Letting the Days Go By: The Historical Horrors of Pentiment
This column is a reprint from Unwinnable Monthly #185. If you like what you see, grab the magazine for less than ten dollars, or subscribe and get all future magazines for half price.
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We are what we’re afraid of.
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Warning: Spoilers ahead for the ending of the game
Okay, so, I know what you’re thinking: “Emma, we stayed with you through the Ooblets thing, but this one is such a stretch. There’s no combat, no QTEs… for God’s sake, the game is about politics and the Catholic Church.”
And you would be correct in all of those statements, dear reader. However, I would argue that simply because the narrative motifs and aesthetic trappings of Obsidian’s delightful old-world RPG don’t speak to a traditional horror sensibility does not mean that we cannot find some truly scary shit to talk about in this game. Because we can. I can. And now I will.
For those of you who are unfamiliar, the basic plot of Pentiment follows a novice painter, Andreas Maler, through his many significant visits to the small farming town of Tassing and the abbey that oversees it. Each time Andreas arrives in Tassing, tragic ends begin to befall those around him, and Andreas inevitably finds himself tasked with figuring out whodunit, and why. Meanwhile, a mysterious figure leaves cryptic notes around town, weaving a web of intrigue, scandal and death. Murder mysteries and thrillers have long been considered an adjacent genre to horror, so I feel like I have enough latitude here to make the connection to this column.
While there is an awful lot of murder in this game, let me be clear in saying that the death is not the point here. Rather, the death is a symptom of a bigger issue that haunts the legacy not just of the church, but of all of Western civilization – the inherent malleability of historical truth.
To elaborate: The final sequence in the game reveals that the town priest has been orchestrating the murders for decades so that it is never revealed that the patron saints of the town (the source of much tourism money) are fake – they never visited the town and are based on Roman artifacts found by the first Christian settlers. Out of fear that if people knew their local saints were ersatz, they would lose faith altogether, the priest leverages the scandals he learns about in confession to manipulate the townsfolk into killing potential whistleblowers. Thus, the entire legacy of the town, and the guilt of the two “culprits” you as Andreas identify earlier in the story (both of whom are immediately executed), is built on a carefully preserved falsehood.
When I first played this game, I found the big reveal to be a little anticlimactic. The issue of Christian appropriation of pagan infrastructure and theology is so well-known today that I had trouble feeling the emotive impact of the conclusion – who cared that the statues weren’t of Christian saints, but really Roman gods? Not me. And, as it turns out, neither did the townsfolk – when I chose to tell everyone “the truth,” the town didn’t descend into radical atheism. They shrugged, hired a new priest and set about rebuilding the church (which collapsed, long story).
The really scary thing about Pentiment is not that the Catholic Church is built on a bed of lies, but rather that the whole game rests on the idea that “what happened” is not so much about literal truth, but about what people believed. In the first two acts of the game, Andreas “solves” two murders, and the culprits are brought to some form of justice. The thing here, though, is that there isn’t a reward in the game for getting it “right,” nor a punishment for getting it “wrong.” All that happens is that everyone in the town believes that the person you pointed to was the bad guy, and that’s that. Further, there’s never any definitive proof that you did actually get the person who committed the crime, and you/Andreas are haunted by death and your choices for the rest of the game.
The fact that the game has a “Schrodinger’s Murderer” approach to these choices is fascinating, because it points to the very real phenomenon that world leaders like Napoleon and Churchill have identified for millennia – that the history we record and maintain is a “fable agreed upon” written by the people in positions of power. What actually happened matters little to none, both at the macro-societal level and here, in this tiny fictional village. What matters is the first convincing explanation to enter the public sphere, which soon becomes functional truth. And no matter how hard people work to debunk or correct blatant inaccuracies (I’m thinking here of the podcast “You’re Wrong About” or current political fact-checking services), once something achieves cultural velocity, it’s almost impossible to change the story.
So, that’s why Pentiment is terrifying. In a cultural moment rife with rivals jockeying for the ability to write the next chapter of American history (which, no matter who is holding the pen, will certainly contain some measure of polite fiction), this game points the finger squarely back at us – we don’t pay attention, we don’t go looking for our own answers, we let someone else do the unpleasant work of defining truth and so we’re susceptible to the consequences of whatever version of history makes its way to us. And we may never even realize that what we think we know is true, we are simply made to believe.
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Emma Kostopolus loves all things that go bump in the night. When not playing scary games, you can find her in the kitchen, scientifically perfecting the recipe for fudge brownies. She has an Instagram where she logs the food and art she makes, along with her many cats.
