The naked guy happily reaching out towards what I promise is a giraffe adds a certain je ne sais quoi to the scene, don’t you think? A quirky touch of class, maybe? A dramatic representation of humanity’s desire to strive for the unknown?
Perhaps I’m getting a little too deep in my inkwell after being asked to recreate the long-necked animal, as described by a guy who knows a guy who definitely thinks he saw one once, using whatever familiar illustrative parts I happen to have lying around. Still, at least the client’s happy with the apparent accuracy of my cheese-slice yellow creation—monster jaw for horns, monkey butt under the tail because… because it’s my picture and I can do whatever I like—and it’s a good thing too, because in Scriptorium another equally bonkers request or three is never more than a bird-delivered scroll away.
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I honestly have no idea what I’ll have to make next. Sometimes a man just really wants to be reunited with his beloved snail, and needs me to create the fanciest border I can imagine to try and draw people’s attention to his missing pet poster. A knight insists there was a time the king rode him like a horse, and it’s on me to bring that image to life in whatever degree of safe-for-work-ness I choose. After a string of requests like these my grip on normality starts to falter, and so when a client asks for a basic combat manual full of animals, I find myself smiling as I assemble a dual-wielding sword frog to go with the battle hedgehog and axe-brandishing squirrel I already put together.
The success of Scriptorium’s unusual style of creative comedy stems from its two-pronged approach to my inky work. First of all: it’s relentlessly, joyously absurd. One moment I’m building an elephant out of trees, the next I’m turning a royal decree into an illustrated masterpiece, or visualising a viciously petty divorce settlement.
Nothing could prepare me for the twists and turns found in the main plot threads and smaller side stories brought to my ink-stained table—or even in the UI. Fresh colours are made by grinding petals into a paste, using a weary live turtle as a pestle. The shells that hold my ink are cleaned in a water dish “sailed” by a boat full of jolly rats. The game never wastes a single opportunity to raise a smile.
But the second part of it is, if anything, even more important: The game truly does not care what I create, so long as it meets a few extremely broad pieces of criteria. The client may ask for a verdant natural scene, but in truth the game makes clear that all it’s actually checking is that I’ve put 30+ things from the nature category on the page, and maybe eight bits from the animal tab for good measure. Whoever I’m working for will love a forest of golden mushrooms just as much as a beautiful selection of carefully selected foliage.
Heck, there’s nothing stopping me from recolouring, resizing, and generally twisting about a bunch of overlapping pink flower petals until they resemble a giant floating brain—the freedom I’m offered ensures it counts just the same.
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For all the dubious would-be saints hoping I’ll recreate their “divine” struggles and elderly mice hoping I’ll draw peace with cat-kind, ultimately I’m the only person I need to creatively satisfy here. I always have the space to make something I like, something that makes me laugh, and if that involves painting monkey heads blue so I can use them as the scales of a giant sea monster, then so be it.
If that’s somehow still not enough freedom, Scriptorium’s sandbox mode is ready to help me conjure up absolutely anything I like. It even offers a bit of optional inspiration to help spark my imagination, beginning with a simple how-to on dressing up a person in various ways before descending into waving skeletons, royal canines, and a beautiful flower made mostly out of bunny bottoms.
Spending an hour on this makes the entire artistic world feel like my inky oyster—and I bet I Scriptorium would let me build that shellfish out of something’s bum if I really wanted to.
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