I made the what’s next after Half-Life thread and received many awesome recommendations, thank you guys! During the Holidays a game caught all my attention: Pentiment. It hooked me and I played it non stop for three days, now that I finished it, I may do another play through to unlock all achievements and try other choices, but in the meantime I am in quest for similar games!

What I’m craving :

  • the mystery / investigation was great, for context I have already played Outer Wilds, Obra Dinn, Golden Idol, Frog Detective… they immediately came to mind once I started puzzling what I had to do. What are similar games with a murder mystery at their core, that reward investigation?
  • the effort to provide historical accuracy, this is a time and area of Europe I only briefly learned about in middle school, so it felt nice having a glimpse of what life was like in 15th century Bavaria, are there games that try to portray life and folklore of people I may not know about? For context I am an average western European.
  • the sense of progression struck me, I saw kids become teens, then adults, I got to know these families, attach myself to some of them, saw their evolution as characters, are there games that make you get close to characters and see who they become over multiple years, over generations ? I can’t remember any game that made me care that much for NPCs as this one.
  • I enjoyed the art direction a lot, medieval illustrations have this quirkiness that just endears me, I had already played the Rock of Ages games, are there similar games with this feeling of playing through pages of a book? Or any game with a really nice / stylised illustration style? I already played Gris which was beautiful.
  • After finishing the game, I was left unsatisfied with the explanation and wanting more, I mislead myself in thinking the dialogues animation and typos / font switching had a bigger impact and were hiding some 4th wall breaking. Are there games that play with this kind of meta mystery (I don’t know what word best describes it) where you have a glimpse that there’s something bigger behind the scenes? Inscryption is one of my favourite games for this, I also really liked the demo for ‘is this game trying to kill me’ and am planning to get it during the Steam winter sale

Thanks !!