Pentiment Review (gergo)
Pentiment is a nice interactive novel with lovely graphics and an intriguing setting. The story is interesting, but it is the story: There is a single story with a single outcome that you can't influence. The game's description is wrong when it says that "Players will be responsible for conducting their own investigation to decide the fate of the community". The community's fate is preordained, you cannot avert the pre-scripted tragedies that will happen to it.
You do have choices, and they can make characters happy or unhappy and help or prevent you from advancing side quests. But you can't change the overall outcome. You cannot even discover the solution of the overall Big Mystery; instead, you kind of stumble into it and then have everything revealed to you in a wall of text.
While you do also make choices that get people killed, the game even robs you of most of the moral ambiguity that is involved in these choices. Very annoyingly, no matter whom you accuse and get killed based on whatever flimsy reasoning in Acts 1 and 2, in the end the Thread-Puller reveals that these were indeed the actual killers. I fretted about these choices, but this fretting was invalidated by the game. It would have been much better if the writers had decided who the real killers were, and in the end told me "ha ha, you got the wrong persons killed". That single-line dialogue change, all by itself, would make the game much more interesting to replay.
Like other critical commenters, I also generally disliked the railroading, and the fact that you are working against the in-game clock and are repeatedly forced to do things that advance game time. This makes it impossible to solve most of the side quests in a single playthrough. That is probably by design, intended to make the game more fun to replay. But that presumes that the game is fun enough to replay at all. To me it feels like a few side quests and "maybe if I change this one choice, something else will happen after I wade through the next ten hours of the game" do not warrant replaying the whole thing.