What kind of writing style would your speech bubbles use?

Game review, Pentiment

If your words appeared above your head in a little papery speech bubble every time you spoke, what would the letters look like? Would they be scrawled and barely literate? Ornately illuminated? Printed in moveable type? Word-processed? Decorated with emojis?

Welcome to Pentiment, an absolutely gorgeous game by Obsidian Entertainment released in 2022. The story is set in the early sixteenth century, not long after the invention of the printing press and just on the cusp of the Reformation, two events that were to revolutionise not only the way the way the world wrote, but the way the world thought.

You play as Andreas Maler, a giddy young artist with flowing golden hair (very reminiscent of Albrecht Dürer) who is serving an apprenticeship at Kiersau Abbey. He spends his days illuminating manuscripts among the monks or flirting with women in the local village of Tassing.

Life becomes a bit more exciting when a nobleman is murdered and Andreas, being an educated man, is expected to help solve the case. He starts to piece the clues together, uncovering a whole host of tensions and secrets on the way.

There are so many details that make Pentiment a joy to play. The outcome of the story can be affected by all sorts of tiny choices you make, for example, the book you lend a child means they’ll grow up with a slightly different personality that will alter a later section of the game. It’s intensively well-researched, ang gorgeously designed like a living medieval manuscript.

When we see inside Andreas’ head, we glimpse a human psyche as it would have been understood at the time. The team essentially underwent a Renaissance education to create the look and psychological landscape of the game.

But my favourite detail is the use of scripts in speech bubbles. In Pentiment, characters’ personalities, livelihoods and degree of literacy are illustrated in how their thoughts appear. Andreas himself speaks (and thinks) in a standard German blackletter script:

But the monastic characters have a more ornate version:

Peasant characters who are essentially illiterate have a much shakier style

And one mysterious figure has their own way of forming words entirely: the ‘thread puller’ whose gorgeously elaborate script appears in purple ink on their tantalising notes…

Best of all is the fact that the printers’ family speak in movable type i.e. letters that are used in the printing press. The ability to rearrange and reuse single-letter stamps was the core technology at the heart of the revolution in printing. To find out more about how it worked and some of the folklore associated with this new machine, read my article:

The Devil and the Printing Press

So the printer and his family speak in moveable type to signify that they are already being changed by this new way of forming words. Just look at this lovely animation! Marie’s letters appear upside down, just like they do when you set type in the composing stick, you can see the black ink roll over them and then they appear properly printed the right way up. Agh! So beautiful!

And as if this wasn’t enough extra work, the design team made the decision to include errors in the speech bubbles when they first appear. The more comfortable a character is with writing, the fewer mistakes they make. You often start reading even as the person is ‘correcting’ a letter here and there.

Accordingly, the printer’s family make the type of errors common in printing e.g. accidentally reproducing a letter upside down and then having to turn it around and try again – not something that we often get wrong when writing by hand! Another printer-specific error is the fact that some letters come out less well inked than others, a little flaw you see when you’ve rolled the ink across the type unevenly or when one of the letters has been worn down by use and doesn’t take the ink so well. There are little sound effects too, we hear the clunking of the press rather than the scratching of a quill.

As you can probably tell if you’re new to Curiosities, my ‘game reviews’ are really just an excuse for me to wax lyrical about something I love which happens to be related to a game. Every medievalist and early modernist who sits down with Pentiment will find a different gorgeous detail that stands out to them, but for me, the best touch has to be the use of speech bubbles. Making the decision to include all this in the game required a huge painstaking commitment but I am so so pleased they did.

Nowadays we have far more styles of writing than ever before. If you were a character in a game like this, what kind of script would your speech bubbles use and what would that reveal about the way you think? Let me know in the comments below.

12 pt Times New Roman would probably be the font for me; it was the default setting when I first used word processors, and I chose it for my PhD. Then again, the one I use here for my articles is called ‘Fancy serif’ so maybe that will shape my thoughts from now on. There would definitely be a fair few typos…

You never quite know what will happen in my Monday articles, but if you’re interested in the history of magic, horror, theatre, storytelling and the generally weird and wonderful, consider paying to subscribe to keep me writing or like, share, comment, and recommend for free to help my substack grow.