If the best Xbox exclusive of this generation comes to Nintendo Switch, everyone should be excited

Do you know why Obsidian’s latest obscure RPG is called Pentiment? The word (not a real one) comes from the term pentimento, which refers to a change an artist makes to their work as progress on the project continues. Pentimento, in turn, comes from the Italian pentirsi, which means to repent or change your mind. Given the game is about history, and what we do or do not believe in the recorded annals of our shared past, it’s a very fitting word to sit atop the whole thing.

And now, roughly 18 months after Xbox’s most peculiar exclusive first came to Series X/S, the history of Pentiment is very likely being altered again as its status as a Microsoft-only game hangs in the balance, with the hand of fate aching to ink the words ‘PlayStation’ and ‘Nintendohttps://www.vg247.com/platforms/switch’ beneath its title plate. How fitting. How poetic.

It shouldn’t work. A hand-painted, 2D detective thriller about a sequence of brutal murders set in the bucolic countryside of 16th-century Bavaria – no one is going to want to play that, are they? It’s the sort of game you’d read about on Eurogamer on a Sunday, or that your grandad would ask you about next time you head over for a last-minute Easter lunch. Against its Xbox-exclusive stablemates (Hi-Fi Rush, Halo, Forza, Starfield), it seems wholly out of place.