Pentiment, the latest game from Obsidian Entertainment, joined the Xbox Game Pass subscription service last week to widespread positive reviews from critics, but it is being review bombed on review aggregate site Metacritic. Pentiment is a story-driven game that uses an art style inspired by Medieval-era paintings where players have to solve a mysterious murder. The catch is that players have to come to a conclusion about it without every getting a definitive answer whether they solved the mystery correctly or not.
Pentiment reviews have been highly positive, with particular praise for the game's story. While some reviewers weren't quite as high on it as others, there are those that have even gone as far as to give the game a perfect 10/10 score. Pentiment's positive reception has helped the game earn a respectable 85 rating on Metacritic, but it is now been the subject of review bombing efforts in both directions, with users spamming both negative and positive reviews.
At the time of this writing, the Pentiment user score is 6.9 for the Xbox Series X version, 6.4 for the PC version, and 5.2 for the Xbox One version. As is usually the case with review bombing efforts, users are giving the game 0/10, regardless of if that score really makes sense or not. It seems most of the negative user reviews are upset about Pentiment's narrative-driven nature, its slow pace, and how it's more of a visual novel than a traditional video game. Conversely, it seems some fans have taken to giving the game perfect 10/10 scores in response to the negative reviews, an effort to pull its user rating in the opposite direction.
Review bombing on Metacritic is a practice that's unlikely to go away any time soon. It seems many like to go to extremes when leaving user reviews for games on Metacritic, either assigning the games perfect 10/10 scores or 0/10 scores with no room in between. Oftentimes these reviews are from people that have clearly not played the games they're reviewing to any significant extent. It seems one solution to this recurring issue would be to make it so users can't leave reviews until more time has passed after a game's release, but it's unclear if that will ever happen.
As far as Pentiment goes, the good news is that one can come to their own conclusion about the game without breaking the bank. As previously mentioned, Pentiment is readily available on Xbox Game Pass, and since it's a first-party Microsoft game, it's unlikely to ever leave the service.
Pentiment is available now for PC, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X.