Pentiment was an unexpected game, so it’s only natural that it would have unexpected inspirations. Would you believe that one of those inspirations for director Josh Sawyer was famous semiotic, philosopher, and historian Umberto Eco?
Without getting too bogged down in the details of his achievements, Eco was a very accomplished academic and philosopher, who parlayed his intelligence to writing popular novels. As a professor, Eco had interests in deep subjects like the medieval age, and also semiotics, the study of signs and how we assign meaning to them.
Eco sought to draw the public to share his interests when he wrote The Name of The Rose, a medieval age detective mystery with deep religious and metatextual themes, and the lesser known but possibly more accomplished Baudolino, a story of an unreliable narrator who tells entertaining but unbelievable stories of his adventures across medieval Europe.
Both of these books are relevant to Pentiment, because Josh actually name drops them as directly influencing the game. Like The Name of The Rose, Pentiment is set in a medieval abbey. Josh liked the idea of setting the game in an abbey, and tying it to religious themes, as religion was a major part of medieval life.
More importantly, Josh cites a scene in Baudolino that inspired the way he went about writing Pentiment. In Baudolino, there is a part of the first chapter where the paragraph gets reproduced in such a way that it’s suggested the author failed to remove the original writing that was on the paper where he wrote his story. He even apologizes for it. This scene is Eco trying to make readers think about metatextual interpretation and semiotics, without lecturing about it.
Now Josh too that inspiration and put his own modern spin on it to fit the conventions of a video game. As he explains, while The Name of The Rose has a clear ending that tie up all the loose ends, his Pentiment does not have such a convenient sense of closure.
Josh points to another inspiration, Night In The Woods, and explains that he recognized that there were things that can be done with text, that can only be done in the medium of video games, and he sought out to realize that potential.
Josh also confirmed what he stated in an earlier interview, that Pentiment only exists because of Microsoft Game Pass. He added that this program, and the success of digital distribution as a game model, convinced him he could make Pentiment feasible for his publisher, and he could bring his vision to the gaming audience.
Source: Wired
