Interview and Q&A with Josh Sawyer, Game Director of Pentiment

Abstract: Josh Sawyer is the game director of ‘Pentiment’ at Obsidian. This interview with him was conducted live on Twitch on the 8th of May 2023 by two researchers. Dr. Alan van Beek (German Studies, University of Salzburg) and Dr. Lucas Haasis (History, University of Oldenburg) posed questions relevant to Game Studies, History and Literary Science. Mr. Sawyer revealed his thoughts, background information, historical source material and inspirations for various aspects of the game set in the 16th century. This provides valuable insights for a planned interdisciplinary edited volume on ‘Pentiment’ to be released open access on mittelalter.hypotheses.org in 2024. For long-term archiving and more precise quoting with time-stamps toward promoting an open science culture in the humanities and beyond, here is a transcript of the interview available on Youtube.

Zusammenfassung: Josh Sawyer ist der Game Director von ‘Pentiment’ bei Obsidian. Dieses Interview mit ihm wurde am 8. Mai 2023 von zwei Wissenschaftler*innen live auf Twitch geführt. Dr. Alan van Beek (Universität Salzburg) und Dr. Lucas Haasis (Universität Oldenburg) stellten ihm Fragen aus den Bereichen Game Studies, Geschichte und Literaturwissenschaft. Josh Sawyer sprach über seine Gedanken, Hintergründe, historisches Quellenmaterial und Inspirationen zu verschiedenen Aspekten des im 16. Jahrhundert angesiedelten Spiels. Dies liefert wertvolle Erkenntnisse für einen geplanten interdisziplinären Sammelband zum Thema ‘Pentiment’, der 2024 als Open Access auf mittelalter.hypotheses.org veröffentlicht werden soll. Für die Langzeitarchivierung und präzisere Zitation mit Zeitstempeln zur Förderung einer offenen Wissenschaftskultur in den Geisteswissenschaften und darüber hinaus ist hier ein Transkript des Interviews auf Youtube verfügbar.

[00:00:01.050] – Haasis

Hello, good evening from Europe and good morning in America. Welcome to this interview and Q&A with Josh Sawyer, Studio Design Director at Obsidian Entertainment and Director of the game Pentiment, a narrative point and click adventure game set in sixteenth century Bavaria, Germany, focused around the protagonist Andreas Maler, a journeyman artist living and working in a time of great upheaval, great religious, political, and cultural change, indeed the crossroads between the late medieval and the early modern period. Following Andreas’ path, we can experience the estates society, we can get a glimpse into life in monasteries and villages, but also the world of art in this time, a “living world inspired by illuminated manuscripts and printed woodcuts”, as you put it yourself. The setting is the fictional Bavarian village of Tassing, but in the background, large-scale events are afoot: the Reformation is already bubbling up as well as the peasants wars – and there’s also a murder case to solve. Clearly, this is a wonderful game, profoundly researched and has duly attracted a lot of attention recently, receiving many positive reviews and recently receiving a nomination for the German Computer Games Award. Therefore, we are very pleased and even surprised that with all this success, you were able to find time for an interview and even agreed to do a Q&A session with us. So, Josh, welcome! We are very grateful that you could take the time for us.

 

[00:01:18.550] – Sawyer

Thank you, thank you very much for having me.

 

[00:01:21.400] – Haasis

The interview will be around thirty minutes long, conducted by my wonderful colleague, Alan van Beek from Salzburg University and me, Lucas Haasis from Oldenburg University. And Alan, would you like to say a word of introduction, too?

 

[00:01:34.950] – van Beek

Hi. Good to meet everyone. Thanks for meeting us. My name is Alan. I am a postdoctoral researcher and I have my primary research focus in medieval literature. So, there’s a few questions coming your way from this angle. I also branched out into game studies with a focus on queer and transgender studies. That’s my gig.

 

[00:02:04.990] – Haasis

And I’m an early modernist, postdoc, researching and teaching about the early modern period, and we are representing the Working Group “History and Digital Games”, which is an important point of contact and mouthpiece for German, but also Swiss and Austrian historical game studies. We have just recently published short interdisciplinary essays on Pentiment on our homepage and Alan and I, together with our dear colleague Aurelia Brandenburg are currently preparing the publication of an edited volume on the game. That’s the background. So, now to the first question, finally, let’s start on a more general level and also clarify the question of why this game, but also you and your life story, is of such interest to our German audience. The question is, where did the idea for this game come from? Does it have anything to do with your German ancestry? How else would you get the idea to develop a game about an artist in a village in 16th century Bavaria?

 

[00:02:55.380] – Sawyer

I think it’s a lot of different things coming together. My father is an artist. He’s retired now, but he was a bronze sculptor. And growing up, we had a lot of books on art history in the house that I would read. And so I became at least passingly familiar at a young age with Albrecht Dürer and (Hans) Holbein and numerous other artists of the Northern Renaissance. And then my grandmother was born in Bavaria near Kempten (Allgäu) in 1917. And a few years later moved to the United States with her family. But I was interested in that branch of my family background. My father’s family also were at one point Donauschwaben migrants who had come from Baden-Württemberg down the Danube (river) to settle in Hungary, and prior to that, in Vienna. So there’s a lot of Austrian and German background in my heritage, which I knew a little bit about when I was younger. As I became older, I became more interested in history. I actually first got interested in history, I think, through Shakespeare’s histories, which you can put big quotes around, because they certainly interpret history in a pretty interesting way. But then also the game “Darklands”, which is a 1992 role playing game set in 15th century mythic Germany. So, it’s historical, but there are also supernatural elements taken sort of historical beliefs of the time. And then when I went to college, I actually wound up getting a degree in history focusing on early modern history in the Holy Roman Empire, the history of witch hunting. And when I got in the game industry, I knew very early on that I wanted to make a historical game. I couldn’t get a lot of traction. And so it took me a very long time to be able to get the opportunity. And yeah, that’s kind of where the inspiration came from, though.

