Verses

**Verses** by Kit Riemer

This was a hard game to play, but not for the usual reasons. It wasn't difficult in a puzzly way and it didn't make me feel bad inside.

This game was hard to play because the text really made me have to think to understand it, to try to piece together everything, to absorb the different layers of meaning going on.

Here's an example. The links in this game are colored differently, with one mostly representing 'forward motion' and the others side details which are placed below the main text. These side details take the form of definitions and can vary from mundane to metaphorical, often one right after the other. Here's a snippet I clipped:

(Spoiler - click to show)
air: the chill makes you shiver.
smoke: something becoming something else.
meat: how would it feel to be cooked?


So I felt like I was wrestling with a hydra, trying to take on this game on multiple narrative levels at once.

I failed, I think. I can only identify the surface themes in this story, alas.

Which is why I've delayed describing the story so far, because I'm not sure I can.

As far as I can tell, it's set in a different timeline than ours where biological modification is common and words usually reserved for religion are applied to other mysterious phenomena.

You are an analyst, which seems to be a job involving organic, technological and spiritual components. You are assigned into the middle of nowhere with little company in a rotting building. Every day you're asked to analyse, partly using the computer and partly using your own intuition. The whole process actually just now reminded me of accounts of Joseph Smith's translation of the Book of Mormon, first using a tool designed by God for the purpose before later relying on it less.

Analysis seems to be all about interpreting the words that come to you, but those words are unclear at first. Simultaneously, the game includes many translations of poems, going into great detail of the difficulties in preserving metaphor, beauty, rhyme scheme and tone between Hungarian, Romanian, and English. It was fun learning a bit of Romanian (I saw a word for claw or hoof that looked like 'ungulate'). The protagonist takes special pride in translating poems with good meter.

The translation and the analysis seem to go hand in hand, but of the rest of the story, what does it mean? I visit a farm which I've already heard rumours about, and find (Spoiler - click to show)masses of bioflesh with human organs waiting to be harvested. As I translate more, I (Spoiler - click to show)lose my humanity, my eye, my leg, my ability to speak. I consume the flesh of the unholy and the dead. What does it mean? It feels almost like Kafka's "In der Strafkolonie", with its vivid and violent semi-religious imagery with no explicit moral or meaning.

I don't think this is a game meant to be enjoyed in a brief time to serve as entertainment; it feels like something designed to provoke thought, like someone deliberately crafted something to cause as much pondering as possible.

As a final note, what I think is going on with analysis is that (Spoiler - click to show)the biscuits you consume are pieces of waste extruded by long-dead aliens that preserve some of their consciousness, which you slowly become attuned to at the price of your own body and mind. They appreciate this as it grants them some freedom, but you yourself lose everything.

In any case, definitely a game worth checking out. I found a small bug where I had to click on some links repeatedly before they worked, but it's been passed on to the author and a workaround may be available. I wouldn't let that stop you from playing, though, it worked well for me even with that.

I’ve a bittersweet relationship with Penguin; the publisher, I should clarify, not the birds who can recognize the cry of their chicks among a colony of millions, who wouldn’t daydream being so precious? On one hand, they are indefatigable publishers of affordable translations of humanity’s deep heritage: they grab you in a dingy used bookshop like would you like to read a seventeenth century Korean fable highlighting an idealized Tang NeoConfucianism which directly enspheres Daoist and Buddhist interventions, only six dollars! And I go, it infuriates me it took this long for someone to ask. The problem is that the way they can afford to publish these works at scale is by maximizing their accessibility, which dilutes every other consideration which should feed into a translation. The Penguin house style features conversational prose compressing the alienations innate to voices of lost worlds into narrowband twenty first century convenience, and it’s like, if I wanted to hear ancestral modalities jpeged into crispcollapse, I’d read Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Buried Giant.

