The Director of ’Pentiment’ Wants You to Know How His Characters Ate

Obsidian Entertainment’s latest game, Pentiment, takes its title from the term pentimento, a change made by an artist while painting. Its origin is the Italian word pentirsi, which means to change one’s mind or repent. Pentiment’s aim is to show how history, like oil on a canvas, can be covered, then rediscovered or forgotten.

The game, which has been getting rave reviews, is set in 16th-century Bavaria in the Holy Roman Empire, an area that’s now part of Germany. The player takes control of Andreas Maler, a journeyman artist with a university education, embroiled over 25 years in a series of murders and scandals that take place in the fictional locations of Kiersau Abbey and Tassing. Inspired by Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose, the game tries, as Eco’s novel did, to capture the texture of history, the traces of font and ink, of manuscripts and print wood cuts.

It is, then, a passion project for the game’s director, Josh Sawyer, who’s probably best known for the much loved Fallout New Vegas, as well as helming the nostalgic and pioneering modern isometric RPG Pillars of Eternity. On Twitter and IRL, he radiates enthusiasm for Pentiment’s setting, a time of epic technological and social upheaval that began with the Reformation and ended with the introduction of Copernicus' heliocentric model of the solar system.

To learn more about Pentiment’s uncanny appeal, WIRED got on Zoom with Sawyer to talk about Eco, murder mysteries, double monasteries, and what this newer artform might tell us about early modern history. He recommended some great books too.

This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

WIRED: I'm interested in the relationship between Pentiment and this time in history. Why 16th-century Bavaria?