 

[00:05:00.530] – Haasis

And you did a very good job.

 

[00:05:02.030] – Sawyer

Thank you.

 

[00:05:03.290] – Haasis

I’m from Southern Germany as well, so I can relate a bit.

 

[00:05:07.090] – Sawyer

Nice.

 

[00:05:07.700] – Haasis

Okay, second question. I found out about your game when I saw you posted a tweet about the books you used as an inspiration for the game and then stumbled across your fantastic reading list, which includes three of my all-time favorite history books, the Faithful Executioner, the Return of Martin Guerre and the Cheese and the Worms, actually. I was intrigued that you used these books and also gave access to the backstage of development by publishing your reading list – this should really become a new standard – and when I played the game, without giving too much away, it was such a great experience to rediscover these actors and their intriguing stories and to realize how you also use the approach of these books called Microhistory and research to match the approach of the game. The approach is to tell the story of the past world from the perspective of the actors, ordinary people who live in and created these worlds. So, I used the example of your game in my class to show how microhistory, and the perspective of everyday life, works, and I used your example as a developer to show that it’s still worth reading the books, too! The students liked it. My question would be, is there also some educational goal or even aspiration behind the game, namely to tell a different story to the students of history and also to the pupils, students at school and to make this kind of “telling the history from below” better known, which is not a story about wars, fighting, violence, only great men, but about Andreas living in the 16th century and experiencing it.

 

[00:06:33.650] – Sawyer

Yeah, very much so. I mean, “Cheese and the Worms”, “Night Battles” (Carlo Ginzburg), a lot of others, “Peasant Fires” by (Richard) Wunderli, those were all really inspirational texts to me. A lot of them focused on people within movements or just people who as individuals had extraordinary stories. And it’s harder to find records about them, certainly corroborated stories. But often we will get them through, for example, trial transcripts. I mean, that’s how we know about Menocchio from “The Cheese and the Worms”. It’s also how we know about “Martin Guerre” (“The Return of Martin Guerre”, Natalie Zemon Davis). So, I think that by looking at these stories, we start to get a more nuanced picture of what life was like for people in this time period. And a lot of people learn broad stroke history, and it’s useful and valuable to know that. But it’s also very easy to paint everyone with a very broad brush and assume that culture was a monoculture and that people within a social class were kind of all the same. Other things that we pulled from were things like the “Fournier registry”, or register, rather (register of the inquisitor Jacques Fournier, 1318-1325), which is the accounts of the future Pope at the time going into Southern France and interrogating Cathars about their beliefs. And they had some pretty extraordinary personal beliefs that they weren’t afraid, surprisingly, to talk about. So, yeah, I did want to show that ultimately, I think this is something that comes across in historical studies is that the material conditions in which we live are quite different from the material conditions of people hundreds of years ago, but they’re fundamentally pretty similar to us. And even if their world view is shaped by different forces and a different level of comprehension and education, they’re not dumb. And so they can form their own thoughts and ideas and opinions, and some of them are quite complex and interesting. And so I just wanted to show that breadth of expression across society.

 

[00:08:35.450] – Haasis

Very good – and I think we all need a roundtable with you, Natalie Zemon Davis and Carlo Ginzburg. And I’m going to meet Joel F. Harrington (author of the “Faithful Executioner”) soon as part of a conference panel, so I’m going to ask him. Okay, and just to let you know, I’m not only testing the game in university, but also in schools, so I can give some feedback how the pupils also liked it. And third and final question from me. At the University of Oldenburg, I’m giving the introductory lecture on the early modern period. The first three units are called “The Estate Society and Village Life”, and “Renaissance and Humanism”, and “Reformation, and the Printing Press”. All these topics play an essential role in Pentiment. So, for me, the game was primarily an early modern experience. But no matter where I look in journalism worldwide, even in Germany, it is said to be primarily a game about the Middle Ages. Perhaps because of the illustrations like the “Book of Hours” that people associate with the Middle Ages, and perhaps it is also an indication that from a popular science perspective, the early modern period as a period is still not very well known. I wanted to push the question a little bit to why the 16th century was special from your perspective. Would you say that the 16th century was special, an era of its own in world history, maybe, and why would that be so? And considering the many, many people who are not, like us historians or linguists, but get their first impression of this era from the game, why do we need a game about this era in particular?

 

[00:10:00.880] – Sawyer

I think it’s because people don’t know that the early modern period exists or they think of Renaissance, and when they think of Renaissance, they think of Italy or, charitably, they think of France or maybe England. But they don’t think of the Northern Renaissance. They don’t think about the early modern period. And I think especially for the Holy Roman Empire, the 16th century is incre[dible]. I mean, you could argue that every century is important, but there were some really big changes. The Reformation is just a huge event. And the German peasants’ war does reflect… I mean, when I was doing my research and reading about… Now I’m going to lose my train of thought here, and I’ll try not to. But I was reading a 1973 book. I remember Eric Middlefort did the translation of it, it was originally German (“The Revolution of 1525: The German Peasants’ War from a new Perspective” by Peter Blickle). Anyway, but it was trying to reconcile all of these competing West and East German – primarily Marxist and not Marxist – ways of reconciling what the German peasants’ war really was, fundamentally. And I think that there were other peasant uprisings. There were other peasant uprisings in Germany. There were uprisings all over Europe. But people generally or historians generally regard that the German peasants’ war was notable in some ways that the other ones are distinct, let’s say, not necessarily notable. And so I do think it’s important to understand that it was not yet what we would consider class consciousness, especially when you have peasants essentially appealing to the Emperor and saying, “Don’t get us wrong, we think you’re great, Emperor. We love the Emperor, but it’s these lords! They’re awful.” So it’s not quite class consciousness, but it represents a change in the mentality and the organization and certainly the literacy of people. I tend to think of the 16th century as being particularly pivotal in the history of the region, certainly.

