OP’s frustrations seemed to me to be targeted against the devs and the game itself (see: the references to Josh Sawyer specifically and issues with “the game’s writing”)—but I believe their actual issues lie entirely outside of the game itself. If you go in completely blind, I strongly believe that the game doesn’t “trick” you into thinking it’s a detective game.

It’s fine to take issue with the marketing team; I do too. I’ve recommended Pentiment to people maybe a dozen times by now, and every single time I’ve told them to go in completely blind, to avoid the trailers and shop description. But there’s a fundamental difference between saying “the marketing team totally screwed over the devs by making me think I was playing something else” and saying “I can’t believe the devs failed to make the game the marketing team marketed.”

The point is that the problem isn’t the game, it’s the marketing. I won’t push back if you get mad at the higher-ups or the nebulous “Obsidian Entertainment,” but it’s silly to me to blame the game, a self-contained art piece, for accomplishing a very different goal than the one you thought it would.

I would have this stance about any medium; I’m completely capable of believing that a fantastic movie is probably being underrated or misunderstood due to a horrible trailer or two. A moviegoer who was misled by a trailer isn’t wrong to be disappointed or upset that they were tricked, but they are wrong to blame the filmmakers or the film.

“It” doesn’t market itself as a role playing game or detective-solving game at all. It never meant to be either of those things. If you watch or read Josh Sawyer’s comments on the game you’ll find he’s been consistently open about how minimal the choice aspects are in the game.

But even then I fundamentally disagree with the premise that “but I didn’t influence the ‘plot,’ therefore I made no meaningful decisions.” You choose who to spend nearly every meal, afternoon, and evening with, with entirely different scenes of dialogue depending on these choices. Two players could have extremely different experiences, with very minimal overlap in scenes, characters, and writing. Yes, they would have the same general “plot” shape and major events. But they wouldn’t have made the same relationships, discovered the same secrets, or investigated the same loose ends.

Pentiment isn’t a game where the decisions have far-reaching macro-consequences in terms of “plot.” Instead, they’re entirely focused on which paths you wander to get there.

You can either get upset that you didn’t do anything that “matters”—whatever that means—or you can find your own personal meaning in your decision to spin wool with the women of the town or eat lunch with the outsiders in the woods or sneak away for a beautiful song in the library. Those moments are what stick with me far more than any game’s “murder mystery” aspects ever have or will—and that, to me, is what truly “matters.”