Pentiment’s text animations are my new happy place

You’ll have heard by now that Pentiment is bloody good. It’s a medieval murder mystery with monks and manuscripts and other m things – including the protagonist, who is an artist called Andreas Mer. It’s inspired by The Name Of The Rose, a murder mystery similarly focused on a medieval scriptorium in a monastary (and notable for being adapted into a film where Sean Connery is a detective monk aided by a tiny baby Christian Slater).

In the ol’ days books, were copied by monks onto parchment made of animal skin. Most people weren’t educated enough to read, in case poor people got radical ideas like maybe they should get some rights, and controlling the flow and spread of information was one of the things that made the church as powerful as it was. Pentiment takes place just as printing presses are becoming popular, which makes access to knowledge more readily available. Part of how the game conveys this is through the dialogue – not the stuff people are saying, although that helps, but what their speech bubbles looks like when they talk. You’ve probably already heard this, but I want to show you in a bit more detail.