Dual II: Cyclic

This is unfortunately one of the less accessible pieces I’ve encountered in this year’s ECTOCOMP, and I don’t mean that in the way that poetry can be inaccessible to people unfamiliar with the artform. I know I repeat this constantly, but please, please use a contrast checker to make sure your text is legible. This gave me a headache to read. Also, I don’t usually complain about font sizes since that’s the easiest thing to change on the user’s end—any old browser will do it—but as someone who doesn’t generally need to boost the font size for vision reasons I did need to boost it here because it is tiny and my poor fine motor control was not up to clicking to continue when the target was so small.

The chained poem conceit is interesting, with each poem taking the last line of the previous as the first line and spinning off into a different direction with it, and the poems cover many different topics. The one that stuck with me most was the one about relatives squabbling over an inheritance, which I thought made interesting use of the unique affordances of the medium in what it was doing with cycling links. The rest of the poems don’t really make use of anything besides (sometimes very slow) timed text; I see in theory why that’s appealing to a poet and seems like a natural outgrowth of the way line breaks and general space on the page are used in static poetry, but I personally did not feel like it added to the experience. I do think there’s promise here and I would be interested to see more interactive poetry that really explored the question of “what can you do with interactive poetry that you can’t do with the regular on-paper kind?” (Other than make the text fade in really slowly.)

This sounds like it was almost a La Petite Mort game, as it was finished in 5 hours, but I’m glad the author took time to finish it, because it feels like a complete product.

This is a cyclic series of poems presented on a yellow background with black text. Due to the weird way Itch frames work, I had to download the game to be able to see it properly (if the author sees this, I suggest using the ‘enable scrollbars’ and ‘click to open in a new window’ options).

This is a poetical work of horror, with the poems blending explicitly horrifying things (monsters, death, etc.) with relatable foibles of humanity like family squabbles or employment woes.

I liked the way each poem flows into the others, and I like the variation in interaction. Some poems play out with slow-displayed text (all of which were thankfully faster than my reading speed). My favorite poem in the cycle, Monstrous beauty of curses, uses a kind of accretive poetry where the lines and words expand as they’re clicked on.

Overall, the writing here is very descriptive and the game felt interactive and polished. I found some of the topics relatable, but I’m more intrigued by the mechanics and the inter-connections.