[00:11:59.420] – Haasis

You’re doing a good deed for early modern historians also. Thank you. Okay, it is special. It is good. Okay, that’s from me. I now pass on to Alan.

 

[00:12:09.920] – van Beek

Right. I promised you some questions relating to medieval literature. As a medievalist, when I played your game, I was just amazed by the scriptorium, of course, and by the most exciting fetch quest, I think, to date for me was getting the books for Sister Illuminata. There are several manuscripts you have to get for her, the “Aeneid”, or as we call it in Germany, the “Eneasroman”, “Roman d’Eneas”, or the “Parzival”. Overall, typography and script play a huge role in your game as character features, too. That was really fascinating. My question is, what were your reference materials, say, for example, the “Parzival” manuscript? Did you look at some of the original codices? And if so, which ones?

 

[00:13:09.860] – Sawyer

Yes, we did. I won’t be able to recall off the top of my head which for each one, but we always used reference for everything. When I wasn’t quite sure, I would reach out to people. I remember I reached out to a friend who’s a Welsh historian and I asked her about what a Welsh herbal might look like just to get some references. Not that there are many extant references to look at, but to theorize looking at insular book hands from the right time period, looking for continental book hands in different regions. Also, one of the first reference books I read was by Alison Beach (“Women as Scribes”), which was about, I want to say, 12th century women, female scribes in Bavaria. And looking at all, I mean, she did a really deep dive, a paleographic dive on the differences between the different book hands and how you can identify, for example, Diemut (of Wessobrunn, editor’s note), whom Andreas references at one point. But just trying to learn all the nuances and the differences between the different hands and how they developed and how even within a standard hand for a time and place, individual scribes were individual people, and they had different idiosyncrasies. They had different tells where if you did deep paleographic research, you could figure out who wrote what section here and there. So, we always tried to look at, you know with “Parzival”, actually with the “Aeneid”, you know one of those things was obviously the “Aeneid” as a story is quite old, and throughout history, you can find many versions of it in different eras and places and hands. So, we tried to place ours in a specific time a few hundred years earlier than the game takes place, but it’s still being referenced. Some of the other texts are much more contemporary to the time. So, yeah, we always tried to look at references. I mean, one of the obvious ones was for Andreas’s manuscript and the “In der Mauer” manuscript, which is not real, is the “Très Riches Heures” of the Duke de Berry, obviously was very inspirational. So, some of them are really obvious if you know that stuff and other ones were a little more obscure. We have the Munich Manual of Necromancy that Richard Kieckhefer wrote about (in “Forbidden Rites”), (from) which there are scans in the Bavarian Staatsbibliothek in Munich has helped, you can just look it up. So we did. And I was actually trying to say that Brother Guy actually had that specific book. And then later it made its way to Munich. But okay, there we go. So yeah, we tried to reference those things from real things as much as possible. And when it wasn’t possible, we just tried to extrapolate from what might be typical for a time and place.

 

[00:16:14.930] – van Beek

That’s so cool. Because as a medievalist, I was just looking at the fake manuscripts and going like, oh, that’s “Codex Manesse”-inspired graphics. And here we have some late 13th century script and I was checking the databases and going like, “Which one did they use?” And it was just a really fun extra layer to your game. I have another script related and a bit of a personal question. If you don’t mind answering it, if you’re not comfortable with it, that’s fine. But I noticed you recently sent a tweet with shows some initials and some script tattoos on your forearms. So as a medieval script and tattoo aficionado myself, because I have medieval script tattoo from 10th century manuscript as well. Would you care to eleborate?

 

[00:17:11.070] – Sawyer

Looks like some Bede?

 

[00:17:12.430] – van Beek

Yeah, it’s old English from Deor from the Exeter book. So close call, really good guess. But would you care to show us your tattoos and maybe tell us a little bit of the source material for these?

 

[00:17:28.650] – Sawyer

Yeah. These are actually not real or legit. I don’t know if you can actually see them that well.

 

[00:17:34.940] – van Beek

Yeah, a little bit.

 

[00:17:36.240] – Sawyer

But they’re not like from anything. They’re “in the style of…”. And one of them is from “Bellum Catalinae”, the story of the Cataline conspiracy by Sallust. And it’s an excerpt from Cato’s speech before the senate. And then another one is actually from an English poem that I really like by Dante Gabriele Rosetti called “Silent Noon”. And it’s the song that I sang when I… I originally went to school for music, and it’s the song that I sang to get into the conservatory. I just loved the poem and I loved the song, so I had it tattooed. But it’s not real. But it’s just I think I got these maybe 15 years ago or so, but I’ve had a long term interest in manuscripts and illustration styles from the 10th to the 15th century. And then I have just a whole bunch of other stuff. Although actually, I think my favorite one is… That’s an “Onfim” illustration. I don’t know if you know Onfim. So, Onfim was a 13th century Novgorodian boy who was doing writing lessons on birch bark.

 

[00:18:54.790] – van Beek

Oh, I recall that.

 

[00:18:56.480] – Sawyer

They fell into, I think, like a peat bog or something and were preserved. And I always really loved them because going along with what I was saying before, people have always been the same and little kids have always been the same. And they always like to draw and they all draw in the same way. And that was actually, I think, part of an inspiration, too, for Paul and Paul’s illustration, Paul Müller, who’s the son of the town miller. But he draws in chalk on the Roman ruins. And over time, if you encourage him… If you don’t encourage him, he doesn’t keep drawing. But if you encourage him, he’ll keep drawing and his drawings get better. But his early drawings very much look like Onfims.

