Pentiment Is Broken on Xbox One, Which Is a Big Bummer

I should love Pentiment. I have written about mystery games. I’m a big ole nerd who enjoys classics. I prefer story over exciting action mechanics. I am a graphic designer with a typeface obsession. In many ways, I think I am an ideal player for Obsidian Entertainment’s recent release, Pentiment. I just wish the game actually worked when I tried to play it on Xbox One.

I’m frustrated about this game in a way that I haven’t been since Cyberpunk 2077, and in this op-ed, I try to answer why I’m so annoyed.

Glitches and Long Load Times in Pentiment

I played a buggy 10 hours (a little more than halfway through) of Obsidian’s illustrated manuscript plus murder mystery plus galavanting simulator, Pentiment, before it broke. Well, the game wasn’t doing so hot even before then. I saw two major performance problems.

First, some characters had forgotten that we had already spoken. I would have to repeat the same conversations multiple times, sometimes locked into a repeating loop before I could get away. Given that the game is mostly hours of conversations, this bug was not amusing.

The second problem was much more egregious. Changing locations, which the game necessitates you do almost constantly, triggers a loading screen. There are easily 50+ unique locations. Each requires pathing through other spots to get where you need to go. Every time I changed locations, Pentiment stuttered through a 20-second loading screen.

Now, 20 seconds on its own isn’t a big deal. But when it’s 20 seconds of waiting for about every one minute of gameplay within an already pretty slow and methodical experience, these waits add up. And when many of the locations you’re exploring don’t actually turn up any clues or suspects, and you need to check them multiple times within every game “day” as the time passes, Pentiment begins to feel like a grind rather than anything resembling fun.

Pentiment‘s secrets and joys lie in its thorough investigation mechanics, yet due to the immense slow-down when changing locations, I often just gave up. Which is too bad, because when I put up with its bugs, it was good.

What’s Good About Pentiment?

I was amused by and admired the efforts of Pentiment for the hours that I got to actually play it.

It’s a beautiful game. The illuminated manuscript aesthetic is gorgeous. Even the meals look amazing. The accompanying music is perfect for each scene. The gameplay is simple but effective with natural dialogue trees, mini-games for making wool or coded astrology ciphers, and an option to pet every dog and cat. A limited number of hours in the game created an effective feeling of urgency. I found myself making IRL notes of who I planned to talk with and when with my limited time in order to pursue justice.

Most of all, Pentiment feels like a smart game. It asks big questions about what justice and freedom really look like, especially when you’re not a white middle- or upper-class man. A time jump surprised me, forcing me to reckon with the actual impact my character’s choices had on the town around me, something that not many pieces of media can or are able to pull off. Pentiment asks the player to question what they think they know, again and again, all while accepting what may never be known.

Then, my game broke completely.

Pentiment Has a Game-Breaking Bug on Xbox One

Pentiment released last month on PC, Xbox Series X/S, and Xbox One. It was developed by Obsidian Entertainment, a studio owned by Microsoft under its Xbox Game Studios label.

I played on Xbox One via Game Pass, and was stunned when my game started having save-related glitches. Pentiment is one of those games that only allows one save file and only via automatic saves.

Pop-up menus told me that the auto-save feature was having trouble, and since there is no manual saving, I had to keep trying with my only existing save file. I hard-quit the game. I turned my Xbox on and off. But I could never get the game to run for more than a minute or two. On my third attempt, Pentiment broke entirely, overwriting my save file with an out-of-time main character in a location he couldn’t have been in with an empty notebook, wandering around an empty town, until the game stressed itself out and booted me again.

Pentiment is a game that demands patience and rewards diligence. I was willing to give it both, until it broke.

To restart a playthrough would require me to read hours of dialogue and move hundreds of times, all while asking me to trust that it wouldn’t break all over again. And just like how the people of this Bavarian town don’t trust visiting artist Andreas, I’m not sure I can give this game any more valuable end-of-the-year time, and that makes me sad.

Xbox Is Proving Why It Lost Last-Gen (and Why It May Lose Again)

I generally try to avoid writing grumpy pieces. I often just choose not to review an indie game I thought was awful rather than risk making a small dev studio feel bad. Here’s why I think I’m so mad: I am frankly embarrassed for Microsoft. Microsoft owns both the platform and the studio. Pentiment should work on Xbox One, and it’s ridiculous that it doesn’t.

Some might argue, “Hey, sometimes games have bugs,” and I get that. I actually generally don’t have a problem with slow load times, dropped frames, graphics not rasterizing, typos, glitched limbs, or any of those other technical aspects. When others got angry about graphics in Pokémon Legends: Arceus earlier this year, I shrugged and kept playing. But Pentiment is not just buggy on Xbox One; it’s unplayable.

I feel that if a game isn’t technically proficient on a platform that a studio has launched on, they shouldn’t have released it. Just sit on it. Don’t rush testing—QA itself is laborious, thankless work, so no wonder many quality assurance testers are unionizing. Find the problems; fix them. Get the port ready. Then ship it. Or just admit that you don’t care about this platform anymore and stop releasing games for it.

Even Microsoft admits that Xbox has “lost” the console war “last” generation to PS4. I debate the term “last-gen” as games are still being made for both Xbox One and PS4; and sure, we’re close to the end, but we’re not there yet. I am lucky to have both the One and the PS4, and it’s an easy victory to assign, even if Game Pass is better than PlayStation Plus. Yet despite all this, my emotional loyalty is with Xbox, and it’s one of the reasons I was so excited that Pentiment was releasing on the One.

No matter what I say here, Pentiment is going to be fine. It is one of the many indie darlings released in 2022. It’s doing well with critics, including here at The Punished Backlog. I know my fellow editors Sam and David will write well of it in their EOY posts, and that makes me happy. And it’s a good story; I ended up watching a 17.5-hour playthrough on YouTube where someone clearly didn’t have the same loading issues I had. I jealously watched how quickly their pages flipped to new locations, and grumbled to myself how I would’ve chosen different dialogue options. But Pentiment’s strengths don’t change its efficacy on hardware.

I keep coming back to this question: Shouldn’t Pentiment work on one of its only launch platforms? Shouldn’t games that are produced by Xbox Game Studios actually run on an Xbox?

It’s frustrating that every time I boot up my Xbox One, I’m reminded of why it just couldn’t win. Next-gen consoles are here, and if I can only afford to buy one, Xbox is unfortunately giving me plenty of reasons why I should I get a PlayStation 5.