Poetic Justice

Poetic Justice is a short poetic and logical game made in Dendry, where you play as a legendary unnamed (at the start) poet on trial for plagiarism. On the bench, sit your peers, other iconic poets, ready to judge you. Will you manage to refute their arguments or face justice?
Worried about fairness? You get to choose one of those judges are your poet representative (though it ends up barely mattering... but you get to learn a bit more about them with a Wikipedia snippet).

Because it is also a fair trial, you get to review the evidence against you, before refuting each of the poets' arguments (I'm not sure why you need to fight your own lawyer, but ¯\_(ツ)_/¯). It's pretty much a breeze. But your own arguments are not enough, you need to trick them to see the idiocy in their thinking.

Which leads us to the main interactive element of the game: a logic puzzle. Each poet writes their own version of one of your poem, and your must choose the right order and combination so they all end up criticising each other. I ended up writing down all the options to get it.

The puzzle was neat. I wished I had more to do in the first half of the game, especially when refuting the arguments of the different poets. Or maybe even lose the trial (I don't think there is a bad ending?).

This game uses a seed where you have to stand on trial before four famous poets.

It’s written in Dendry, one of the first Dendry games I’ve seen not written by Autumn Chen, making this pretty unique.

The game presents each of the four poets (Sappho, Tagore, Milton, and Khayyam) as characters each having themes, virtues, and vices.

The concept is that you are on trial for plagiarizing their work. Each one accuses you of having plagiarized certain themes of theirs. Your own identity is kept secret.

At first, I thought the game would have very little interaction, since clicking on each poet gave me three pages of non-interactive text.

But then, I found out that that was just the intro! You then reveal your own identity which was a powerful moment for me (I got mild chills on my arm hair).

Then there follows a combinatorial puzzle. I found it tricky; I just randomly clicked for a long time and didn’t understand the mechanics. After about 10 minutes I started thinking more about it, and finally came up with a solution. It was pretty complex; it reminded me a bit of an Andrew Schultz puzzle.

The game inspired me to look up more about the poets. Due to my inexperience, it was hard at times to see the differences in their themes and their values, so I had trouble distinguishing between them. I look forward to learning more about them and am glad for Onno and Rovarsson (the seed author) for bringing them to my attention.