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I've finally gotten around to playing Pentiment. It's a very nice detective adventure game set in early 16th century Bavaria. I found it to strike a very tasteful balance between woke and trad. At the very least, it avoids falling into either gratuitious cottagecore or Bay Area diversity. Quite recommended.
The game is set in the town of Tassing and the double abbey of Kiersau, sitting on Via Imperii in the Bavarian Alps. The abbey has a diverse cast of monks and nuns: German, French, Czech, Hungarian. There's even a visitor from Abyssinia: he's returning from the Council of Constance, and given that the abbey's important relic is the hand of Saint Maurice, it feels appropriate that he would stop there to venerate the African saint. The town is much more homogenous, as is expected. There's a wandering Gypsy tinkerer wisely staying well away from the built-up area, and the rest of the non-Germans in town are the guests of its most modernized residents.
The problems the residents have to deal with are delightfully period appropriate: conflicts between the estates, like peasants not being allowed to pay taxes in kind and being denied the use of the common land, widows not being able to inherit their husband's property (which some of the characters remind the PC is a recent change), infant mortality and of course religion. The game is set during the Reformation, so the baron we meet in the early game, who enjoys (ab)using his privilege and loves pushing people's buttons, knows exactly how to spoil the Benedictines' midday meal: talk(!) about Martin Luther(!). Of course, there are homosexuals, but you have to snoop around the deepest closets to find them. They aren't exactly happy when you do. There's a suspiciously unmarried dude I had initially pegged for a confirmed bachelor, but he turned out to be a shy incel. At the same time, there are many more happy marriages than unhappy ones, including some very unlikely ones.
Everyone's naturally religious (and I haven't played a naturally religious protagonist since AssCreed: Origins), but the Reformation naturally starts rearranging people's priorities. The aforementioned baron is probably the closest you can get to a non-believing character in the game, but he is much closer to the French royalty in the same time period, who, while remaining Catholic, allied themselves with the Ottomans and supported Protestant vassals of the Catholic Holy Roman Emperor, than he's to the median /r/atheism poster.
Finally, there's a tiny feature I really enjoyed. The game is split into time slots, and you don't spend all of them investigating. You have to sit down to eat and you can do it with various families around the town or with the monks. You usually get a new clue from the table talk, but it's also a nice way to learn what early modern people of different social classes would eat for dinner or supper.
I can't really talk about the story of a detective game without spoiling it, but it certainly has a murder and an unlikely amateur sleuth in it. Like a good detective story should, it introduces the ultimate villain and the clues to the motive hidden in plain sight in the first few scenes, and I really enjoyed the twists. I can't say I am good at detective stories, and I guessed the real villain's identity before the reveal, but only in the final act. And I completely missed their motivation, which is a bit of a hot and fuzzy one if you know what I mean, even though I kept noticing the clues.
I wish I could enjoy it. It should have been right up my alley. I like Josh Sawyer games and I like the medieval period and historical accuracy.
But the way it's presented really bugs me. So much text, divided into so many little dialogue boxes you have to click through. And no way to just exit a dialogue. You have to follow each one until the end. Drove me bonkers. I just wanted to "get on with it" and the game kept me stuck clicking through crap I didn't want to read at that point.
It's not like there's anything else there beyond dialogues. It's like saying you wish you could skip all the combat in DooM.
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I started Pentiment but sort of fell off and will probably try it again after working through Citizen Sleeper.
The description rouses my interest but uhh, what exactly is supposed to be woke about it then?
I have edited the introductory sentence to not imply it has something specifically woke about it. To me, indefensibly woke historical (or parahistorical) fiction implies that people back then were just like us, just more oppressed. If you picked a paragon of virtue from back then and a paragon of virtue from now, the only difference between them could be explained by unavailability of synthetic hair dyes. An equally indefensibly trad fiction ignores the real diversity and/or problems various marginalized people experienced back then. Pentiment tries to walk between two fires and mostly succeeds. It certainly beats bipolar AssCreed: Odyssey that lets you know how sexist Ancient Greeks were in one scene and has you win Olympic gold as Cassandra in the next one. Of course, Pentiment doesn't try to play on edgelord difficulty where it would force you into situations where the values dissonance was unavoidable.
How many Africans were there in place and time this game takes place? This "real diversity" reminds of Rock Paper Shotgun claiming that since an African trader is attested in the same decade in Prague, KC:D being set in 15th Czech countryside has no business being all-white.
KC:D had Cumans gatecrashing the tutorial, I have no idea how that's not diversity. As I've said in the OP, Pentiment doesn't try to shoehorn historically implausible minorities into the setting.
Ask RPS?
On the other hand, who, specifically, is denying you'd run into a soldier from faraway lands, particularly around the time of wars between empires, or that maybe you'd see a pilgrim or a merchant if you happen to be at the right place at the right time?
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