Because isn’t the fantasy of reading The Epic of Gilgamesh summoning spirits from cuneiform carved into clay by our most ancient echo echoing their ancients’ most chthonic primordial hum, he who saw the deep, that faintest song over the abzu beneath the dunes? Instead this sandpapery shimmer of a surface you can’t delve below: “The rhyme scheme is off completely, and such a literal translation seems to have eliminated the beauty and meaning from the poem.” This fear animates Verses’ anxiety that you can’t taste the crying in the words. As a translator of artefacts, the game presents you with densities you try to click click uncover, pinning words’ butterfly wings to ekphrasis the noumenal horizon: from a Romanian starting point, a beauty outside our limited scope of worlding, we keep trying to wring out the juice to taste without desiccating: “If flowers: the tall grass” becomes “The flowers grow in tall grass”, literal into idiomatic, how much can we preserve through the distance between us? The fantasy that “I with my light enhance the secret world - / like the moon with its white rays / not diminishing, but trembling / multiplying the night’s mystery” as we enter alterior worlds, but the phantoms leap too high upon the cavern walls flickers of our dimming swallowed, myrrh murmurs crackle in our clenchfist strain: “You place your hands on the control board. Lines of text burst from the screen into your eyes. Your job is not to translate, but to make sense.” But we’re not a part of that world, are we a part of any world, how can we contain humanity, “and everything that is not understood / becomes even harder to understand / in front of our eyes-“ as the worlds unfurl without settling, kaleidoscopic unresolve in the overwhelming overflow of information cascading the contained through translation’s unstitching, words failing to live up to their signified as you dutifully drain them to safely flaskable: “lawn: sort of a misnomer; it’s mostly dirt packed from hundreds of years of walking. / tower: the shortest structure in the compound”, words like fences failing to imply the ranges within.

As the anxiety of translation overbursts its bounds into paranoia blossoms, the garland which vivifies Verses’ sinuous elusions, heady scifi extravagances literalize the looming losses to prevent collapse to mystic whispers. The more our translator disintegrates before failing to render the impossible otherness desired real, tangible, tastable, the more they’re forced into themselves, the less they imply any correlate otherness nonreal, nontangible, nontastable. Human vats gestating raw flesh, the bodily as humiliated into literal purpose metamorphosis of the translator failed, butcher’s twined together in increasingly medical language’s reductio ad abcessum: “Material composition: Human skin, fat, muscle, epidermal appendages incl. sebaceous and sudoriferous glands, as well as choristomatous lacrimal glands, connective tissue/cartilage, fragments of bone, vascular structures, and neurologic tissue.” Physiological insistence encaging all that happens within to a one to one correspondence with the overtaxing latination, words as caches of hyperdetermined technicalisms ready to be uncompressed into the fullness of reality, tangible and technical equally, a precision endpoint precluding our yearning ambition to be “a living thing inside of something dead, like the terminal, like the data.”

That we technologize word into data at the next layer of informational amphibology should unsurprise Riemer’s readers, and with a blink the impenetrable surface hardens to a screen: “Virtualities surface on the screen, each only briefly. Posthuman analogs flickering once before going out permanently.” Translation happens through intimate grappling with a terminal, with its visual overlay of an anterior phantastation: "After a moment of dark whirring, your terminal’s screen alights with green dotpricks that gradually cohere into a landscape.” The landscape as unreal to the touch as it is to your eye, standing there in a forest feeling like every decade you’ve endured this earth has been a waste because not one of these profusions you can name. No understanding of their uses, no memories of their presence, no distinctions to transubstantiate the host fleur de less, nothing but shape and color an infantile morass below object permanence. I see flowers; someone else understands “oxeye, yarrow, arrowhead”, colors beyond the yellow I beseech secondhand. “You stand before a strobing monitor. Cathode green on dead pixel gray.” I belong inside boxes, everything I love is in them, “Memories bathing in warm fluid the color of elemental iron”, and why should I be attached to an outside which is after all outside, placed there by the confines I have considered shelter, from who and what don’t ask, just bask, a quiet you can keep for yourself, ataraxic reduction to… “disaster: obliteration. Image fragmentation. The recording apparatus is destroyed, viscera spatters. The brain has become soup. All connections lost.”

These connections which keep reminding you of attachments, there is another end you can reach through them, become a part unapart. World resonous with so much more than your noise deviance can ever contain, though voracious you want to be filled, be more than “a mind in a box, ruined. / You eat until, finally, full.” Reduced once more mereness, the amness of your shambling purposeable, mere genetic continuity that cannot retain any ancestral electricity to live: “There is no space for understanding, for an idea to survive: everything is concrete, grotesque, without identity.” Gods wither to gold in the deemblematic embolisms: “altar: gold glints through the dust.” As apostates, could we just relent to the box, comfortably bound in some annex never appended to the text, not translation but ablation, steady okaystate to decompose: “The work happens in a wooden box. The product of the labor is removed, and the work continues. Where it goes is none of our concern; maybe it would hurt us to know. But it’s impossible not to wonder.” One day they will wake and find you corpse and nod.

