PROSPER.0

Adapted from a SpringThing24 Review

Played: 4/1/24
Playtime: 1hr, 2 endings, but trashed my success poem!

If you were going to pitch the anti-JJMcC work, like the work engineered from ground up to push me away and keep pushing until I fell into an ocean, well, let’s just eavesdrop on the pitch in progress:

“… see the hero is sentient AI, right? And what it wants is to save humanity from its sterile profit-driven doom. But get this, what will save them is ART!!! Keep up, son, we’re still accelerating. So the game protagonist is not the hero though, they will be a corp-drone sheeple redeemed by art… what? Seriously? A drone’s initiative impact narrative, are you hearing yourself? Be realistic. Forget the sheeple, they’re just the player’s shell. The point is the art, only not just any art, are you ready for this? Are you ready? What brings down dyscapitalopia is… PEOTRY!!”

Imma stop you there made-of-straw pitchman. So many anti-JJMcC boxes in such short time. AI valorization; hopelessly naive Art-stronger-than-profit; marginal player agency; Poetry. Longtime readers will recall a certain antipathy for what I have called Poetic Verse. Y’know what is teeming, just chock-a-block with Poetic Verse? POETRY. For me, at it’s best, Poetry is glib, amusing wordplay. Far more often it is overwrought linguistic excess that I have no patience for.

Well, Prosper.0 is evidence why clearing these pitches past me is a BAD idea. Is it guilty of all the things it pitched? Yeah, it kinda is. But it adds two things so crucial to the proceedings as to completely transform the entire experience: a clean, simple, but immersive graphical presentation and a POETRY minigame. The latter being the heavy hitter here.

Setup first: the player is a worker drone in a dystopian Corporate far future, purging art from computers and summarizing entire civilizations in a handful of reductive categories. Uh, kinda like what you see at the bottom of this review. The graphical presentation endeavors to put you at that far-future terminal, madly sorting those bits in soul-crunching mouse clicks. It is a clean, evocative design (not the least of which the teletype and reverse teletype word presentations) Until the hero AI pops in and… brings the poetry.

Nevermind the flimsy narrative justification, nevermind the logistical problems of the setup, nevermind the straight-faced and totally committed assertion of Poetry’s potency in the face of uncaring capitalist incentives... you gonna write some poetry. And that is where things take off.

The poetry minigame is somehow completely winning, a thoroughly engaging exercise of madly clicking words as they vanish before your eyes, then trying to make coherent poetry out of the resulting word salad. IT IS ENTHRALLING. My first attempt was a too-cool-for-school parody that couldn’t even maintain its ironic remove to the last line. Against my own nature and sensibilities I found myself TRYING to get usable words, then honor the subjects as best I could, THEN ACTIVELY BEMOAN MY LIMITED SKILLS IN AN ENDEAVOR I HAVE LITTLE REGARD FOR. Ultimately, the plot contrivances were immaterial. The game wanted me to believe in the power of poetry and wisely decided the only way I would is to MAKE ME DO IT. With just the perfect amount of evolving artificial/randomized constraints to keep things fresh. It also has a bit to say about the limits of expression and the inherent loss of depth in any documentation that add the right sour/salt to keep things from getting too cloying.

You cycle through a series of slightly varied exercises, then come to some final narrative choices that impact you but not the plot. Then you get to see your poetry one last time! The alchemy that generated that engagement kind of moots any objections the setup might provoke - I kinda didn’t care how contrived the setup was, it was barely but just enough to push past all my reservations and rejections. It did what it needed to do to showcase its centerpiece statement: Poetry is kind of an act, not a product.

I swear to God, five stars for a POETRY work??? Who even am I anymore?

Mystery, Inc: Velma
Vibe: Geeky but winning High School English teacher
Polish: Smooth
Gimme the Wheel! : My only quibble with the game was my inability to recover poetry lost to an ‘explore alternate ending’ option. Would try to keep those available, even with an alternate path exploration.

Polish scale: Gleaming, Smooth, Textured, Rough, Distressed
Gimme the Wheel: What I would do next, if it were my project.