Happy Monday, folks, and welcome to the Weekly Video Games Thread!
A couple of days ago, I finished Deltarune Chapter 3. Woo! Great game, great upping of the stakes and the conventions, not unlike Chapter 2. Looking forward to jumping into Chapter 4 in a… couple days, probably. Wanna give it just a tiny bit of time, especially since Chapter 3 was played in cut-up chunks alongside all the other things I’m playing. I don’t think it’s often great to do that with games that are already small and punchy.
But that’s not what I wanna talk about. Really, today, I wanna talk about fonts. Deltarune, even more so than its predecessor Undertale, absolutely adores the minor visual gimmick of playing with font. The antagonist of Chapter 3 shows up by making giant shifts in the game’s typical and extremely functional normal font. Sans from the previous game speaks in lowercase Comic Sans. And while those are more noticeable examples, the games are full of moments in which a font will be fully changed to indicate a character’s mental or emotional state, moral alignment, role, place, or change of some other kind. It leads to a game in which the text itself can feel rather visceral.
When I was younger, this kind of thing came in the form of, say, slightly larger font size or Nintendo coloring all the proper nouns to know you had to stop Ganondorf from seizing Hyrule Castle (WordPress makes proving visual aids… complicated, so enjoy the basic bolding and underlining). But this is a very overt escalation, one that uses text as another visual tool to manipulate for some artistic point. And Deltarune isn’t the only one! Pentiment did this as well and even more immaculately, as font was used to indicate social class and public presentation. Essentially, this turns the most basic aspects of games, bare bones text, into a tool of graphical and potentially narrative weight. Text is so ever-present that we often forget it can be toyed with. So for today’s prompt, what’s your favorite example of this phenomenon, of a game playing with its own text?
Of course, before I go off, I’d be remiss to not point out that this comes with certain potential drawbacks. This kind of gimmick can be problematic for various disabilities, or for people without as firm a grip on the language being written. As a rule, it’s best to provide more accessible text options and to treat these as additive to your vision but not a load-bearing pillar that cannot ever be removed. That is something Pentiment provides with simpler and somewhat more easily readable fonts; I don’t think Deltarune includes such an option. So I do get that my geeking out over this idea comes from some degree of privilege.
While you’re mulling on that, what did you play this weekend?