Where in the World Is William of Baskerville?

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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Interfacing in the millennium.

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Pentiment‘s debt to The Name of the Rose is both well-documented and amusingly obvious. Obsidian set themselves an interesting task in translating a story that’s legendary for being dense and obscure into an interactive medium. While there are many little simplifications that make Pentiment a more digestible experience than Eco’s novel might have been, it’s a less obvious choice that affects the structure and experience of Pentiment the most: the choice to forego any analogue for William of Baskerville, the narrator Adso of Melk’s master and the primary vehicle for plot, background, context, historical knowledge, theological understanding, argument, banter, brainstorming, idle chatter, quiet muttering and general information in The Name of the Rose. Instead, Pentiment mirrors Adso with Andreas Maler, an outsider in the town of Tasing, and supplements his (and the player’s) contextual ignorance with a glossary.

Adso has a pretty easy job. He wanders around and fetches what he’s asked and listens to his boss monologue about anything and everything. Andreas, on the other hand, is tasked with the slightly more complicated job of actually solving crimes. He does not do this particularly efficiently; then again, neither does William, whose anguish at the end of The Name of the Rose is due to the lack of a murderous pattern, his instinctual desire to see signs where there are none and the mirrored desire of the killer, who uses the same signs to justify his crimes as holy. Eco was a semiotician, and his interest in the representation of concepts and the meaning given by individual interpretation is a key aspect of the mystery in The Name of the Rose. Because Pentiment is meant to be played and understood to at least some extent by the reader, it must sacrifice some of Eco’s obscurity.

Adso is primarily passive; Andreas is active. Adso’s job is to bear witness to William, who is given agency in the machinations of plot through his reputation and his extensive knowledge; Andreas, on the other hand, is new to town and puppeteer-ed by a player who in all likelihood does not come with an encyclopedic understanding of 16th century Bavaria, and who needs a little bit of help to not get entirely and hopelessly lost. The glossary is a simple fix to this problem, and more elegant than having Andreas be trailed by an informative follower (Caspar, Andreas’ apprentice in the second act, is an earnest tween who thankfully knows nothing about anything and is therefore not annoying.) However, the structure of a glossary means that in Pentiment, facts are presented as informative, singular and permanent. Clicking on a highlighted phrase in the first act will present the exact same sentence as clicking on it in the third act. It is a, perhaps, unavoidable consequence of any sort of mystery game, which tend to lean towards dossiers to distribute information: they are simply structured, easy to reference and comprehensive, all necessary to solve a mystery (Pentiment‘s barely-navigable “journal” does, on the other hand, contribute to Andreas’ general sense of what the fuck man this isn’t even my job).

In contrast to Pentiment‘s informative glossary, The Name of the Rose is discursive in its approach to facts. The obvious and most significant aspect of this is that most information is filtered to Adso through William, who must speak, remember, recall, listen, articulate, process information, second-guess himself and ensure or (refuse to ensure) understanding before giving his facts practical application. Many of William’s breakthroughs come not from his own knowledge but through his transmission of his own knowledge, whether it be from talking himself through a tricky aspect of the scenario, making a connection he hadn’t noticed before, or from Adso’s contributions, as he plays the reader-role and makes William be more specific about his obscurities. The Name of the Rose is not concerned with facts so much as William’s understanding of facts, his translation of them into the world and his application of them in the mystery he sets out to solve. This is why his anguish at the end of the book; though he solved the mystery, located Jorge and discovered who had committed what crime, it was his comprehension of the meaning of the scene that was fundamentally incorrect.

Pentiment makes its own nods towards this rejection of the traditional detective story. No matter how much information you gain, Andreas will never actually solve the mystery of the murders – the culprit presents himself, at the end, and whoever you condemned to execution earlier in the story stays a sacrifice to that lack of understanding. It’s not only a rejection of the literary tradition that a mystery should be able to be solved by a sufficiently apt reader, but it’s a rejection of the gaming tradition that a player with all the facts should be able to solve the crime. Whether the player considers that an interesting subversion or a frustrating evasion of player agency is up to them. Pentiment‘s glossary, on top of its more traditional mystery game mechanics, serve to make the game feel fair, even if it is not. It translates the complexity of the world, the obscurity of the historical setting and the complication of a populated town into something comprehensible to the layperson, so they can participate without feeling too out of their depth. In contrast, The Name of the Rose‘s denseness does not need to be participated in, only witnessed, and so the facts as they present themselves are able to take much more malleable form. When William makes a connection out loud in front of Adso, the perimeters of their understanding both shift – Adso-as-listener and Adso-as-narrator – as William’s understanding of his own understanding also shifts (as, of course, does the understanding of the reader: unlike the player, who must be a participant, the reader need not understand what the fuck is going on.) As Eco said in his later postscript:

Adso was very important for me. From the outset I wanted to tell the whole story (with its mysteries, its political and theological events, its ambiguities) through the voice of someone who experiences the events, records them all with the photographic fidelity of an adolescent, but does not understand them (and will not understand them fully even as an old man, since he then chooses a flight into the divine nothingness, which was not what his master had taught him) – to make everything understood through the words of one who understands nothing. […] I wonder if this was not one of the features that made the novel readable for unsophisticated readers. They identified with the innocence of the narrator, and felt exonerated even when they did not understand everything.

With Andreas, there is no innocence, because in a game a lack of understanding is not exonerating: it is instead a mechanical barrier to the feeling of fair participation, a damning of the player to their ignorance. Andreas cannot witness as Adso does. Andreas must, instead, literally play the cards he is dealt, and move himself through the story by pointing fingers, saying names and laying blame. And so, in order to facilitate that movement, facts must be facts: not memories, translations, interpretations, discussions, guesses, theories, readings, controversies or explanations. There cannot be any William to give meaning to the uncountably vast mysteries of the universe, to quantify variants of truths and distill them for Adso’s comprehension. There is only Andreas, and the player behind him, taking two and two and doing their best to make them four.

But Pentiment does not entirely abandon the interests of its progenitor. Both texts are pointed about their own artifice. The Name of the Rose is a story within a story, prefaced by Eco’s fictional discovery of a fictional manuscript that has been fictionally translated, fictionally lost, fictionally found and fictionally lost again. With this, he does not just explain the errors in his own text but highlights them, pulling the story he presents the reader with away from any literal interpretation and into the realm of a retold, rediscovered tale, many spaces removed from the original intent of the author – a sign, not a truth. On the other hand, Pentiment leans into its protagonist’s vocation and situates itself within an illuminated manuscript, highlighting the visual nature of a videogame (and the charming art style) as well as cleverly presenting the glossary mechanic. Instead of Eco’s meta-introduction, Pentiment ends with a meta-epilogue, the camera pulling away from the 2D manuscript to reveal a 3D room, where the secondary protagonist Magdalene had been painting her mural. Pentiment winks at its own artificiality and our assumptions about the space in which we were participating; a game within a game; a sign conveying a meaning; a truth realer than the truth we were given.

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Maddi Chilton is an internet artifact from St. Louis, Missouri. Follow her on Bluesky.