From the old world comes a heritage of beauty and a heritage of hate, and on us falls the reckoning. Every age creates the next, pictographed in bloody definition, as the mother births the child, who must be washed clean of the mother’s blood and shit. Living history surrounds us; we are making its monuments. In the past this could take the form of a gothic cathedral, its heights a symbol of the heights of god and church, its marble dug out of a Roman quarry. Today it might be a tower of steel and glass, where businessmen decide what newspaper gets the ax.
Modernity understands that a monument is an antenna, an information medium. Indeed, we’re more aware of information and its effects than probably any audience since the Reformation, when the printing press accessed a public opinion outside the purchase of authority. Pentiment speaks to our present time of social media and data science through that past world of nascent revolution, choosing as its setting the fictional town of Tassing.
Set in the Bavarian mountains, Tassing demonstrates late medieval institutions. The struggling peasant, the craftsman, the university educated professional form the cast of this murder mystery, as do the monk and the lord, who are sadly one and the same. Dominating the town from a nearby hill, Kiersau Abbey levies taxes and demands the town’s labor. In a calculated anachronism, Kiersau also features a scriptorium, a medieval monastic writing workshop that, by the 16th century, had largely been replaced by printers’ workshops.
The year is 1518. Martin Luther’s ideas are spreading, and Baron Rothvogel is about to deliver a book of history to the abbey. We can connect the two to gain an impression of something momentous. What is in the book, the Historiae Tassiae, that is, the History of Tassing? The baron provokes the abbot by bringing up Luther. That same night the noble is silenced in death, the book stolen. Terrified that the baron’s powerful friends will seek retribution, the abbot pins the murder on Brother Piero, the old monk who finds the body.
Journeyman artist Andreas Maler is on the cusp of finishing his masterwork at Kiersau when Baron Rothvogel arrives. Brother Piero is, of course, Andreas’ friend and mentor, and the artist (unusually) wastes no time in starting an investigation. He soon discovers a series of clandestine notes encouraging the townspeople to murder the baron by leveraging their fears and grievances. The murder is really an attack by an anonymous writer. This figure whom we conspiratorially call the Thread Puller will profoundly change the community of Tassing.
Pentiment divides its play between conversations and physical activities like puzzles and minigames. Doing each of these takes time. Time always runs out. One of the key features of Pentiment plays out heavily during this portion, that we can never definitively identify a murderer. Whether we answer to an archbishop or an angry mob, the problem of time remains the same. However solid the case, when we name names, it’s always in the presence of serious doubt.
Andreas’ conversation mechanics are informed by famous medieval figures. The mythical Prester John rules the court of his mind, shaped like an image of the ideal city. Dante’s Beatrice voices prudence, Socrates encourages a pursuit of truth, and St. Grobian, the patron of fools, is the troll on our shoulder. These medieval constructions implicitly promise to help us solve the mystery, but they cannot solve the problem of Tassing’s murders for the same reason that medieval institutions could not solve the problem of Protestantism. They were both created by the same minds.
The medieval world was laid out in scripture, God’s will up to the interpretation of the learned. Theologians sometimes distrusted reason, considering it to be but a handmaid of revelation, which after all explains all. Yet after the Reformation, there existed not one scripture but differing interpretations of it. Did reason fail to guide humanity to absolute truth? The Socrates in Andreas’ mind doesn’t consider a world in which it is impossible to ever know, and yet, to be compelled to live and act. That world is being born in Andreas’ mind as it was in our history, a world that nonetheless employs fallible reason in a pantomime of the search for truth.
In classic mystery, the detective must reveal the murderer to conclude the story and confirm the reader’s own investigation. Pentiment may admire the classics but indulges in no such nostalgia. The investigation starts veering off from murder, to the laws of the medieval world, and man’s place in it. Andreas’ inability to deduct an answer in the short time allotted starts bleeding into the truth of his personal life. The investigation of a single question becomes an investigation of existence, the seeker a detective in his own life, and in his own life failing, and thus failing in the search for truth.
