A Quiet From Obsidian That’s Getting Louder
Pentiment, Obsidian Entertainment’s hand-illustrated murder mystery set in 16th-century Bavaria, launched in 2022 to genuine critical admiration and then – nothing. No DLC announcement, no sequel tease, no roadmap. The game dropped, earned its praise, and Obsidian moved on publicly to other projects. For a studio that makes narrative-driven games with the kind of depth that demands follow-up conversation, that silence is starting to feel conspicuous.
Players who finished Pentiment and wanted more of that specific flavor – slow, literary, morally ambiguous storytelling where dialogue choices carry real weight – have started looking elsewhere. And the game they keep landing on is Disco Elysium, ZA/UM’s 2019 detective RPG. Not because the two games look or play the same, but because they share something harder to name: a commitment to letting players sit inside a world instead of just moving through it.
What Pentiment Did That’s Hard to Replicate
Pentiment is unusual in ways that are easy to describe but difficult to design around. Its art style mimics illuminated manuscripts. Its characters speak in typefaces that shift based on their social class and education. Its mysteries don’t resolve cleanly – you make your best guess, the story moves forward, and you live with what you chose. There’s no combat. There’s no XP loop. The game is essentially a long, illustrated book that asks you to make decisions inside it.
That design philosophy narrows the field dramatically when players go looking for something comparable. Most narrative games still build around action verbs – shoot, craft, climb, build. Pentiment is built around reading, listening, and deciding. The audience it created is hungry for more of that exact register, and Obsidian hasn’t fed it.
Why Disco Elysium Keeps Coming Up
Disco Elysium doesn’t look like Pentiment. Its visual style is painterly rather than archival, its setting is a fictional post-revolutionary port city rather than a Bavarian monastery, and its protagonist is a washed-out detective with amnesia rather than a learned scribe. But both games treat the act of talking to people as the primary mechanical challenge. In Disco Elysium, skill checks govern what your character can perceive, remember, or blurt out in conversation. In Pentiment, relationships and community standing shape what information is even available to you. Neither game lets you reload and game the system cleanly – decisions accumulate.
Players on forums and social platforms have been making this connection for years, but the conversation has picked up recently in direct proportion to Pentiment’s silence. When a game ends and leaves no obvious next thing, the community that formed around it doesn’t dissolve – it migrates. Disco Elysium is the most natural destination because it satisfies the same specific itch: a game that respects your intelligence and doesn’t explain its themes at you.
The political and philosophical texture of Disco Elysium also scratches something Pentiment players recognize. Pentiment is quietly radical in its sympathy for peasant characters and its skepticism toward institutional authority – church, nobility, scholarly consensus. Disco Elysium wears its ideological concerns much more loudly, but the underlying discomfort with power structures is the same. Players moving between the two are picking up on that continuity even when they can’t articulate it precisely.
This kind of player migration – from one quiet, literary game toward another – is not unique to this pairing. Silence from a developer can actively redirect a playerbase, and the effect is often more durable than a marketing push because it comes from genuine need rather than hype. Players aren’t going to Disco Elysium because someone told them to. They’re going because the gap Pentiment left has a specific shape.
The Problem With ZA/UM’s Situation
Here’s where the recommendation gets complicated. Disco Elysium’s development studio, ZA/UM, went through a very public internal crisis. The original creative leads behind the game – including the writer most responsible for its voice – departed under disputed circumstances. A sequel has been discussed but its status is genuinely unclear, and the creative continuity that would make such a sequel meaningful is in question. Recommending Disco Elysium as a destination right now means recommending a game whose future is uncertain in ways that go beyond normal release schedule ambiguity.
For Pentiment players landing there for the first time, this doesn’t diminish the existing game at all. Disco Elysium: The Final Cut remains fully intact and playable. But the community around it carries a particular heaviness – awareness that what made the game special may not be reproducible, even by the people who made it originally. That’s a mood Pentiment players may recognize. Obsidian is a healthy studio with ongoing projects, but Pentiment was made by a small internal team and there’s no clear signal that team is doing Pentiment 2.
What This Moment Says About Narrative Games
The audience for this style of game – call it literary RPG, call it narrative adventure, call it whatever fits – exists and is paying attention. It’s not enormous by the standards of mainstream gaming, but it’s loyal and it’s vocal. When Pentiment came out, it found that audience quickly. When it went quiet, that audience didn’t dissolve back into the general population. It stayed organized, stayed curious, and kept looking.
Obsidian hasn’t indicated whether Pentiment gets a follow-up, an expansion, or anything at all. The studio’s public focus has been on other titles. Meanwhile, the Steam reviews for both Pentiment and Disco Elysium show a slow but steady trickle of new players – people arriving late, working through the games, and posting the same discovery: there isn’t much else that does this. The niche isn’t just unfilled by new releases. It’s barely acknowledged by the wider industry as a niche worth filling. Which means every month Obsidian stays quiet is another month that a small, attentive audience goes looking for something that mostly doesn’t exist yet.
