Post Script
Pentiment’s art is glorious, but its text is even better
As is entirely proper, Pentiment will receive plenty of plaudits for the standard of its art and animation. What this small team led by art director Hannah Kennedy has produced is nothing short of remarkable: the wood-print character art and backdrops are richly drawn, while different period-appropriate styles are adopted from time to time. As characters chat about books, they’ll pop up within their pages; meanwhile, our protagonist’s dreams sometimes see him visit a sort of mind palace, which has a very different look to his waking surroundings. While dialogue exchanges tend to fix characters in place, there’s always something (or someone) moving in the background; when the camera zooms in for a one-on-one chat, subtle eye and mouth movements and head tilts reveal as much about the speaker’s feelings as their words.
Still, it’s in Pentiment’s text where much of the magic happens. That makes sense, since aside from a few pieces of music, the human voice is absent: there are no grunts or short soundbites accompanying each line. Rather, they are written out, accompanied by the sound of a quill scratching against linen fibre. It is, as Sawyer says, designed to evoke “the physical act of writing”, a clever way to represent how people thought, and recorded those thoughts.
That includes spelling errors: often during an exchange you will see words that don’t make sense until the sentence is concluded and this unseen scribe will briskly correct their mistake, the erroneous letter still faintly visible beneath. During one encounter with a group of Italian visitors, entire speech boxes are overwritten, the words in their native tongue replaced as Maler translates them. Gaps will sometimes be left – references to ‘God’ and ‘Christ’ are written in red, facilitating a change of ink before they’re added. When we speak to one character, the text appears instead in blue, reflecting the fact that they’re a non-believer (a discovery that perhaps partly explains a troubling late-game revelation).
Underlined words, meanwhile, are the early modern equivalent of hyperlinks: select these and the camera will pull out to reveal character portraits or explanations, with amusing marginalia around the frame, from frogs in natty hats to birds cheerfully calling from within a bovine’s jaws. Strong emotions are represented visually, too: angry outbursts see words land on the page quickly, surrounded by a spatter of ink spots. And while older characters appear relatively faded and worn, you really know they’re not long for this world when they’re coughing and spluttering, the shaking text accompanied by a harsher scratch.
But perhaps its cleverest trick of all is its use of different typefaces. Of the five main scripts, the Peasant variant is the roughest, while the cursive Scribe is perceptibly neater, with smoother curves. Maler and a few others speak in the clear Humanist script, while Monastic script is more ornate (and harder to immediately parse) with the outlines of letters scratched out before being flooded with ink. Finally, there’s the Printer type, which for the first encounter with new characters means words are stamped on via individual inverted letter blocks. (Naturally, this is our favourite.)
You might think Pentiment’s method to be needlessly protracted, drawing out exchanges that could otherwise be expedited. But in practice it’s a useful way to denote social standing, a constant visual shorthand for the class conflict at the heart of the game. Indeed, in one early exchange, Maler’s assumptions about a character highlight his prejudices, via a chastening mid-conversation change of font. And the endeavour proves its worth late on, via a sudden epiphany handled entirely by a similar shift that sews up a major mystery. While proving the enduring value of the printed word, Pentiment also hands down a lesson to the narrative adventures that will follow in its wake, setting a new standard for what games can communicate through text alone.