The aesthetic of using characters as material was noted to be related to ASCII art in a fundamental way.
The game features ASCII art which can be disabled.
ASCII art is also used widely and many of them are faces with expression.
ASCII art can be created with any text editor, and is often used with free-form languages.
ASCII art was also used in early e-mail when images could not be embedded.
This kind of ASCII art is handmade in a text editor.
In this way, it is possible to create ASCII art where the characters only differ in color.
Also can be accompanied by an ASCII art image of an owl.
This only made sense when using ASCII art, because without it the resulting resolution would only have been 80x100.
ASCII art (to make this one work, be sure to set the console size to at least 119x48):