Iamb(ici)

It took me a shameful amount of time to recognize the wordplay in this entry’s title, but now I understand and I am here for it.

I did a quick playthrough as hoeforpoe and I thought it was a competent entry. The chat exchanges felt like real transcripts between people online. And they were applied sparingly; I appreciated that the game provided summaries of the discussions instead of trying to simulate lengthy poetry workshops.

On my second playthrough, I hit a blank screen and wondered whether I was doing it right — was there much interactivity in this story, and could I influence how it unfolded?

Then I opened up the walkthrough to see whether I had missed anything. OMFG, I did.

So, strong fiction, strong interactivity, and bonus points for adding interactive elements that played with the fourth wall. It was my own fault that I missed these features on my first two attempts.

I’m an old fuddy duddy for sure so I definitely wasn’t digging a game that entails almost entirely watching users chat on-line using text-speak, even if the setting of on-line poetry forums was intriguing. The game has an odd way of scoring: the poetry forum ranks you based on your character’s ability to write poetry; however, you the player are scored on how you treat others in the forum. I would have loved to have been given a chance to create some poetry of my own, but I was relegated to choosing my demeanor and letting the talking heads play it out. For the most part you don’t actually see any poetry, just usernames talking about hypothetical poetry they enjoyed writing together.

That said, this game is pretty fun technically as it uses various screen prompts to check for viruses and allow you to download files. And the true ending (the one I received on my first playthrough) was a neat, sentimental twist. However, I had little desire to find all nine endings, primarily because I found a game crashing bug on my third playthrough which didn’t motivate me to keep clicking on all the possibilities.

In this game, you play as a new user on a poetry forum. You select from 3 usernames of varying respectability (and they all get commented on). You can then join 4 or so different chat workshops.

Each one has different characters, all reminding me of real-life forum members: the rude ones, the funny ones, the cute ones.

I got the Kanojo ending, which I enjoyed. The game's not too long, but it's replayable and its length suits its purpose.

I didn't feel strongly emotionally invested, but it's polished, descriptive, has good interactivity and I would (and did) play it more than once.