Pentiment reminds us that reading is an act of necromancy.
THE LETTERS MOVE! Even as you read the text in this game, it shifts and rearranges itself underneath your eyes. It is text as a living, breathing entity, and I am positively shocked in retrospect that no other game has done anything like this. Great innovations, I think, rearrange the world around them. They seem like the obvious solution in retrospect because they are so overwhelmingly right that it seems a travesty for any other solution to be used in their place.
Pentiment loves writing. It loves text, it adores the written word, and it is obsessed with the act of reading and being read. It makes every single other text-heavy game look worse by merely existing with such passion for this medium. How am I supposed to read a VN, play a CRPG, wander a walking sim, when the entire time I am now acutely aware of just how dead those texts are? They are cold and unfeeling, just a tool used to get across words to the player, and nothing more.
The text in this game has mechanical depth! I don't just mean the writing, which is a strong contender for the best prose in the entire medium, but the text itself -- the ink bleeds to life in front of you, filling in the outlines of the words as they appear. Several handcrafted typefaces populate the dialogue of this game, each of them accompanied by the scratching of a pen on paper or the satisfying clunk of a printing press, like the voice beeps of a visual novel on steroids -- it turns the act of reading into an awareness of the act of writing, intimately coupling the consumption of the text with the creation of the text in a way that somehow makes the characters in this game feel even more real and human than if they were fully voiced.
Each typeface refuses to just have one variant of each letter, but instead several varying versions of letters are used depending on where they are contextually located, causing the text to bleed and run into itself in a satisfying and natural way. The letters change as you read, but not in a lazy and random way, instead carefully handcrafted for effect. The speed of the changes is just so that, for those within an average range of reading speed, you won't so much notice the exact changes of the letters as they happen, but instead you will always be right on the tail of the rearranged characters, noting their presence in the corner of your eye and by the stains left beneath the newly written text. This is, of course, the titular effect, and it says everything about the historical and cultural themes explored in this game -- but that is for another review to discuss. For our part, we are here solely for the text!
In far more obvious ways, the way that characters write their dialogue reflects who we understand them to be, whether it's in the choice of typeface, the frequency of spelling mistakes, or the ways in which alternate colors of text are used. Some characters wield red text as if we are reading a Red Letter Bible, and other characters hold completely different things to be significant and holy, and thus represent that with red text instead. When characters are impassioned, or tired, or terrified, their text is filled with errors and rapidly changing letters. We get a sense of who they are without even reading the words that they have to say!
Pentiment is all about uncovering the vibrant life in that which we view as dead, permanently separated from us, and hidden by layers of dirt and centuries of distance. It argues that even the very words in which history resides are alive -- and if the text is alive, how can its contents not be? In a world of digital text and mass alienation, is all too easy to conceptualize of a relationship between us, the author, and the text that looks something like author --> text --> reader. The author creates a text, its own standalone object, and we consume it. Pentiment rejects this entirely, and reminds us that the relationship has always been that of a conversation! The act of reading cannot be separated from the act of writing. When we engage with a text, we are fundamentally engaging with its author as well, and by doing so reaching across continents, across millennia, connecting two living persons even if it means that we are resurrecting the dead to do so!
I did not think text could be something that I would find this beautiful. This is what the medium of gaming deserves, this is what it's always been capable of, and it is a joy to finally see the medium's potential fulfilled in such a loving and thoughtfully crafted manner.
Play this motherfucking game!
THE LETTERS MOVE! Even as you read the text in this game, it shifts and rearranges itself underneath your eyes. It is text as a living, breathing entity, and I am positively shocked in retrospect that no other game has done anything like this. Great innovations, I think, rearrange the world around them. They seem like the obvious solution in retrospect because they are so overwhelmingly right that it seems a travesty for any other solution to be used in their place.
Pentiment loves writing. It loves text, it adores the written word, and it is obsessed with the act of reading and being read. It makes every single other text-heavy game look worse by merely existing with such passion for this medium. How am I supposed to read a VN, play a CRPG, wander a walking sim, when the entire time I am now acutely aware of just how dead those texts are? They are cold and unfeeling, just a tool used to get across words to the player, and nothing more.
The text in this game has mechanical depth! I don't just mean the writing, which is a strong contender for the best prose in the entire medium, but the text itself -- the ink bleeds to life in front of you, filling in the outlines of the words as they appear. Several handcrafted typefaces populate the dialogue of this game, each of them accompanied by the scratching of a pen on paper or the satisfying clunk of a printing press, like the voice beeps of a visual novel on steroids -- it turns the act of reading into an awareness of the act of writing, intimately coupling the consumption of the text with the creation of the text in a way that somehow makes the characters in this game feel even more real and human than if they were fully voiced.
Each typeface refuses to just have one variant of each letter, but instead several varying versions of letters are used depending on where they are contextually located, causing the text to bleed and run into itself in a satisfying and natural way. The letters change as you read, but not in a lazy and random way, instead carefully handcrafted for effect. The speed of the changes is just so that, for those within an average range of reading speed, you won't so much notice the exact changes of the letters as they happen, but instead you will always be right on the tail of the rearranged characters, noting their presence in the corner of your eye and by the stains left beneath the newly written text. This is, of course, the titular effect, and it says everything about the historical and cultural themes explored in this game -- but that is for another review to discuss. For our part, we are here solely for the text!
In far more obvious ways, the way that characters write their dialogue reflects who we understand them to be, whether it's in the choice of typeface, the frequency of spelling mistakes, or the ways in which alternate colors of text are used. Some characters wield red text as if we are reading a Red Letter Bible, and other characters hold completely different things to be significant and holy, and thus represent that with red text instead. When characters are impassioned, or tired, or terrified, their text is filled with errors and rapidly changing letters. We get a sense of who they are without even reading the words that they have to say!
Pentiment is all about uncovering the vibrant life in that which we view as dead, permanently separated from us, and hidden by layers of dirt and centuries of distance. It argues that even the very words in which history resides are alive -- and if the text is alive, how can its contents not be? In a world of digital text and mass alienation, is all too easy to conceptualize of a relationship between us, the author, and the text that looks something like author --> text --> reader. The author creates a text, its own standalone object, and we consume it. Pentiment rejects this entirely, and reminds us that the relationship has always been that of a conversation! The act of reading cannot be separated from the act of writing. When we engage with a text, we are fundamentally engaging with its author as well, and by doing so reaching across continents, across millennia, connecting two living persons even if it means that we are resurrecting the dead to do so!
I did not think text could be something that I would find this beautiful. This is what the medium of gaming deserves, this is what it's always been capable of, and it is a joy to finally see the medium's potential fulfilled in such a loving and thoughtfully crafted manner.
Play this motherfucking game!