Verses

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.