Be The Medieval Scribe You’ve Always Wanted To Be
HIGH The freedom to create literally anything, no matter how absurd.
LOW It might be repetitive for some audiences.
WTF is wrong with the queen?
In the Middle Ages, monasteries were the centers of literate culture. There, groups of monks spent their days secluded in dark rooms (called scriptorium) hand-making copies of the Bible, manuscripts by classical authors, and other texts from European and Muslim sources.
These books were considered precious, rare objects, accessible only to certain monasteries, cathedrals, kings, and the wealthiest individuals. However, the most splendid parts of these folios are the marginalia. The monks decorated the margins of manuscripts with colorful drawings — funny and shimmering images depicting religious themes and scenes of everyday life… but sometimes, the monks got bored and would draw the funniest and most surreal things.
We have knights fighting snails, rabbits fighting like they are knights, a siege led by animals, a king pooping while standing on the neck of two heads kissing each other, two men fighting and swinging on a rope with their decapitated heads in their hands, a bird-man fighting a two-headed figure with a bell in its hood and endless more examples. These margins offer a world turned upside down, where the creatures defy the natural order in humorous and surreal ways. These are magnificent displays combining erudition and absurdity.
In Scriptorium, the premise is simple — take those absurd medieval miniatures and create our own equally absurd masterpieces.
We start play by choosing and personalizing our character. Then we are welcomed in our workshop by a suspicious Yoda look-alike uncle, who introduces us to the tutorial. After fulfilling his role, he departs for who knows where, and his presence gives way to… the devil. In a medieval, dark fairy tale style, Satan tricks us and now lives with us permanently. Strangely enough, instead of turning our life into hell, he will actually be a helping hand… for a price.
At our desk, we choose orders from clients and create works of art according to their requests, and some assignments are weirder than others. Notables include a queen who wants to illustrate a decree to ban bathing and divorce, a nameless weirdo who want us to recreate his exquisite dreams, and a guy who wants to create a flyer for his lost snail.
All the orders have specific requests that we need to fulfill in order to complete the task and advance to the next order. These requests can be simple, like putting an animal in the drawing, or they can be quite challenging, like the queen asking us to specifically paint her confidant pouring wine on the stiff-necked king’s advisor, and then to draw the king falling into a pot of stew while animals play music. Besides the required elements, clients often have extra wishes that are not compulsory, but are worth extra rewards if satisfied.
When going to work, we don’t actually draw as if we were using the mouse like a quill, but instead we assemble collage pieces in which we select sketches from our library of options and assemble the desired composition. We can place the sketches, resize them, rotate them, flip them, layer them, and color them in. Everything feels intuitive and smooth, and the best part is that we have the freedom to do not only what our customers request, but to go further and embrace creativity and absurdity, just like our predecessors in the Middle Ages. Players can add as much as they want without constraints or aesthetic judgment.
Some sketches are originally created by the developers, which is a nice touch, but some are clearly inspirations from real medieval miniatures, like the famous horse from the manuscript L’estoire del Saint Graal that was drawn from the front, kind of.
Another interesting feature of Scriptorium‘s artistic side is the pigment workshop, where we create new colors. To do that, we mix pigments from various flowers by grinding the shell of this snail like-creature. If we want to add a golden hue, we have a dragon to melt gold ingots. We save the new ink on little shells, but if we’re not satisfied with the color, no problem, we have cute little rats to wash it away.
Scriptorium is amazing. Every aspect embraces the same absurdity that medieval monks from 1000 years ago reveled in, and I congratulate Yaza Games for doing such a masterful job.
But the congratulations don’t end there.
I was also delighted to hear that Yaza Games is proud that Scriptorium is a 100% human-made game — it’s the result of years of hard work put in by real human artists, developers and medievalists, and that they have a strict zero-tolerance policy for GenAI. Everything we see in Scriptorium is made by real people, and in the non-medieval times we live in, this is a refreshing statement that makes us feel connected to a piece of human history from centuries ago.
Rating: 9.5 out of 10
Buy Scriptorium: Master of Manuscripts – PC
Disclosures: This game is developed by Yaza Games and published by Mythwright. It is currently available on PC. This copy of the game was obtained via publisher and reviewed on the PC. Approximately 10 hours of play were devoted to the single-player mode, and the game was not completed. There are no multiplayer modes.
Parents: As of press time, this game was not reviewed by the ESRB. The game is safe and recommended for children. However, as the Steam description states, “Scriptorium is a game for scribes of all ages. However, those familiar with medieval art will know that it can be a little… cheeky. We have embraced this tradition, keeping the humor as bizarre and bare as the original scribes intended. Expect to encounter cartoon bottoms and figures in need of a fig leaf or two – all presented with a wink and a nod, with no explicit or scandalous anatomical details.”
Colorblind Modes: There are no colorblind modes available.
Deaf & Hard of Hearing Gamers: This game offers subtitles. The subtitles cannot be altered and/or resized. For Deaf and Hard of Hearing gamers, Scriptorium is fully accessible game because there are no audio cues needed for successful play.
Remappable Controls: No, this game’s controls are not remappable. This is a point and click game, although we can use the arrows to move through the screen.
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