 

[00:19:43.790] – van Beek

That’s a very nerdy answer. Thank you so much for this insight. You’re quite the polymath, aren’t you?

 

[00:19:52.130] – Sawyer

I don’t know if I’d say that. Some would say dilettante.

 

[00:19:56.120] – van Beek

Well, I prefer polymath. It’s also more medievaly. I have another question for you. You talked about the “Aeneid” before, and I actually want to write an article about the portrayal of Dido and Sister Illuminata in the scene in the library where she takes Dido’s place and talks about women’s rights and it’s historically accurate but still at the same time with a very modern twist, which I really appreciate. My question is, are you a feminist? How did this affect the portrayal of female characters in the game in a period where women’s rights were, let’s say, complicated at best?

 

[00:20:46.590] – Sawyer

Yeah. I think at least in the English speaking world, the term feminist is very loaded. I would say, yes. Other people might say no. But I think certainly Illuminata has a more developed sense of what it is like to be a woman and how limiting that is. But also we know from Christine de Pizan and a select number of other writers, but certainly her. This was not a thing that was foreign to women, educated women, at least in the time period. And also even the women among the peasantry have some understanding of their limitations as well. But Illuminata, I wrote her as a very educated woman and a very intelligent woman. So she’s very well read and because of her position – she’s a daughter of a noble family, and she was put into the position that she’s in – and she’s very aware. She is pious, but it wasn’t like she said “Mom, Dad, I really want to go to a Benedictine Abbey in Upper Bavaria”. So yeah, thinking about her, thinking about Christine de Pizan; in college, I read the “book of the City of Ladies” and the “Treasure of the City of Ladies”. And Christine de Pizan’s work was also a reaction to some pretty, I mean, even for the time, misogynistic stuff that was being written. And so it was a defense in a way. It was saying like, “No, hold up, like, women are not the way that you think we are. And there are places for us, and we are capable.” And it is also interesting to even look at something like… I think this is going a far field, and I apologize. I was reading “the Decamerone”, and (Giovanni) Boccaccio’s attitude towards women is interesting because in some ways you can say it is progressive compared to other people in the time. But also it’s all couched in this weird, not quite the same way, where you’ll have in “Utopia” where there’s like another figure speaking the ideas of More (Thomas More/Morus), but you have the women saying, “As I am a woman and very dumb, I should go find a man to take care of me.” And it’s a little ridiculous. So in some ways, Boccaccio is progressive, but also in other ways, it’s shocking to see how the women that he is writing about are describing themselves and their capabilities. So anyway, that’s a long winded way of saying that feminist writings at the time, such as we can understand them, even if they were not understood that way by the authors or by the people reading them, they certainly informed how Illuminata thinks about her own position and the position of women more generally.

 

[00:23:46.430] – van Beek

Thank you. That’s great. I’m reading Christine de Pizan right now, and I think she actually references Boccaccio at one point. So you weren’t that far on a tangent as you thought. You were right on the topic. You mentioned your German ancestry, your interest in the south of Germany. The game was developed in English, right? And the localization for German came later on. I guess it must have been a little bit difficult. Did dialects figure into this localization at all? With hardcore Bavarian, it’s sometimes joked about in the other parts of Germany, but all the characters speak “Hochdeutsch” (High German) mostly so did that cross your mind at all to go even more complicated, or was it a no-brainer for you?

 

[00:24:53.240] – Sawyer

There were certain things where I considered that if/when we had original German texts, meaning we were not lifting the texts from somewhere else to write them in, I guess it would be early high German. (Middle High German or Early New High German, editor’s note). But we looked into it and I don’t know any, and it was very, very difficult to find anyone who was available and felt like they were comfortable doing it. So at a certain point, I resigned myself to all of our original stuff was going to be all the original dialogue is written in English. And then I worked with the German localizers. I’m fluent, but I’m not a native speaker. So I tried to phrase things in ways that I thought would be more constant with translation into German phrasing. But ultimately, I left it to the localization team to understand the markets that they’re working with best. So I wasn’t like, no, this has to be strict Bavarian. Because the thing is, just to be frank, I can’t understand regional dialects very well. I got in big trouble on a train or on a light rail in Steyr because I couldn’t understand what anyone was saying. So it’s certainly, I’m not going to push on or insist on something that I don’t really fully comprehend. And so I certainly don’t know. That’s the thing, I think, about working with localization teams is even if you are familiar or comfortable, especially as a non native speaker, you do have to trust the localization team to understand the needs of the audience better than you do. That’s why they’re doing it for you. So as much as that stuff appealed to me, I just couldn’t really see the value in doing it. And so for the rare number of original things that were in German, I translated them, and then I had someone who was a native speaker look over them. So for example, like the poem on the back wall of the chapter house, the “Dance of Death”, I wrote that and then had someone look it over and proofread it for me to make sure it wasn’t ridiculous. So that’s about the extent. But yeah, there was some talk about doing some more hardcore Bayrisch, but it’s a bridge too far.

 

[00:27:10.360] – van Beek

Yeah. I just moved to Austria. I hardly understand anything as well. You’re not alone. I think it was wise.

[00:27:18.540] – Sawyer

My anecdote for this is I visited Salzburg in 2015 for Silvester (New Year’s Eve), and I took a tour and there was a family from Dortmund with me and then my girlfriend at the time and I and my girlfriend didn’t speak German and so the tour guide was switching between German and English as we were going along. I could understand both. I was thinking, “Wow, this guy, he’s just speaking Hochdeutsch, maybe this dialectical difference isn’t that much.” And then at a certain point, he said, “Oh, hold on. I see a friend of mine. I’m just going to say hi to him.” And he rolled down his window and he started talking, and I did not understand a single word that he said. I know that he was speaking German, but I seriously didn’t understand anything that either of them said. They were speaking their local dialect. And then he rolled up the window and he went back to speaking Hochdeutsch. So, yeah, I’m certainly not in a position to insist on things that I don’t even really understand.

