I think it was also more railroad-y than it appeared. At the end of Chapter Two, I thought, “I guess I should have learned more about the miller so that his actions make more sense,” but given how Chapter Three unfolds, I’m not sure there could ever be more than a one-size-fits-all explanation for his behavior since events have to unfold in a certain way regardless of who you accuse. And in Chapter Three, I was asked multiple times about whether the character would leave town or stay and why they would make that decision, and none of that had any bearing at all on what they ended up doing. Like you said, Chapter Three didn’t have many choices or optional scenes, so the game asking me to make choices it had no intention of honoring stuck out.

I think it was an ambitious and interesting game that stumbled at the very end, which hurt my overall impression.

One of the things I like Pentiment doing well is making special speech options not a no-brainer. A lot of RPGs claim to make failures as interesting as successes. But usually if you see a highlighted option it’s just a “skip some gameplay” button. Pillars of Eternity does a lot by adding plenty of speech options based on personality and background which *usually* don’t really matter and sometimes may even make things worse. Pentiment was a delight in that regard cause backgrounds I’ve picked provided terrible answers half of the time. Especially logician phrases tend to make the character sound like a prick: when someone gets emotional you can often say something very logical and completely inappropriate.

Anyway, as you say, GOTY, easily. I always appreciate Obsidian mechanically complex games (PoE2 is the only RPG I have ever 100%’d in terms of achievements, and no other is even close) but I have no regrets they strayed from making the same game again and again and instead made this.

Yeah, great game and so delightful to see it get the praise that Josh and the team at Obsidian deserve!