I got the impression Pentiment was Sawyer's pet project, he said a number of times that he wasn't interested in another super complicated RPG project, of the kind they'd burnt out on, specifically Deadfire but I think New Vegas came up too.
As for the critical acclaim, I liked Pentiment, but to hear about from the games press you'd think they'd never heard of a visual novel before.
It'd be interesting if they made more games like it.