 

[00:28:21.410] – van Beek

That’s very, very understandable. And yeah, the diversity of the German language, right? It’s a treasure. Okay, so the last question is a bit of a special question because we saw that you did a lot of interviews recently, which is cool. And we’re all crossing our fingers for you that you maybe win an award or something.

 

[00:28:51.540] – Sawyer

That’d be nice.

 

[00:28:52.390] – van Beek

Just adding to the press coverage here. But maybe you’re also tired of answering the same questions over and over. Everybody asking you about your history degree or your inspiration for the game. So I want to give you the opportunity to ask yourself a question that you would like to be asked that nobody ever thinks of asking you.

 

[00:29:16.570] – Sawyer

Oh, geez. Let’s see. Nobody has really asked much about what it was like working with Benjamin Vierling, who did… Granted, I think in part because it’s a little more obscure. So Benjamin Vierling is an artist in Northern California who developed the art for the album, the soundtrack. Not the key art for the game, but the actual album art. And I first became aware of him through… I am a really big fan of the musician Joanna Newsom, and she had an album in 2006 come out called “Ys”. And the cover is a portrait of her by Benjamin Vierling, and it’s done in a Mischtechnik style that supposes what the Northern Renaissance artists were working with in terms of egg tempera and oil. So he tries to do things in a very traditional way. So we approached him for doing this piece of art, which was maybe a little extravagant, but I don’t care because it turned out to be really great. He sent us sketches, and the sketches for a long time, they changed. There are tons of details. If you look at the artwork in up close at high res, there’s all sorts of tiny details, which much like Holbein’s portraiture and a lot of portraiture of the Northern Renaissance. You see all these little esoteric things, some of which are easy to decipher if you know something about the history of the person, others of which – who can say. But he loaded a bunch of references to the game and the story that we work together on. My cat is also in the background. He really wanted to put a cat in. And I said, Well, if you’re going to put a cat in, then put my cat in. But there’s all sorts of symbols of time or progress or of the people who are murdered, which are also reflected on the desk as you play the game as time progresses. But he made that painting over 19 months. That’s how long it took him to make it. But because of the drying required of each of the layers, Misch-technique requires you put on a layer and then you wait for it to dry, which can be weeks or months, and then you go back and you put on more and put on more. And because the process was so long, we actually had him put a pentimento into the artwork. So in one of the layers of the under painting, he painted in the tauroctony, the ritual sacrifice of the bull with Mithras. And then he covered it up with the seal of Saint Luke. So you have the bull covering the bull, which we thought was very appropriate if you know the story of the game. But it’s actually in the painting. And by the way, we still don’t have the painting yet because it’s still drying. It was finished and he photographed it, but it’s not ready to transport because it’s still drying and he still needs to varnish it. And then it’s going to take a few more weeks. But maybe by the end of June, we’ll have it. But it was a very interesting process working with someone in such traditional media because my father worked in traditional media his whole life. And all the artists that I work with now work in digital media for the most part. So actually doing something in the truly old way was pretty extraordinary.

[00:32:53.920] – van Beek

Very retro, very cool. Where will the finished painting go then?

 

[00:32:59.720] – Sawyer

We don’t know because it is a very expensive, big painting. I think it’s like two by three feet. So it’s a significant… I think it’s on Masonite. So you can’t just… Not that you would just throw it around. But Masonite is notorious for potentially folding in half if you don’t transport it correctly. So, yeah, we don’t know. We have a big office and there’s plenty of places it could go but it’s a pretty special and unusual piece of art, so we need to think about it.

 

[00:33:34.580] – van Beek

It’s got to have a place of honor somewhere.

 

[00:33:36.600] – Sawyer

It does, because it’s really beautiful.

 

[00:33:39.460] – van Beek

Cool. Thank you so much for sharing that. That’s so interesting.

 

[00:33:42.700] – Sawyer

Thank you.

 

[00:33:45.300] – van Beek

All right.

 

[00:33:47.760] – Haasis

I think that’s it.

 

[00:33:49.240] – van Beek

Yeah, I think that’s all the questions we have for you.

 

[00:33:52.600] – Sawyer

Awesome.

 

[00:33:53.420] – Haasis

Thank you very much, Josh. We are now looking forward to the questions from the Twitch stream also. Yes, thank you so much.

 

[00:34:01.530] – van Beek

Thank you so much.

 

[00:34:03.580] – Sawyer

You’re welcome. Thank you.

[00:34:09.460] – Haasis

Where does the fascination for medieval book illustrations come from? Let me ask one more question myself here, about your team. Do they all share your enthusiasm for these sources?

 

[00:34:22.080] – Haasis

I think my fascination and interest in it started when I was very young. My father is a bronze sculptor, and we had a lot of books about art history in our house. I do remember one that had some work by Albrecht Dürer. Later, I think I started seeing paintings, especially portraiture by Hans Holbein the Younger. I was just interested in the German Renaissance and later the painters of the low countries that emerged later in the century. I found all that art really fascinating, especially since with Dürer, it coincided with … He was one of the first artists, if not arguably, the first artist to make mass market art using printing. A lot of what we know about Dürer is through his prints, which have endured for centuries, obviously. But by being able to mass produce his art and spread it all across the empire and beyond, he really was able to make a fortune for himself. I really did have that interest from a young age, and it just intensified over time. I’m sorry, there was a second part of the question that I immediately forgot.

 

[00:35:36.200] – Haasis

Your team, the enthusiasm.