The lifethirst outrage that reacts at this precise second to violent revulsion strikes Verses’ emotive match, the needing to exist in the problematic as potential to personhood, not to be cauterized from its coterminous cohabitation, two spirits in the oneness of the word: “Identity: there are still problems here, but the problems want to be solved; you can feel their desire to unravel.” Even in the absence of solution, the need to be seen concrete, more than digital figments blurring in and out of cataract impermeability as “only avatars whizzing past & extinguishing themselves on a black screen”, distressed fire to burn through the “tumor in the viewer’s eye” that remains “intact. Self-contained. A safe recording, until it rots” to reach beyond the vestige, impetus to break free from your isolation’s unpotential, resistance as violence against reality as inert opacity of the witness who cannot will into the seen, the seething outside yourself: “You rub your eyebrow with a fist. And against the inside of your eyelid, like the wall of a cave, play the bodies, the spray, neither solid nor quite liquid. Flesh still half-frozen. Transmuted slush. The rods, the cells, the void.” Actualizing the push beyond the pressed into print our arc evolves us from “A creature filled with ideas and nothing else” to someone “here to construct an understanding, not for yourself but for others. You are here to create a record from which you yourself will be struck.” Defined into the act, you overcharge the signification with its significance, whichever you choose outside your limitations, words as signposts to where a greater collective humanity lies in defiance of the anodyne fleshsufficience, flesh as suffusion of sense: “Light hits your eyelid and scatters, illuminating blood and skin. / You dream of a pink mist and awaken inside one.” Acquiescence of suffusing metadata as moral determinative of the datum we must determinate.

If translation allows us communion with need as continuity with the strivings of those who once spoke a reality you desire, then this rebellious urge derails against the limitors, box occluding the “overabundance of nearby metadata” that contextualizes words into a subjectivity superior to the overbearing abstractions of an objectivity which proposes you purely an object that could never include you, per our antagonists: “Context is poisonous, Eca. This remote laboratory, the clandestine nature of your work, is to prevent even a mote of extraneous information from seeping in. Cultural, ideological, linguistic poison. Your analysis must remain objective.” Analytical lattices which plug “directly into the terminal” to “suggest the sample’s placement” constrict us into a deposition decay that sees less and less outside its depository display, eyes increasingly indistinguishable from the holographic overlay imposed until we’re so inculcated to a calculated anneal that “externality comes apart like something wet. Then the truth reveals itself to be a nutrient or a poison. Then the message reveals itself to be something excreted from the speaker. Then the sun goes away and the rain comes and you and I freeze in it, the translucent bluishness of our skin. The rain falls and we are ever uglier.” Whatever was meant antecedents no me in it, only molder.

This tension against the inertness of ghosts a ruin resplends resolving into which resonation? I don’t know, the military entertainment complex? Dutifully, one ending has you rewield your monstrousness against the impending military “cleansing” of the zone. Aliens, at one point the game gestures, almost ironically. Here the game falters too slight, too ramshackled from myriads winked together to foster an inhabitance capable of generating genuinely internal antagonisms worth wrestling thematically through the metaphor of translation. Most passages hasten a jot or two, nodding towards where they might combine sublime, but quickly recede into the quickening pace of the game’s not so much descent as cocaine freefall into madness. As if in recognition of this race to outpace an internal metronome to cohere from fragments a fullness of focus, the few ideas of which it is very certain, like the eye as fragile membrane between the soul and source, are repeatedly emblazoned lest they not crest the waves, in case without this spine we might gelatin likewise gestation beasts: “Your eye has not ceased to function - it is transmitting non-energy to your brain, a signal expressing absence” we are told, “Your eye has not ceased to function - it is transmitting non-energy to your brain, a signal expressing absence” we are told, “You fall through the floor of material existence, of time. The speed of your descent makes your skin ripple. You feel it even in your dead limb, see it play across your dead eye’s retina.” The narrative thread heaping on the urgency, your devolution to a cessation beyond translation, never quite outshines the interstitial gestures, and it’s like, if I wanted to read about the uncanny unfulfillment of the moment to moment interpolation of influence as existential disclaimant crisis, I’d read Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go.

