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Review
I played this game more than a year ago and wrote this review for it over several months. I finally finished it up and published it today. It's long, rambling and somewhat unedited. Some of it is adapted from a comment I left on the Intfiction Verses thread. It contains spoilers, but I feel like this game is impossible to really discuss without spoiling it, and this game's existing reviews are pretty spoilery anyway.
Years ago, I saw a Reddit post from someone who'd read a classic work of literature, possibly Ulysses, and hated it because it was "too confusing" and "the purpose of art is to communicate clearly, and this story did not communicate clearly, so it is bad". A bunch of users reposted this and mocked it mercilessly for saying that "the purpose of art is to communicate clearly".
Some of those people were awful and I'm not glad to have known them, but that's getting off topic.
Anyway, as much as I hate to admit it, they did have a point. The purpose of art is to communicate, but not always clearly. Confusion is part of life. Sometimes a lack of clarity is what you're trying to communicate. A lot of famous literature is even confusing... on purpose? (Gasp.)
I thought about that while playing this game, because I found it to be immensely confusing and alienating. It's a story about confusion: the confusion of interpretation, trying to distill meaning from events that are presented in a purposefully abstract, shattered manner, often because they're the kind of events that would shatter the psyche - war trauma, mass executions. The uncrossable gap between words and what they represent: things so horrible they're impossible to fully convey. It's art that communicates the inability to communicate.
This is a story where I found myself copying almost every line, saving them to an exterior text file, and poring over them to try to figure out what was going on. None of the other stories I played in the comp did that to me. None were this quotable, and also this opaque, at the same time. The game really made me feel stupid, I'm pretty sure you need grad school level knowledge about the philosophy of language to really get it. I couldn't understand it fully and my experience was hazy and detached. All this nonsense I've written below is only my desperate attempt to make sense of it all.
1 - What I Think Happened
As the most spoilery section, I put this inside a spoiler block so people who haven't played the game yet can skip it.
(Spoiler - click to show)I looked through all of the three endings after Analysis 5. Here's what I make of the story, from what I could glean of it after my first playthrough:
If you go west from the church, near the mercury pond, there's a mutant woman who on one particular day (or maybe after you talk to her twice) will give her personal thoughts on what exactly you're analyzing. In short, she suggests it's aliens. The beginning of the story, where we see "gleaming rods exiting satellites", and some of the Analysis 5 text, seems to imply that to me as well. At first I thought the gleaming rods were orbital bombardment, but the alien relics theory makes more sense to me. That these are relics of an extinct alien civilization that have fallen to Earth, and that's why the local governments have temporarily put a hold on the war that's happening so they can analyze them and see what they say. From one of the analyses, I think the last one:
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.
The same darkness where we had spent the final decades of our civilization mining precious metals.
But based on these analyses, and the ending, it doesn't seem like anything useful to the war effort is being revealed here. We're just getting death and apocalyptic destruction. Then again, in the ending where you return to the church, Cetina and Arcadian are looking at you and taking notes while you start eating body parts alive and experiencing traumatic war flashbacks since the bodies belong to dead soldiers, or something. Their reactions boil down to examining you under a microscope and saying "this is sure a fascinating scientific discovery, I wonder what our data analyst will reveal to us next". So maybe they are learning how to manufacture weapons or where the insurgents are headed or whatever, and you just don't know it because you aren't privy to that information, despite producing it? Doing the analyses causes you to shed body parts and produces various other changes, so it's possible that it also transmits information you don't have access to, along with what you do have access to. Maybe while you're learning about war and apocalypse and losing your mind, they're learning about spiffy new weapons manufacturing technologies. There's not much evidence for that, it's just a thought.
There's definitely some parallel between the extinct alien civilization and the human civilization that exists on Earth (more accurately the remnants of the human civilization, since it seems to be on its last legs). Some of the results from the analyses could apply to either an extinct alien civilization or the war-torn world the protagonist occupies. In the end, your process for "analyzing" just becomes eating corpses, and through that you see the memories of dead soldiers and people buried in mass graves. I wonder if the two civilizations are the same civilization, just time-displaced, or maybe the alien civilization is a metaphor for humanity, or something abstract like that. Don't think there's much evidence for it, so probably not, but it is a possibility.
