Scriptorium Is A Medieval Mario Paint With A Free Trial On Steam Now

Medieval-inspired settings are everywhere in RPGs. Kings and knights are front and center, as is the occasional visit to the lives of more common folk. Artists and scribes tend to shrink into the background, with some rare exceptions, but an upcoming game with a free trial on Steam puts you in the shoes of one as you exercise your skills in making illuminated manuscripts for all sorts of bizarre clients.

Scriptorium: Master of Manuscripts doesn’t yet have a release date, but a playtest running until July 10 on Steam offers an early look at the upcoming scribe sim. Two modes are available in the playtest — a campaign of sorts that has you fulfilling requests for clients at your shop for money, and a sandbox mode where you can just go wild and make whatever creations you want.

In story mode, you start with a partially completed illustration, and you’ll need to fill in details to make your clients happy. For each request, you have a set number of elements you can add to the illustration, but you have a lot of freedom in how you use them. You can pluck out full illustrations of people and animals, or combine various body parts to make a creature of your own. Clothes, buildings, and bits of the natural environment are also part of your toolkit, which you can resize and rotate like you’re using the Middle Ages equivalent of Photoshop. I was pleasantly surprised at just how flexible this image editor is and I never ran into any technical problems getting my artistic masterpieces onto the page.

When you receive a request, you’ll get some background information from your client, who might be a suspect priest, a questing knight, or just a talking mouse wearing glasses. Once you actually get into the business of illustrating, you have to meet certain goals like using a number of images from a certain category or filling some amount of the canvas to proceed. There are also optional objectives, which are sometimes more vague and require more thought from you. These might instruct you to include a dog’s favorite treat, for example, leaving it to you to figure out it’s asking for a bone.

Fulfilling these optional requests adds a small bit of puzzle-solving to the process, which I hope Scriptorium builds on in the full release. On the other hand, I never really felt challenged by the basic goals. Often, clients would ask for something specific when they showed up, which wouldn’t even be reflected in what I was required to add to complete the drawing. As much fun as it is to try to interpret their requests with the drawing elements I had on hand, it always felt like I was doing more than I had to even to meet what seemed like the bare minimum. Still, building on partial illustrations already handed to me was a lot of fun, especially given how bizarre they often are to begin with.

On top of the story mode, there’s a fully creative option that gives you a blank page with no requirements or restrictions and lets you design whatever you want. As someone who spent an inordinate amount of time building illustrations out of stamps in Mario Paint growing up, creative mode scratched an artistic itch that kept me playing way longer than fulfilling requests did. On top of strange drawings of snails and monks, your toolkit also includes a full set of hand-drawn letters. With enough patience, you can develop some truly wild creations that look startlingly like actual illuminated manuscripts, or run amok in the other direction. On the game’s Steam page, developer Yaza Games shows off maps and card games made with the illustration tool, and I have no doubt that even more wildly impressive nonsense will come out of it when the game is in more players’ hands.

Scriptorium: Master of Manuscripts doesn’t have a release date. Its open playtest runs on Steam until July 10.