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Review
[When this review was originally posted on the IntFic forum, it used the LLM-generated cover-art as a jumping-off point to poke fun at the warrior-poet concept -- " someone who’s really good at fighting, but is also like super soulful, like he’s like a poet, man." Fortunately, the cover was later changed!]
The funny thing is, unlike the protagonist the game actually seems to be in on the joke. It plays things almost entirely straight, happy to rattle off wordy boilerplate about how the journey to cross the Infinite Sands seemed to take forever (you don’t say!), has the main character try to make a deal with a camel-seller by saying stuff like “what say you, merchant!”, and features a po-faced RPG system that has you weighing +1 to your armor against a bonus to your weapon damage. But as soon as you enter combat and try out your magical poetry attacks, you – or at least I – will have your jaw drop, because you’re not declaiming epic quatrains in a Quenya knock-off or whatever else you might be imagining: instead your dude, he of the artfully-cultivated stubble and multiple belts strapped every which way, busts out with Little Jack Horner or Pease Porridge Hot (inflicting 1d4 + 2 damage to the enemy and 3d6 SAN loss to the player). The intro also makes clear that warrior poets are something of a joke even in-setting: you’ve gone to a famous university to study their arts, but the department’s been bleeding enrollment to Business Administration, the deans have been making budget cuts, and when one of your instructors steals a magical MacGuffin, presumably because their adjunct’s salary just isn’t cutting it, the administrators dispatch the ten-person class’s star pupil (that’s you) to recover it, apparently because they don’t want to shell out for a real adventurer.
This setup made me laugh, and combined with the adventure-RPG hybrid gameplay and some well-chosen details like a focus on the different kinds of exotic food you can eat, I was reminded of the Quest for Glory graphic adventures, for which I have enormous fondness. Sure, the prose style is turgid enough that it mostly steps on the jokes, but there’s still an overall good-natured vibe to the setting that’s also QFGish, and the business of exploring a new city while making sure you have an inn to stay at, carefully counting your gold, getting incremental upgrades to your skills and equipment, and making progress by alternately solving puzzles and winning fights, makes for an engaging gameplay loop.
Unfortunately, Warrior Poet also sometimes shares the old Sierra philosophy on puzzle intuitiveness. Most of them are so signposted they practically solve themselves, with heavy hinting prompting you about exactly where you should go and what you should do next, but there are a few that feel quite unfair, especially the one that first puts you on the trail of your quarry. While I’d imagined that I’d need to start asking around, maybe interviewing the fellow countryman I came across at the docks about whether they’d seen anyone suspicious taking ship to another port, or checking with the magical antiquities dealer about whether anyone had tried to fence the MacGuffin, instead progress requires examining an unimportant-seeming bit of scenery four times, since the changing description will eventually throw up the critical clue. There’s a walkthrough provided at least, but this is still a pretty unfriendly welcome to Dol Bannath.
The RPG side of the equation is easier, at least. There are three different fights in the game, but none of them are tuned to be particularly difficult; despite being wishy-washy on my build rather than specializing, the baddies all fell without inflicting too much damage, and while I might have benefited from some lucky dice-rolls, even if fortune hadn’t favored me UNDO-scumming would have helped save my bacon. Hybrids like this usually benefit from leaning harder on one of their genre inspirations rather than trying in vain to serve them both equally, I think, so making the combat a pleasant distraction rather than anything more taxing is a good decision.
A less-good decision is that the game really lives up to its “Part I” subtitle, ending before anything much of interest has happened in the main plot, but despite my critiques I did find myself disappointed there wasn’t more to Warrior Poet, if only because I was desperate to see if anyone else was going to point out how absurd my “poetry” was. So sign me up for Part II, I guess – ditch the AI, streamline the writing, and workshop some of the rougher puzzles, while keeping the focus on fantasy-tourism and watching numbers go up, and I promise to dial down the ribbing next time.
- Time for an anecdote even I couldn’t crowbar into the intro in good conscience: so many years ago I was in a Mage: the Ascension game that was also set in a magical college, where the PCs where the newest group of late-teen wizards on the block. As is typically the case in RPGs, we’d all chosen to play misfits of one variety or another – we had an antisocial goth, a smart-aleck overachiever, a girl who grew up in a Narnia knockoff, That One Libertarian Who Won’t Just Shut Up – so combined with our youth, we were obviously the lamest crew around. Except then we went to a big schoolwide convocation and discovered that there was a cabal called the Warrior Poets: according to the GM they were really cool and everyone liked them, but as nerds ourselves, we knew what we were looking at, and proceeded to make brutal fun of them behind their backs and to their faces the whole time. It was glorious, with the one fly in the ointment being the fact that seeing the damage a bad cabal-name could do, we dithered on coming up with one for our own group for something like three real-world years.
