you are an ancient chinese poet in exile

(I beta-tested this game).

“Where do you get your ideas?” is surely the most vapid question you can ask a writer, but spare a thought for how much worse it must land when the writer in question is a poet. Poetry isn’t so much a what as a how, “ideas” are at best the jumping-off point that has as much to do with rhythm, an image, a sense of a word’s full freight, as anything else. So spare more than a thought for the protagonist of you are an ancient chinese poet…, child of a disgraced courtier who amuses himself with anonymously-circulated verse but is suddenly summoned to the Emperor’s court to take part in a poetry competition. You have a couple of hours to circulate amongst the great and the good, observing their foibles and possibly being recruited into their intrigues, but you’d better hope you catch a spark somewhere along the way because given the cut-throat nature of court politics, “sorry, I just wasn’t feeling it tonight” probably isn’t going to go over well.

I haven’t exhaustively plumbed the game’s many, many endings, but at least in the ones I’ve tried, the protagonist does manage to rise to the challenge. Admittedly, there’s quite a lot here to stimulate composition: after a prologue that efficiently sets the scene, you’re set loose to wander the garden, where you’ll meet cliques of other poets pursuing their particular passions, and maybe have an opportunity for a tete a tete with the princess and general bent on agendas of their own. They’re a colorful bunch – I was partial to the gang trying to escape the moral burden of choice by embracing extremist fruitarianism, but they’re all in thrall to some decadence or other, even the ones espousing moderation obviously taking things too far. There’s more than a hint of contemporary social comment to all this, which can likewise feel like it tips just over the line of plausibility on occasion, like the voyeurs whose activities are an analog analogue of prurient pursuits that more often play out digitally. But even these moments when the fourth wall strains, the game’s understated prose and its structural imperative to somehow make a poem of all of this helps bring the player along.

There are also a lot of decisions to make, because there isn’t enough time to go everywhere in the pavilion, and each vignette puts you on the spot. The others are keen enough to have noticed that the Emperor’s recruited you as an outside observer, here to render judgment on what you see, so they try to get out ahead of the game by pushing you to preview your reactions, issuing an approval or disapproval of their ideology and behavior. And while it’s not too difficult to map each faction to their real-world inspirations, the game does a good job of complicating the picture so that either response can be justified – the proponent of free speech correctly identifies the need to speak truth outside of systems of constraint, but he’s also a rich kid slumming for clout, and his crew seem more interested in getting sloshed and feeling self-righteous than actually trying to change things. Things get more complicated still when you’re pulled into a conference with one of the Emperor’s would-be successors (you get either the princess or the general, not both); these are not nice people, but they’re powerful ones, and compelling too, so I definitely felt put on the spot.

The prose is restrained throughout, zooming in on tell-tale details that communicate that the Emperor made a good choice when he tapped you as his eyes, and the writing appropriately reaches a climax when it’s time to recite. Your choices in the rest of the game unlock the choices available to you in the final composition – each of the five lines can be cycled through to emphasize a different take on what you’ve experienced in the different vignettes; it’s a happy medium between a pre-baked result and pure Mad Libs, and while it’s possible to make something awkward if you really try, I was impressed at how easy it was to come up with a coherent and compelling poem. Appropriately enough, your words can have significant consequences indeed, or at least, they can for the empire as a whole, because in all the endings I’ve experienced, the protagonist simply returns home to an exile that now might be as much self-imposed as enforced from outside – having seen what it takes to write high-stakes poetry, perhaps you’ve decided from now on to get your ideas closer to home.