 

[00:35:40.680] – Sawyer

I think some people, the more people you work with on a team – this is something I’ve learned as a director – the harder it is to ensure that everyone has a uniform level of interest in the subject matter. But I think the thing is, I would say Hannah Kennedy definitely has that passion and interest. She’s our art director. I would like to hope that most of the people on the team have at least some appreciation of it. But it’s really my job to get people excited about the whole concept of the game, even if they’re not super excited about one individual element. There are some people on the team who really don’t like reading a ton of dialog. They don’t like dialog without VO, (Voice Over, editor’s note) or they might not really be into story games at all. They might be into more action oriented stuff. But I think with each person, I try to get them to see something cool about the game that they could help highlight, and that’s helped drive everyone forward. I would say definitely Hannah and I share the passion. Other people to greater or lesser extents.

 

[00:36:46.170] – Haasis

I really like the behind the scenes video also. You can get a sense of the team. Alan?

 

[00:36:53.520] – van Beek

We have another color related question. In the chat, a person really loved the amount of color and the dress of the people in the game. Also, I thought it was so fascinating that the older characters get more worn with time like a manuscript would, and the children are still fresh and vibrant and young. The chat wants to know, where did you draw inspiration from for these color schemes, for people’s garments and such?

 

[00:37:24.700] – Sawyer

I think that we actually did look a lot at Hans Holbein’s portraiture. The later you get into the 16th century, the darker things tend to become. But there was more color earlier. Also, if you look at certain characters who might be Italian, Italian clothing tended to have more color in it. We tried to emphasize richness of color, especially among wealthier people, people of status. A character like Beatrice, obviously being a fictional character, but also Italian, she is essentially supposed to be Beatrice from the Divine Comedy, so she’s dressed in a beautiful, rich blue. But other characters, we tried to find as many examples as we could. Unfortunately, when it came to things like the peasantry, there isn’t necessarily a ton of examples of German peasantry that has that richness of color. But if we look to, for example, Brueghel, the Elder, he had a ton of portraiture of peasantry. Those were quite rich in color, not super, super vibrant, but they showed a diversity of color that we could represent in the characters. I think we drew a lot of inspiration from those paintings, not so much necessarily from the “Nuremberg Chronicle” (1493), although we did reference it for a lot of the forms and images of the characters and the form of their clothing. Also looking at the structure of clothing in some of Dürer’s illustrations because he also did illustrate not only nobility, but also he had a number of illustrations of peasantry, Landsknechte and so on.

 

[00:39:17.970] – van Beek

Thank you so much. If I may, I just saw a question that I thought was really interesting. The question goes: The inclusion of Sebhat (Brother Sebhat of Sadai, editor’s note) was a delightful surprise. Where did you get the idea from – Verena Krebs’s book (“Medieval Ethiopian Kingship, Craft, and Diplomacy with Latin Europe”)? Because the presence of Ethiopian monks in that region is not at all well known even in historical circles. Thanks for introducing lots of people to that. That was a really cool thing to do, just include non-white people in the game, and the Jewish influences as well.” You really got a very nice societal, as we say in German “Querschnitt” (cross-section, editor’s note) through society. So yeah, could you elaborate on that?

 

[00:40:07.100] – Sawyer

Sure. I don’t know Verena Krebs’s book. I think I did find some information. I want to say the historian’s name is Kate Lowe (Professor of Renaissance History and Culture in London, Black Africans in Renaissance Europe, editor’s note). I think she is based in the UK. She works with cross cultural contact between Ethiopia and Europe. I had seen references to Ethiopian priests at the Council of Constance, which is referenced by Brother Sebhat when he talks about why he’s there. It’s a contrivance. I contrived the situation where I think it’s Abbot Rudolf, an older abbot a 100 years ago had given a Bible to one of the Ethiopian monks that was present at the Council of Constance. It took 100 years for the Ethiopians to return that. That’s the occasion upon which Brother Sebhat has traveled from Rome North to this remote town. Something I had said about, I think in the interview that aired earlier is that because this is a fictional location, I can create the perfect circumstances under which an Ethiopian monk and Jewish printers from Prague and so on were all present in this place. We did know that Africans were present in small numbers throughout Europe. We see it in a number of places, including, for example, Saint Moritz, who was extremely popular in the empire at this time and had been illustrated as a black African since about the 13th century. That changed later on for reasons. But at this time, he was very popular, and he was illustrated in that way and was a patron of soldiers among many other people. Just tried to include that, show that representation.

 

[00:41:52.660] – van Beek

Thank you very much.

[00:41:54.520] – Haasis

Okay, we have also some students among us, which is very cool. A lot of students become history teachers also. One question relates to that: “I love recommending Pentiment to my fellow historians and especially to those studying to become history teachers. When developing the game, did you have in mind that it could also be used in school to give kids a closer understanding to medieval – I want to add – early modern life in Europe. That’s the question from the student.

 

[00:42:22.160] – Haasis

I hadn’t thought of it primarily as a didactic tool, but I did think of it as having the potential to help educate people. Obviously, it’s incumbent on me and the rest of the team to represent the period as faithfully as we can. The better a job that we do of that, the more potentially valuable it can be to people to understanding life in this time, even in a fictionalized way. I have heard of people using it. It has limited applications depending on the venue where it’s used because it is, depending on how you play it, it is a 12, 15, even 20 hour game if you go slowly. For some people, the time investment might be a little much, but hopefully at least segments of it can be used in an environment like that. I’m glad that it has found some use in that way.

 

[00:43:07.040] – Haasis

You can use it for small episodes about the Reformation or something. More on that. Alan?

