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A point-and-click adventure has always been my favorite video game genre with brain teasers around every corner, interesting settings and characters, and a primary focus on story. Elysium Discotheque changed my view of what a story-driven adventure game could be. It combined a story-heavy detective adventure with a deeper RPG and choice mechanics than I’ve seen elsewhere, creating a much more engaging and interesting experience. Since then, we’ve had quite a few games that have tried to go down a similar path with varying degrees of success. Repentancedeveloped by Obsidian, is not a clone of Elysium Discotheque, but it shares some common game design DNA. It explores its historical setting through player choices that unfold over time, making it exciting, deep, and innocent. However, it can be a bit of an acquired taste at times.
Focusing less on RPG mechanics and utilizing a real-world setting, Repentance is an interesting exploration and display of 16th century Bavarian society, all wrapped up in several violent criminal cases spanning a quarter of a century. We control Andreas Maler, who spends his early years in the Bavarian town of Tassing at a Benedictine abbey to help with manuscript work and finish his masterpiece. While your sights are set on Nuremberg to eventually become a master artist, you are part of the local town for now.
Then chaos ensues.
After a noble is killed in the abbey and your mentor is caught red-handed, you take it upon yourself to find the real killer and keep your friend off the chopping block. It is the first of several mysteries in Tassing, each occurring several years apart and yet somehow connected to a larger thread. As such, time jumps are common, and with each instance, the community around you changes. Rebellions are formed and disbanded, Catholicism faces Lutheran reformation, and manuscripts copied by hand are slowly disappearing in favor of woodcutting and the book press. It is a time of change, due to external and internal circumstances – and your decisions in Tassing.
What does Repentance especially interesting is how it plays. First and foremost, it’s a story-driven, point-and-click adventure game that offers a number of branches based on your actions. In practice, this means that you have limited time periods in a day to complete certain tasks. It’s work with a short lunch break in the first half, then dinner, some afternoon activity, and sleep in the second half. Walking around town and talking to people doesn’t advance time, but more involved tasks, like following a suspect or breaking into a building, usually take up a whole chunk of the day.
In either case, you’ll have a host of suspects and hunches to follow. However, Repentance will never tell you what to do or lead you to a firm conclusion. It’s easy to get distracted or follow the wrong path altogether, so solving each case is not always as simple as it seems. At the end of the day, the player decides who to blame, and the consequences will ripple through the rest of the game. You may be able to find clues and evidence to pin down the most likely perpetrator, but if you prefer to eliminate a particularly annoying or bad character, you’re welcome to do so. In my first case, I fixed a specific character who was behaving strangely, only to find justifiable reasons for the behavior that were unrelated to the murder at hand. I was running out of time, so I had to decide whether to charge that individual, knowing full well that my friend’s neck would meet the sword otherwise.
the road Repentance deals with decisions is interesting, and it is easily its strongest feature. I haven’t completed any more playthroughs yet, but it’s clear that there’s a decent degree of choice and branching paths to explore. Andreas seems to be the protagonist of this story, but he is only part of a story that is much bigger than himself. Within the city and among its inhabitants, your choices and consequences are seen and felt – sometimes immediately, sometimes years or decades later.
I already mentioned that Repentance doesn’t opt for traditional RPG mechanics like Elysium Discotheque, but that is not the whole story. At the start of the game, Andreas previously studied at university to no avail, but he has a few scraps of knowledge left. The player can decide on the background and which regions of the world Andreas has seen before. For example, we started the game with proficiency in French, decent speaking skills and a legal background. Going forward, we can engage in those topics with additional dialogue options that can help us in solving cases.
As time passes between each instance, our protagonist gains additional abilities along the way, adding new dialogue options for each instance and game section. The game uses a skill control system for certain dialogue choices, which are largely influenced by previous decisions and choices. Although Repentance is a small-scale game, it gives you a lot of freedom and choice to deal with its history and see changes develop over time. This freedom is worth revisiting the adventure for several games, depending on your choices and their results.
