I never thought I'd see Kingdom Come: Deliverance and Animal Crossing mentioned in the same breath, but now that I have, it actually makes plenty of sense. If you can get past all the murder, Kingdom Come: Deliverance and its GOTY-deserving sequel are actually remarkably cozy games. I've probably spent an accumulative dozens of hours hanging out in taverns playing dice, drinking with locals, and brewing potions. When I'm not fast-travelling across Bohemia to farm bandit encounters, I'm probably doing one of the above activities, because again, this is a seriously chill game when it wants to be.
It's the exact, extremely niche cozy vibes you get when you combine Kingdom Come: Deliverance and Animal Crossing that have been extracted, distilled, and used for the foundation of new medieval simulator Scriptorium Master of Manuscripts, which just launched today to some pretty darn encouraging Steam reviews.
Developer Yaza Games wisely promoted the game in the Kingdom Come: Deliverance subreddit and said "KCD was actually one of the biggest inspirations for us when we started working on our own project." Gameplay-wise, it's inspired by Animal Crossing: Happy Home Designer, Tiny Glade, "and other cozy titles," according to a Steam update from Yaza Games.
Scriptorium, as you might've gleaned by now, plops you down into a scriptorium where you're tasked with transcribing and, more importantly, decorating manuscripts with medieval art. There's a story mode with 70 available commissions to guide you toward your masterpiece, or you can dip into sandbox mode and really let your imagination run wild.
Either way, you'll have access to more than 2000 drawable assets inspired by genuine medieval art to use on more than 50 pieces of parchment paper. You can also customize your workshop with all sorts of furniture, lighting, decorations, windows, columns, and carpets, and of course, what would a cozy game be without pets? You can choose to have cats, dogs, and tiny dragons chill out with you while you work, which is just too cute.
I was also delighted to hear that "Scriptorium is a 100% human-made game and the result of years of hard work by real human artists, developers and medievalists," and that the developer has "a strict zero-tolerance policy for GenAI, so everything you see in Scriptorium was human-made, including art and texts."
Scriptorium normally costs $14.99 but it has a launch discount that brings it down to $11.99. Going off the admittedly limited cache of 55 user reviews published on Steam, 96% of which are positive, this one might be worth the money. One review simply reads: "hans capon mentioned therefore GOTY."
Sold.