(I also found a branch that seemed to let you access the last ending (return home) early on in one of the analyses. Really not sure what to make of that, except the implication that whatever you're analyzing in that church might have precognitive capabilities, or literally contain a piece of yourself from the future? Or maybe by analyzing it, or analyzing anything there, you're unanchoring yourself from the time stream by jumping to various moments across time, though most of the other analyses seem to cover the past? Maybe? There are definitely references to becoming unmoored from time in some of the analyses, but on the overall, this one's a bugger.)
2 - Initial Thoughts
The source of the artifacts gets compared to the divine, by the apostate, and the process of "analyzing" is compared to divine revelation. Trying to interpret the word of God.
I haven't heard of the Oracle Project, which another commentator brought up on the Intfiction thread, but I was reminded of some blog posts by Spencer Yan. He's a priest working on a video game about revelation and grappling with faith, My Work Is Not Yet Done, and has written a lot about his gamedev process. I quoted this devlog of his in my Intfiction post, and will bring it up again since I feel like it's relevant:
The spiritual core of this game for me lies in a certain state of frustration, and more acutely at times exhaustion, that emerges from the process of discernment. The most concrete way I’ve been able to articulate this is as that phantom flicker of a feeling you get after you’ve been thinking about some idea, or staring at a set of data for too long hoping to find some kind of recognisable pattern, and all of a sudden the shadow of something emerges out of the corner of your eye but just as quickly as it passes across your vision, it’s gone.
...For me, this is fairly directly tied to my own religious discernment (both theologically, in my personal spiritual and theological orientation, and vocationally, in the call to the priesthood); but the game is just as much interested in non-spiritual manifestations of this too: whether that’s the glacial inconclusiveness of scientific and technological pursuits, or the challenges of trying to piece together contradictory historical narratives describing the same event, or the maddeningly confounding ways in which people tell themselves stories about themselves in order to make sense of the parts of themselves they’re not yet ready to confront. At direct risk of repeating myself in a slightly different register, a big part of this game is especially concerned with the role of boredom in that process, both in the ways in which, given enough time and space for speculation, it can coagulate into uncertainty and paranoia, and in recognition of the probable necessity of boredom as a strange vehicle to greater eventual reconciliation and clarity somewhere later on down the line. I’ve always privately described the core of the game in summary as a game about what we are to do with, and in the midst of the silence of God; or in a more general sense, what happens to us and what do we do in the aftermath of an encounter with the divine which fundamentally alters us, but which may and probably will not ever come back to us again?
Another comparison is a self-published webnovel I read called The Apocalypse of Herschel Schoen, which also grapples with the terror and incomprehensibility of divine revelation. Though it has a vastly different direction and ending that I think most people would find unsatisfying, and goes directly against the theme of this story.
If this game was from an author I was less familiar with, I probably would've spent less time poring over everything and trying to put it together, but I did because I trusted this author in particular to know what they were doing. It's kind of a puzzle game, if you think about it. The puzzle isn't within the game itself as something you need to beat to get a victory screen, but it exists outside the game as the metatextual challenge of figuring out what's going on.
Other reviewers, many of whom are much smarter than me, have published their own takes. I'd encourage people to check them out in the Intfiction thread, which I am linking again here. Seriously, go read it. There's a lot of interesting analysis there.
3 - Comparisons
On my third replay, after wondering how exactly I was to make sense of this game, I thought of Vespers. Vespers is an IF game I played years ago and barely remember, so what I really thought about was my memory of playing Vespers, struggling to solve the puzzles, giving up and consulting a walkthrough, and realizing there were many avenues I'd completely ignored either because the game didn't make them clear to me, they hadn't crossed my mind at all, or both. I don't necessarily recommend Vespers, though I think it's moderately popular in the IF space. I'm just using my memory of it as a point of comparison here.
In my memory of Vespers, you're a monk at a cloistered monastery - initially peaceful, pious, pleasant. Then a plague comes through. People begin to die, in horrific and agonizing ways. Everything collapses, order is lost, the world falls apart. A demonic figure, symbolizing the horror of the plague, arrives and impels you to impious, unholy actions; murder and worse. You obey the demon even though you shouldn't. You lose all sense of time, place, and self.
I remember the game as a horror game with religious overtones, and thinking about Verses as a horror game made me see it differently. It's not labeled as a horror game, but easily could be. The majority of the latter half is about the horror of mass killings and systemized brutality, war and genocide, which is translated on a more visceral level into what happens to Eca herself, as she attunes herself to these alien beings and what happened to them, which is also what's happening to humanity in general on Earth.