The cases are a device to explore the relationships and social structures of the time, with a heavy emphasis on arts and crafts. Its innocent insistence on historical accuracy in both appearance and content may not appeal to some. This is a text-heavy game with tons of dialogue, none of which is voiced. Instead, residents in the city speak with different writing styles. Simple cursive with lots of spelling mistakes for the peasants, fine writing for the clergy and nobles, or printed text for the local printers. Text is written with some colored accents, such as red for religious signs and expressions, as would be the case in writings of that day and age.
Repentance also goes out of its way to provide focused glimpses into the daily lives of most residents. During lunch or dinner, you are usually hosted by a family or a person of your choice. You will engage in conversation that may be relevant to the present case, but may only illustrate their general well-being or frustration, such as the huge taxes demanded by the abbey, the miller being an unpleasant person, or contempt for the common man. You will be served very different foods, from basic to expensive, and you may eat more than the children of a poor family because you are a guest.
At other times, you can participate in one-off mini-games. Some of them are relevant to the current case, but there are also the occasional card games and craft-related exercises. If you have the patience for it, the attention and commitment to getting every detail right is astounding and greatly enriches the experience. If not, the experience will likely feel sluggish as it delves into deeply detailed text conversations. It’s a slow burn, and it often feels like reading comprehension work; if that’s not something you’re up for, the adventure can sometimes go on.
You can choose to use the accessibility feature to make writing easier, and I could see that some people would need it. Some of the texts are difficult to read and often animated in a way that can make some sentences difficult to understand, especially in the absence of voiceovers. It’s an engaging experience and can get slow at times, which isn’t helped by the wall of text you see every step of the way. Repentance also uses unique vocabulary and references to various events or characters, which are underlined in red and have references you can look up. For example, it can show a picture of the person referenced in a conversation if you forgot who they were, and a glossary explains the most important keywords. If you’re a history buff, there’s no better way to immerse yourself in this period.
The commitment to historical accuracy transcends every fiber of the experience. The images are a cohesive mix of art and prints from the period. It took a while to grow on me, but it represents the time and story remarkably well. It is beautifully animated and colorful from start to finish. Every scene in the game is a picture on a page in a book, and the pages turn back and forth as you walk around the town of Tassing and the abbey.
There’s really little to complain about in the presentation, but if I had to rant, the sound design wasn’t always to my liking. Due to missing voiceovers, you will hear a lot of scribbling on parchment paper, and during scenes with little or no music, it can be very distracting and monotonous. When music plays, you’ll get accurate arrangements that reflect the music culture around the time. It’s no Hans Zimmer, but it fits so perfectly, just like everything else, that you can’t help but admire the effort and craftsmanship involved.
What’s even better is that we didn’t encounter a single technical issue during our review period on the PC, which is always a great sign these days. That said, I wasn’t too much of a fan of its save system. Repentance automatically saves automatically, with no way to manually save or load. While that’s not too new for a choice-based game, I found that sometimes, the auto-save function didn’t save often enough. There were a few cases when I was locked into long conversations with no way to save and return without restarting them. I’m also not a big fan of the maps, menu and interface. They’re not overly complicated, but they’re written in cursive and oddly arranged in a small notebook, which makes tracking your current grades and goals a bit cumbersome.
As a story-driven adventure game, Repentance is a history lesson come to life, with some interesting mysteries to solve and difficult decisions to make. It is a vertical slice of history, and it gives a glimpse of a turbulent period through the experience of a small town. The experience can be a bit sluggish as it sometimes values historical accuracy over player comfort. Your choices affect the Bavarian town of Tassing for a quarter of a century, all while uncovering a truly intriguing mystery. Tasing is the real protagonist here, and I thoroughly enjoyed the experience of being an integral part of its community and participating in its struggles. It is a bit special and stubborn in its delivery, but Repentance is an interesting and worthwhile study of the period, its customs and its affairs.
Score: 8.5/10
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