His father basically used connections to the rector of the University of Erfurt to get him an education, which would have been very difficult for a middle-class person at this time. He has, by benefit of some finagling, a university education. So who is Andreas Mahler? How is he connected to this world?Īndreas is a journeyman artist. That's a way in which it is not like The Name of the Rose. There's a lot more ambiguity in Pentiment. You know, in The Name of the Rose, you come to a conclusive end. That's one of the reasons why we have all the different fonts and paper and structure and things like that.
That idea of all that stuff coming through in text, not through voice, I just thought that was a really interesting challenge. Then it resumes, and he's like, “I'm sorry, I couldn't scrape that part of the parchment away.” It's like within the book Eco is recreating this idea of, through text, the barely literate, Italian young man trying to write Italian and transcribe German sounds, struggling to create a palimpsest by scraping a hymnal away. The first chapter of it is called “Baudolino Tries His Hand at Writing.” In the middle of a paragraph, it just goes into a black letter script, and it's Latin from a hymnal. No, just The Name of the Rose and Ur-Fascism, the entry-level stuff. I don't know if you've read Baudolino by Umberto Eco? Also, being purely text-based, I thought there were very interesting things that we could do with language and translation within the context of the game. So playing narrative adventure games, Night in the Woods being one of the main inspiration points, I just thought telling a story within a game structure, where it's focused purely on exploration and relationships and communication, would be great. Why did you think Eco might work in a game? The Name of the Rose is a book that's fundamentally about language, about text. And by having our central character be a secular artist who resides with a family in the town, the secular world, but works within the scriptorium, he has a unique perspective, because he's constantly moving back and forth between those two worlds. And he's setting limitations on how the woods can be used, or not used, how the death inheritance tax works, things like that. The abbot is a religious leader, but he's taxing people. So there are religious aspects, but then also very practical material aspects. It was very common for abbeys to be near communities, for there to be a lot of interaction between those communities.Īlso, in this time period it was not uncommon for the abbot to be the secular lord of the lands that surrounded it. So we talk about Kiersau Abbey and Tassing, which is a town that is right next to it.
For one thing, this is inspired by The Name of the Rose, Umberto Eco's novel, which takes place almost entirely within the confines of an abbey. Did you set this game around an abbey because it's a place where a lot of these themes meet?
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