The main similarity I noticed between Verses and Vespers is the slow descent into death and madness, brought on by malevolent figures who tempt you and laugh - the demon in Vespers, and your bosses in Verses, who don't care about you at all. (You could say the aliens, but I read them as victims.) There's a transformation that happens to both characters as the violence consumes them. Exposure to violence and despair eats away at them until they are losing vital pieces of themselves, and can no longer be called fully human.
Of course there are fundamental differences. I think Verses operates on more levels than Vespers, with more depths and more secrets to uncover. But both stories are about death and suffering, how the resultant trauma ruins people, and how a confrontation with such things can overwhelm and destroy you. In Vespers it's the plague, which symbolically becomes a demonic entity, and in Verses it's the multiple ongoing levels of violence inflicted on the entire world.
There is also a similarity in how I struggled to understand how to proceed in both games: a sense of feeling your way blindly around greater objects built for some unknown or unknowable purpose, where you understand there was surely a guiding vision somewhere, but can only comprehend it in fragments. In-universe, this would be God's vision, or the aliens, or whatever entities are singing out of the computer screen, and out-of-universe this would be the developer's vision, something I couldn't quite grasp. Everything slipped out through my fingers.
4 - Translation
I think a lot of what Verses does is questioning the fundamental power of language and what it can really do for people. What are the limits of communication? How much can you truly understand another person and what they've experienced? Every day, you can turn on the news and hear about the unspeakable suffering of millions, war and hunger and crimes against humanity on every side of the globe, families buried in mass graves, but can you really understand those people as people? Or are they just words and numbers in some random article written to generate ad revenue? I think that to someone like myself, who has never lived through anything like the numerous tragedies I read about online, there will always be a fundamental empathetic disconnect, even if I can talk to these people face-to-face. And in many situations I can't, because I don't speak their language and they don't speak English well enough to communicate what has happened to them and there is nobody to translate, or because the suffering leaves no room to even communicate what is going on. I wonder if this disconnect can ever be bridged.
This lack of understanding ties into the translation mechanic of Verses. One of the last and greatest barriers of human communication is language. People love to talk up the Internet as a great web that connects all of humanity, or a sea of knowledge with every person alive floating in its vast embrace. Nevermind that this isn't true (about one-third of the global population has no Internet access, according to Our World in Data), but the existing Internet is split into multiple languages that run parallel to each other, with members of each language group rarely interacting with members of other language groups. Translators are imperfect and people in one area of the internet rarely have reason to venture into another. Any content posted on the Internet is mostly restricted to people who speak the language it's in.
For example, while people on the English internet are familiar with Youtube, Reddit, Facebook, and Instagram, the Chinese internet comes with an entirely different set of social media sites and apps: Bilibili, Sina Weibo, WeChat, and so on. The Japanese internet has Niconico as a Youtube alternative and a variety of sites like 2chan, 5chan, Bakusai, and so on. Similarly, the Russian internet has its own sites, including VK, the 30th most visited site in the world according to Wikipedia, which I doubt most people reading this have ever used. VK has a Russian version of Youtube here, which has been used more often since Youtube was banned in Russia in 2024 due in part to the invasion of Ukraine. Ukranians have their own groups on Twitter, Facebook, Youtube, etc., and presumably their own constellations of small sites and forums which are highly difficult to access if you don't know Ukrainian. And all these will get used over what the English internet is familiar with, but most monolingual English speakers have never heard about these sites and wouldn't look for them.
You may still remember Rednote, or Xiaohongshu (XHS). Part of the furor around it was the sheer rarity of having people from the English internet cross over to the Chinese internet. It just isn't done. It's amazing to me that in 2025, it's so easy to see videos of other countries, and find them on a map, but it's still so difficult to understand videos from those countries if you don't speak the language. Most content by Japanese people will be in Japanese, just as most content from Chinese people will be in Chinese, most content by Romanian people will be in Romanian, and so on. Without knowing the language, and hell, without also having background knowledge of the greater history and cultural context, you'll always lack a certain understanding. There's a reason people pay for translators and interpreters. Bridging the linguistic gap is a life's work.
The Chinese internet split is the biggest one I can think of. Obviously there are geopolitical reasons for its existence as well as linguistic reasons, owing to Chinese government censorship. In an additional irony, the Xiaohongshu migration was kicked off by the US government temporarily banning TikTok. People who joined XHS at that time were essentially escaping one form of censorship for another form of censorship, since XHS is of course subject to the Chinese government's speech laws.
