Pentiment’s 16th-century story illuminates its fonts

Lettermatic offers fonts. Fonts available for purchase and usage cover your StarbucksFonts on apps, coffee cups and NASCAR cars. You can find their fonts everywhere, on all sorts of things — even in video games, like Psychonauts 2. You’ll find their letters next in Obsidian Entertainment’s Pentiment, the 16th-century narrative role-playing game that looks like it’s been pulled straight out of a medieval manuscript.

PentimentIt plays out in one of the manuscripts. Bavaria is the setting for this murder mystery tale, which draws inspiration from late-medieval handwritten manuscripts and early printing processes. Pentiment’s main character, Andreas Maler, is an artist who works on illuminated manuscripts, writing them by hand and adding in period-appropriate flourishes: intricate designs, illustrations, and borders, sometimes with actual silver and gold.

A group of people stand in front of a person. They’re all saying ‘Amen.’

Riley Cran, his lettermatic small team created six fonts. PentimentEach of these serves a unique purpose. PentimentThis is not an audio-only video game. Instead, its fonts will replace the voices. “We can use these fonts to make characters exclamatory,” Obsidian producer Alec Frey told Polygon. “We can show [a character’s]Fonts can be used to indicate education, background, and personality. It allows us to really give a voice to the characters and bring the world to life.”

Pentiment’s fonts feel like they have a life of their own. They’re dynamic; there are splatters and scribbles, ink bleeding onto parchment pages. With words added and removed, the ink can dry and then dullen.

With a story so thoroughly embedded in the past, Obsidian wanted to ensure it got that important detail — its fonts — accurate, according to history. That’s where Cran and his team came in: They’re font experts, and they were eager to match Obsidian’s enthusiasm for the era. The goal was not only to perfect the 16th-century European Gothic and flourished script writing, but to also encompass more everyday styles of text, too — after all, not everyone was a master of specialized writing, or could even read or write at all.

“We have an entire shelf of books in our library that we purchased for research on this game,” Cran said. “We started the fonts during the pandemic, when it was harder to get access to physical archives. But we ended up realizing that a huge amount of scanned and photographed assets in institutions are available digitally.”

After studying the documents and other resources, Lettermatic built out a big ol’ family tree of Latin writing, one that spans time and geography, to be able to place Pentiment’s world within a timeline, ensuring its writing styles were ones that people of the time were likely to use or see. Lettermatic and Obsidian Entertainment read many books while researching the game. PentimentFrey stated that there is a bibliography at the end of each credit. Lettermatic and Obsidian designers then gathered pieces from these fonts to create a new font. Pentiment’s new fonts, which were designed specifically for the video game. Cran explained that they had figured this out and began drawing fonts mostly hand-drawn using the appropriate writing tools for the period. According to Cran, there are approximately 2,700 different glyphs. Pentiment’s six fonts.

Two people stand in a yard, in front of a barn, talking. There’s a chicken offside.

However, Obsidian and Lettermatic still wanted the game’s fonts to be accessible to all players, so they had to consider that while building the type. Some fonts are not accessible in the easier-to-read version. The player can choose to either use all fonts or the most easily-read ones at the beginning of the game.

“We want to make sure that if people are having a hard time reading [the fonts], we’ve got a way for them to do that,” Frey said. “We also have a text-to-speech feature in the game if you need the game to read itself to you. It’s not voice acting, but it is the automated voice.”

You can use the fonts to implement them in Pentiment, Obsidian received what Cran described as a “toolkit” from Lettermatic. These fonts do not look the same as those you and I use everyday. After all, this text is supposed to mimic writing, which isn’t as consistent as most digital fonts. It includes considerations for how a person writing two E’s back to back won’t write each of them in the same exact way. There are other “spontaneous” details, too, Cran said — like little flourishes or swishes. “That’s one quality is that authentic feeling of spontaneous writing that’s not provided by a digital asset, and how to figure out how to make a digital asset that realistically captures a very analog type of typography.”

Two pages of a book filled halfway with gothic script. At the bottom of each page, there are illustrations depicting people by and on a lake.

These are details that players may miss. Pentiment It was so designed. But if the details weren’t right, the game would probably feel different in some way — albeit on a minor scale. A detail as small as a font on the screen is as important as any other asset; they’re all little pieces of a big, big world.

“The work itself, it was kind of overwhelmingly apparent to us that we’re just part of one big story,” Cran said. “The folks at Obsidian working on Pentiment had such a clear vision for when this game is taking place, and where, so it was pretty straightforward to jump into some in-depth research.”

Pentiment Available Nov. 15, on Xbox Series X and Xbox One.

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