Iamb(ici)

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.