the “correct” way to depict various animals, people, and objects shown in real-life artworks. If you’ve had any experience with medieval art, you know the field is absolutely bizarre when taken out of context, so most of the conversations were along the lines of how many eyes a dog should have (seven), what wrestling is (confused hugging) and whether birds have meetings (yes, complete with a Meeting Hat).

But the best thing about Two Monks was how its attention to weird details made the real people of that era seem more like, you know, real people. Not the intangible, lofty figures that often seem to populate mainstream looks at history. Which brings me to Pentiment: a game that is far more serious than Two Monks, but reminds me of the column in its passionate embrace of the weird details that don’t often emerge in mainstream depictions of medieval Europe, and the ways in which those details chip away at the humanity of a time we can never personally experience.

I jumped into Pentiment in media res, following the murder of nobleman Lorenz Rothvogel and the understandable accusation of a monk who was found holding a bloody dagger near the body. Andreas, however, is friends with the monk, who claims he didn’t commit the crime – which leaves Andreas to investigate and ultimately accuse an alternative culprit. I was given the choice between three different investigative paths