 

[00:43:14.620] – van Beek

Yeah, so many interesting questions coming in. Thank you all for being so interested in this game. There’s a question about the soundtrack and the music, which we briefly touched upon in the interview, but just the cover, not the content. Another question from the chat says: “I love Lingua Ignota’s rendition of Heine’s “Ein Traum” in the soundtrack. I’d be interested to hear how Josh and the team came to choose this as such a central song.”

 

[00:43:43.250] – Sawyer

I’ll try to be informative but brief here because I could talk forever about this. I really, really loved working with Kristin Hayter, who is Lingua Ignota. I remember I started listening to one of her albums, “Caligula” (2019, Profound Lore), sometime during early development, and I loved her voice so much. It actually, what happened is, I just started talking to her on Twitter and DMing her and talking to her about art. I can’t remember what we were talking about, but we were talking about art and art history. It took a while, but eventually, I just was like: “Hey, do you want to do a song for the game?” We got it rolling, and it was a lot of fun. Let me again describe this as briefly as I can. I wanted something that felt more like Liebeslieder. I didn’t want something that felt like it was actually of the time. I wanted it to feel separated from that because the scene in which that song plays is supposed to be later, some other time. I wanted it to feel a part from that. I originally went to school for music, and I loved Lieder (Kunstlieder/Art songs), and I loved singing (Johannes) Brahms and (Franz) Schubert and all sorts of stuff like that. So when I was working with Kristin, she compiled a list of reference things. We narrowed it down. It really dove deep into Liebeslieder tradition. I’d always loved that poem, the Heinrich Heine poem. I felt that even though it was coming from much later, there’s a sentiment of it – because at the time, he was living in France, somewhat as an exile. It’s this mixed feelings about his homeland. I thought it was especially appropriate for the main characters and their relationship to home and what that means to them. We went through a process, she recorded in her home, which was, I thought, pretty incredible. She recorded in her home with her recording engineer, and we went through three rounds of it. When I sent it to the team, everyone was really blown away by it. That was a really fantastic process. I really loved working with her.

 

[00:46:03.680] – Haasis

Coming from the music to the everyday life, a question about that, because I also love the bread and everything on the table, all the food. The question is. “I loved how elements of everyday life like sleeping and eating, were integrated into the gameplay. What influenced your decision to add these elements, which is an everyday life perspective also?”

 

[00:46:21.430] – Sawyer

I think this almost, in a way, has to do with microhistory in the sense that a lot of the broad strokes of history often are big events and big things by big people. The closer you get to the ground and the everyday life of people, the more nuance you start to see about the realities of life. I thought that by focusing on how people slept, where they slept, how they ate, the amount of food that they ate, and the type of food that they ate, there was something that we could communicate about life, even if we’re not explicitly being talked about. We also wanted to structure the day in a way that felt like you had certain things that you had to do or obligated to do or that you just needed to do as a human being. So you need to sleep, you need to eat. Also forcing you to eat with all these different people in the community gave you a lot of different perspectives on what you were doing, their view of things, also how they live and how they eat. Then between the Acts, especially when you revisit certain families like the Gärtners, from Act 1 to Act 2, there’s a really strong difference about what they’re eating and how they’re eating and how your standard of life has changed. In the first act, you’re a boarder with the Gartners. By the time you come back in the second act, you’re either a guest, you’re sleeping in the place where Lorenz Rothvogel slept, so you’re on that level, you’re that important, or you’re easily paying to stay at a landhaus, which is not cheap. It shows the difference of your station in the world and how you’ve moved up relative to other people. I just thought it was important to show that because it illuminates a lot.

 

[00:48:15.700] – van Beek

Let me add to that that I really enjoyed baking cookies in the game, but also it was hard because I was going super OCD (Obsessive–compulsive disorder, editor’s note) about it because I had to make the best possible patterns.

 

[00:48:29.730] – Sawyer

By the way: there is a patch that’s coming. The patch, just as a brief aside, there’s a patch coming. The patch addresses some bugs. Thankfully, the game did not have too many bugs when it shipped. Also the localization. So we have Russian, Japanese, Korean, and simplified Chinese coming. And then there is not a fix necessarily, but we added something. If you have the domestics background for Magdalena, when you do the cookie cutting thing, you can reuse the dough so you can get extra things out of it, which is the thing everyone says. They’re like, that’s what you do when you make cookies. You just roll it back up and you use what’s left over. For people that really have a compulsion, that will be addressed.

 

[00:49:12.760] – van Beek

That’s so cute, that’s a cute patch because I would never choose the domestic background. I would always choose the book worm thing. It’s good to know, it’s a thoughtful improvement. There have been quite a few questions about this, so I cannot delay this any longer. Some people from Innsbruck, might I add, I will be going there next month, so I would better make nice with them. They want to know why all the hate for Innsbruck in the game.

 

[00:49:46.510] – Sawyer

I don’t think there really is hate for Innsbruck, but they’re the neighbors. They’re the people that are in the big town that’s nearby. You’re from a little village and there’s the big city that’s close over in Tirol. There’s a little bit of maybe rivalry there. I think what happens is, especially with Andreas, because he’s shy about asking… There’s a woman that he has a crush on in Innsbruck. There’s a line where Andreas can say, “Do you think Tirolean men are better than Bavarians? Come on, you got to go over there.” It’s not quite that he’s insulting them. He’s just trying to say, “Come on, man, you got to stand up for yourself.” But Innsbruck was also the site of the Austrian Diet that happened in 1518. That’s the contrivance by which the archdeacon is present because we are trying to find a way where representative of the Prince Bishop would be on hand to very quickly come and investigate. It just so happened that at that time, the Austrian Diet was going on in Innsbruck. That’s actually where briefly Maximilian (Holy Roman Emperor) sat for Albrecht Dürer to get the initial drawing. He didn’t sit for the whole painting, but he sat for the drawing that later became posthumously the beautiful portrait of Maximilian I. that Albrecht Dürer made. Innsbruck was very influential. Also years earlier, that was the site of the witch hunting trials that became infamous because it was (Jacob) Sprenger, I believe, who was instrumental in the creation of the “Malleus Maleficarum” (“Hexenhammer”) and he was going nuts about that stuff. A lot of important things were happening in Innsbruck. It’s by far the most important nearby community, so it gets a lot of focus.