But even when there are no censorship laws, and countries don't have their own versions of English sites or apps, the linguistic split still exists. Take French. As far as I know, the French don't have widely popular French equivalents of Reddit or Youtube, but English speakers will basically never go to subreddits like r/france, which speaks French, or watch videos by French Youtubers. Many of those videos aren't subtitled anyway, so no luck if you don't understand spoken French. This pattern applies to every other language. So communication is continually impeded and people all over the world go along believing that the slice of the world they have access to, with only the language(s) they know best, is all they need. Even if they know other parts of the world exist, they can't understand them, it might as well be nonsense, so why bother trying?
This applies to more than just the Internet. Most people will consume media made by people from their own country, or at least people who speak their language, instead of looking at foreign media, even translated foreign media. As for tourism to regions that speak other languages, the price makes it impossible for most. People who emigrate to places that speak another language get the most "foreign" experience, but even then, the language barrier can be extremely difficult when it comes to connecting with other people. Fluency in a language you weren't raised speaking is incredibly hard to attain. I've seen a lot of emigrants and expats who are awkward with native speakers and mainly hang out with people from their home countries due to the language barrier.
Tying this back to Verses, it's a game with a lot of Romanian poetry that contains numerous references to Romanian history and culture, and I'm a dirty foreigner who barely knew the first thing about Romania before playing this game. Since I don't know Romanian and may never have the time and energy to learn, seeing this Romanian poetry was an experience of something totally beyond my knowledge. I did see the author's interactive postmortem game, which explains the historical context behind a lot of the poems and what kinds of people the poets were, but I feel that unless I was born in Romania, living through the eras those people lived through (WWII, Communism, massacres and imprisonment and starvation, on and on), a part of me will never truly understand.
Verses exemplifies the not knowing. The loneliness and isolation of being unable to communicate and being unable to understand or be understood by the people around you. How that loneliness becomes unbearable horror when you are exposed to tortures that you can't even speak about, that other people can't understand for multiple overlapping reasons and are therefore incapable of helping with.
5 - Two Final Notes
Note 1 - My experience trying to get around Niconico (Japanese Youtube) actually reminded me a lot of my experiences playing this game. I didn't autotranslate the whole page, because I wanted to practice my reading skills and not just rely on a machine to do everything for me. But without translation, all these words you can't read are reduced to base collections of shapes and colors that mean nothing to an untrained mind. I couldn't be sure of understanding anything and had to rely on contextual guesswork to navigate, along with Google Translating select phrases. Click click uncover. (Kaemi's review of this game is in parts as incomprehensible as the game itself was, to me. Fascinating.)
Note 2 - I found a review for Verses in Brazilian Portuguese, a language I don't know. I linked it to the IFDB page, but before I did that I put it into Google Translate to see what the reviewer was talking about. I was greeted with these beautiful sentences:
Yes, yes, the old story of how in English, "language" can mean both "language" and "language" and the confusion that arises from that. It seems to me that "verses" distrusts language and not language itself...
Thanks, Google Translate.
6 - Various Quotes
"You have to consider that the words they've chosen for you to hear are words you can understand. But they might not be entirely accurate."
"For example, you might tell a child that a knife is dangerous, omitting that without it we could not cut rope, chop food into manageable portions, and so on. Our lives would be worsened, perhaps threatened, without knives — but this greater context is hard to grasp to a child, whose life is ruled by object-meaning."
> Yes, okay. The dimensionality of literal or figurative meaning.
"No, I'm talking about something else. You approach the analysis as yourself, with your lifetime of experience, in whatever mood you happen to be in. You expect certain things. But understand that the information you receive is filtered contextually in the same way. It's uniquely intended for you."
"In any case, when we talk about the literal or metaphorical nature of the analysis, we refer to something more complex than the descriptive language in a poem. The creatures who created these artifacts, these records, often used language that sounds merely descriptive. But they had moved beyond a literal existence."
This present lacks the past's duration. In the present, moments collide and push past one another in a frenzy, each trying to make it into the past before the others. There is no space for understanding, for an idea to survive: everything is concrete, grotesque, without identity.
Mutant viruses, bacteria, rogue algael cells, adapting to new conditions: bone-colored clouds that drip into groundwater, pour themselves into throats, and evaporate again from the open skulls of the dead. Permanent war.