What can we do with the little we do know? We build a list of suspects, motives and means. Often a suspect is guilty of something else, if not the murder. We can never eliminate reasonable doubt, however. So what decision will we make in the absence of knowledge? How will we feel when we see the results? Truth may be something we are due, as is justice, but justice is not truth, it is the performance of rules, however much we wish it proceeded from truth. As we surrender our incomplete information to the judge, his executioner in toe, we cannot help but observe that the pantomime of truth has been acted out primarily in ourselves.
Notice that the detective is neither a professional nor official investigator. Andreas spontaneously decides to prove his mentor’s innocence, his agency based on a simple fact that contributed to the times. A man like any other may determine the truth for themselves, and once they have the means to form an opinion, the most any authority can do is prevent its speech, but not its conception.
For centuries, intellectual dispute had belonged to a small elite armed with a powerful information technology: literacy. Still, this group could communicate with itself but not with a popular audience. By the time Martin Luther drafted his 95 theses, there existed a printing industry able and ready to reproduce his text. Luther himself could not explain the wildfire spread of his thoughts, but spread they did. The anxiety this produced is present in both subtle and overt ways in Pentiment, but we can also recognize it as the sadly familiar anxiety we feel at the spread of the far-right.
We can hardly fail to see the resemblance between the Thread Puller’s note-in-your-pocket modus operandi and Cambridge Analytica’s targeted ad campaign. Eerily aware of their greatest pains and fears, Tassing’s hidden hand offers each injured soul the perfect opportunity to take revenge. Data science business Cambridge Analytica handed Steve Bannon — of Breitbart infamy — a method developed with information harvested from 87 million Facebook accounts. The company used the data “to exploit what we knew about them and target their inner demons.” If we feel that a message was speaking directly to us, it’s because it was.
When talking heads pour hatred on minority groups and wonder aloud if anybody — oh, anybody! — will do anything about it, we shouldn’t be surprised that an acolyte will start planning the deed that was long planted in them as fantasy. We can hardly divest the murderer of responsibility through this, but we should understand the power of the message.
Misinformation attempts to create a tidal wave of information that will make the reader believe their beliefs are reasonable and universal, and whose repetition will exhaust and drown out any correction. The collision between lies and truth instead results in two competing world views. Much like a virus, misinformation can attach to a reader’s vulnerability and stay there. Creating a world in which the pillars of logic and reality are so broken that it is impossible to really know anything.
Unlike the real world’s far more organized state actors, Pentiment’s whisperer behind the murders fails to achieve their aim, their messages guiding free people down a path they may have chosen anyway. In the game’s final chapter, the detective is absent. An investigation nonetheless takes place. This time a local Tassinger performs the same process with the same mechanics.
The drama appears far more mundane. Tassing’s council has commissioned a series of murals of the community’s history. When the Thread Puller strikes the artist in charge, the council entrusts his daughter with completing the work. We do not pursue the Thread Puller because we are disconnected from the history of murder conspiracy.
The play during this final chapter focuses on collecting and selecting stories, interpretations, ideas, about events far into Tassing’s past but also about those we helped determine. We are doing a commission, dutifully performing our research until, of course, we find it, somewhere in history’s ruins, a monument relaying a message the Thread Puller was desperate to hide.
When we look at a church we can see a composite for a wholesome image of a whole institution and a whole history, one roof for all peoples in the house of god. The murals we author are the image deconstructed, a multilayered community truth that can also represent a more general historic truth sure to ruffle conservative tunics. The council entrusts this representation to an artist and ultimately accepts whatever form we decide, however impolitic, because they recognize its content as theirs.
When at the end of the game each character expresses their feelings about what happened, it renders a sense of the ambivalence of history, of the pain but also of that gained by it. But perhaps more important is that their candid reflections show that the Tassingers determined their own destiny and formed their own opinions of which the detective was but a handmaid.
Pentiment is a word that refers to the process of uncovering an earlier image beneath a newer one. It describes the mystery aspect, a mechanic in the game, but also our changing perception of ourselves and our history, and the way we can reevaluate the past and take lessons from it. The Reformation asked both those with power and without to take sides. Pentiment’s players will likewise act out a process in which they determine their own position. It is possible that their conclusions may converge into a dominant trend. If so, can we say that reason has guided them to the truth?
Great article!