 

[00:51:33.240] – Haasis

Follow up question to the question before that. What I also like and love about the game is that you can play it again and again, and it remains good. The question is: Did you think about the replayability of the game during development? How the player would see things differently and try different stuff to experiment and how that would affect the general experience?”

 

[00:51:54.510] – Sawyer

I think that we don’t make the game specifically to be replayed, but we want people to have an experience that does feel like their experience with an understanding that it is probably not the same as everyone else’s experience. And so we intentionally made it so that you never have enough time to investigate every lead. It’s just impossible. And as many people have noted, you often fail checks when you’re trying to find out information. So there are certain leads that you can try to follow up on, and you just won’t make it. And if you try it again, maybe you’ll be able to get those. There are things that you won’t be able to do on a first play through. You can try them on the second play through. You can pick different backgrounds, and those backgrounds will open up different options. You can treat people differently. For example, if you are nice to Werner instead of mean to Werner, then he will respond differently. Actually, the entire course of his life can change dramatically. So yeah, it’s not replayability, first and foremost, as much as giving the player an experience that feels like it responds to them. But we do appreciate that on subsequent playthroughs, players are going to see things they didn’t see the first time.

 

[00:53:14.020] – van Beek

All right, thank you. I would definitely replay that. If I choose a different background this time, who knows what I might do? Maybe this time I choose to learn medieval Latin because I could read some books then. It was like that during my PhD as well. Lucas, do you want to (ask the next question)?

 

[00:53:39.960] – Haasis

Yes, before we come to the last question, we have to do something for our technical support today. Vlad Cotuna, thank you so much, Vlad. Vlad’s question was if you could say anything in German. My question would be, “Have you played the game in German as well?” Would there be any favorite word of yours or something?

 

[00:54:04.070] – Sawyer

[speaks German] Mein Lieblingswort? Ja, ich habe das Spiel auf Deutsch gespielt. Es ist einfacher für mich, weil ich das Spiel gemacht habe! Ich bin fließend, aber kein Muttersprachler. Ich weiß nicht, ob ich einen Lieblingsteil habe, aber ich habe gehört,dass die Übersetzung sehr gut ist und dass ein paar bayrische Wörter eingebaut wurden (English translation: My favorite word? Yeah. I played the game in German and it’s easier for me because I made the game. [laughs] I am fluent but not a native speaker. I don’t know if I have a favorite part, but I heard that the translation is very good and that a couple of bavarian phrases or words were included [stops speaking German]) Sorry, I wasn’t sure how to finish it off. I botched it at the end. That’s as good as I can do. Sorry.

 

[00:54:58.120] – Haasis

That was wonderful. Thank you so much.

 

[00:55:00.500] – van Beek

Very professional. All right. I would just briefly acknowledge the “Fallout” people that have shown up in the chat, but rest assured, I think Josh knows that we want another Fallout. But we also would like to have another Pentiment. Here’s my final question for you. We are all interested in this. “How does the story continue with Rebecca and Magdalene at the end? And will there be a Pentiment 2”?

 

[00:55:34.580] – Sawyer

The thing is, when I decided I wanted to direct Pentiment, I wanted it to be a standalone story that worked just on its own. And so I hadn’t really thought about how it would be continued. Although I have thought if we were to make… Not that we ever considered really making DLC, but I thought it would be great to have a DLC that was Brother Matthew and… Jeez, why am I having… I think I’m jet lagged. Brother Matthew and Brother Rüdiger.

 

[00:56:08.190] – van Beek

Oh, my God. I’m shipping this so hard.

 

[00:56:09.610] – Haasis

Having a little murder mystery adventure of their own where they after the end of Act 2, they go off somewhere and they solve some mysteries together. I think that would be a great spin off. But I’ve also seen a lot of people do little illustrations and probably even fan fiction about Esther and Magdalene in Prague. Other people are free to continue the story on their own.

[00:56:41.550] – van Beek

Oh, my, yes. I just taught a seminar on fan fiction, and believe me, they will. Thank you for that.

 

[00:56:49.440] – Haasis

I think that’s also a very nice way to end this Q&A session. Josh, thank you so much. Thank you very much for answering our questions, for your time, for your openness, and we thank you for this great game that does a lot of things differently and right. Also to your team at Obsidian, and good luck this week, of course, in Berlin and in future endeavors, which we look forward to. As moderators today, we’d like to thank also Vlad Cotuna for the technical support. Very good work. And everyone who attended today’s session and asked questions, and would like to point out that you are all welcome to join our History & Digital Game Working Group. Just contact us via Twitter, via Twitch, or via email. Now I can only say have a great evening everyone, and Josh have a great time in Berlin and good luck.

 

[00:57:40.830] – Sawyer

Thank you.

 

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D O W N L O A D

(PDF/A-Version)

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Empfohlene Zitierweise / Suggested Citation: Lucas Haasis und Alan van Beek, Interview and Q&A with Josh Sawyer, Game Director of Pentiment, in: Zeitenwende: Interdisziplinäre Zugänge zum Spiel Pentiment, hrsg. von Alan van Beek, Aurelia Brandenburg und Lucas Haasis (Mittelalter. Interdisziplinäre Forschung und Rezeptionsgeschichte, Beihefte 4), S. 7–30, DOI: https://doi.org/10.26012/mittelalter-31324.

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