Precisely this yearning, though, to fall through the floor of material existence, and its contraposition of a lineage of material extrusion sanctified through poetry’s translucent filminess between image and immanence, pulses Verses past this impasse towards a haunting geschlossen superimposable on the supernal secret of the verses unvocal in “your tongue about your mouth, preparing to enunciate properly”, a certainty enclosure cataclysm in which you wake woundably unwithinable: “Long after everything had ended, there were still mechanisms without purpose, places without names, faces without features. The world was without conceit. All lingering ideas had been eaten from our heads. / Finally and blessedly all blood was lost and the wound of our existence emptied and putrefied. The traps we had fallen into, invisible, placed throughout our history and indistinguishable from the air around them, had sprung, and the atomic motion of everything slowed until there was an impermeable darkness.” In this wound of existence, its collectivity desiccation, “Ruin and death / exodus / and the path to / deliverance / closed”, we crawl close to the magnificent desolation which my favorite Romanian poet once consecrated: “Instants whose eyewink / no brightness sleeps. / Increate, in every place, / gather yourself, / stay.”

Perhaps this glittery despair overdetermines into an elsewise eclipse. “The samples you’re working with are dimensional; they can reveal one facet or another depending on how they’re approached. You have an opportunity here to impose your will on the analysis in a way that results in a more thorough experience.” So then I can ask you this: “For this initial calibration test, I’d like you to tell me anything you can about the object within the lattice without having seen it first. By eliminating preconceived notions, we can ensure the data is objective.” Is that where you’d rather wither? Which is your favorite translation of Beowulf?

This is a Twine game where it’s easier to grasp the themes than the plot.

It’s broadly about the human mind, language and comprehension, and the utility and horrors of those things.

The game mainly conveys its theme through mechanics: specifically, it uses text-replacement links that reveal translations and interpretations.

You, the player character, interact with the text mainly in dark-colored passages. You’re analyzing possibly alien objects that have degenerative effects on the mind and body. The task involves analysis and language translation at times.

I think it gets a little excessive in the light-colored passages. This portion of the game contains a lot of technobabble and obscure words. I wasn’t sure how much of this I was supposed to gloss over, but I think the excess is partially a joke because a few of the responses were kind of evasive and ironic.

(That said, there is some real player engagement here, as these light colored passages are where you actually navigate the world through conveniently marked red links. There are also some more involved poetry translations in the light section, too.)

I’m not going to go deep into anything else Verses features, such as the horror and gore or the poems it adapts, but those things are certainly in the game.

What Does It Mean?

What does it all mean? It’s hard to say but I’ll hazard a guess. Mathbrush’s review noted the game has “violent semi-religious imagery no explicit moral or meaning.” However, in this sort of work, there’s usually a standard implicit meaning, usually with a moral slant — the idea that knowing too much is painful, usually as a result of suffering or committing evil, which I guess is next door to scientific hubris.

I think it’s safe to say all of this applies to Verses. There’s a monk character that discusses whether the protagonist will continue looking for answers through a religious/philosophical/spiritual lens.

Verses additionally frames the effects of your analysis work in a scientific way, and there’s some agonizing over knowing the impact of your work.

That’s the broadest explanation I can give. Saying this game is open to interpretation is a bit of a cop out, since a lot of the musings seem deliberate and sincere.

I think that the author is depending on the fact that the audience can feel anything at all means it has some correspondence with reality. I found a few striking. And if you don’t relate to the game’s musings on a personal level, you’ll probably be impacted by its strong atmosphere regardless.

Lots of Comparisons

Within IF, Verses should draw comparisons to Babel and Slouching Toward Bedlam, which tackle similar concerns about knowledge, language, and cognition and have religious/scientific/philosophical overtones.

There might be an even better point of comparison outside of IF: the Andrei Tarkovsky film Stalker, and the novel it was partially based on, Roadside Picnic. In addition to the Eastern European setting, the film and novel concern the search for things or places that carry a similar danger of knowledge.

I don’t mean to undermine Verses’ originality or elevate its quality by making that comparison, but those two works are very similar in some ways.

Finally: is it good? I only rate about half of the games I review, and Verses is especially difficult to assign a rating to because I didn’t really grasp it in full. Other people have rated it highly. I think I still prefer Computerfriend, which is relatively approachable in my opinion.