Verses

Spoilers).

I am having trouble figuring out how to start this review. Verse is a prototypical quote-unquote challenging work, you see, set in a uniquely-dystopic future with minimal infodumping to provide the player much in the way of orientation, featuring enigmatic gameplay that equates translating Romanian poetry with grokking alien civilizations (I deploy that gerund with intent; see below), and is written in prose that’s simultaneously intensely concrete and absolutely unhinged. It all emerges from an ideological stew encompassing Marxism, Christianity, Kristevan abjection, and maybe even New England Transcendentalism, if you squint (that’s a transparent eye-ball joke). The opening lines put me in mind of Neuromancer (“…cathode green on dead pixel gray…”); the first location could be a riff on Zork (“You are standing in an open field east of an office building and west of a pier”), and there’s a later incident that could be a wry inversion of the climax of Eco’s Name of the Rose.

So yeah, this is a polysemous work, overloaded with meaning, and the difficulty isn’t that I don’t have the first idea of what it’s trying to do – it’s that I’ve got a dozen different ideas all vying for primacy. Verses is a game that begs to be interpreted, generously offering itself up to the player, but also manages the neat trick of remaining inexhaustible; it wants to be read, not solved.

To see what I mean, let’s pick a strand at random. It’s hard to go wrong with Christianity [citation needed] so why not start there? In the main section of the game, your character, an analyst who uses a text-based terminal to interface with unknown objects and artifacts to plumb their secrets, does their work at the transept of an abandoned church. This is the point where the axes of the church intersect, adjacent to the altar to the east, with the nave, where the laity worship, to the west, and chapels devoted to particular patron saints to the north and south. Before each session, one of your colleagues brings you a specially-prepared biscuit, flat and rounded – though late in the game, the process breaks down somewhat and you consume raw meat instead. And there’s a mysterious mutant who dispenses wisdom, and she’s marked by a wound: “a rivulet of dark green fluid pulses from a stoma in her side,” echoing and palette-swapping Christ’s stigmata.

None of this is especially obscure – the game is more or less jumping up and down to draw attention to the ways that these analysis sessions are sacraments of communion, standing between the sacred and the profane, and signpost that that mutant lady is trustworthy and knows what she’s talking about. Similarly, when one of your fellows, labeled “the apostate”, says of your work “[it] happens in a wooden box. The product of the labor is removed, and the work continues,” you don’t need graduate-level study of Marx to see that he’s talking about the alienation of labor, with all that entails, and intuit one of the many reasons he’s on the outs with the power structure.

This is not a dig! Verses doesn’t try to resist interpretation, but rewards it, and if these particular hooks don’t land with a specific player, well, there are plenty more where that came from. The most sensually pleasing must be the set-piece translations. Once you’re strapped into your terminal, you’re confronted with the text, in Romanian, of a poem, all highlighted (the poems are all attributed to their authors). Clicking will reveal a literal translation of each word or phrase, and then often a compete line will offer up one more click to become idiomatic: “măreşte şi mai tare taina nopţii” becomes “magnifies even more mystery of the night” becomes “multiplying the night’s mystery.” And sometimes this transformation is even more magical: that final click turns “and everything that is not understood” to a gnomic “-”.

In a few special cases, the player has agency, and can choose which particular emphasis to put on ambiguous words – one that has to do with production can be code, or progeny, or shit (there is a lot of shit in this game, though it’s described more decorously than that). More usually these are choices the protagonist is making without specific input from the player, but I still found these sequences enormously engaging. For one thing, I wasn’t previously familiar with Romanian and still don’t really know what it sounds like, but it’s an uncanny language on the page: I’ve got a fair bit of French and a smattering of Latin, so I could often sense the gist of some of the words even before I clicked on them and was usually right. But that just meant that the moments of surprise, or of having the rug yanked out from under me when a false-friend led me astray, hit harder: my mind was actively working, dancing with the meaning of the text, and the missed steps are as much a part of that as the successes (there’s one optional poem in Hungarian that didn’t work quite as well for me, reinforcing that there’s something special about Romanian).

The poems themselves are also, almost without exception, spectacular. At their most beautiful, they’re haunting:

Understanding erodes
beneath my eyes-
because of my love
for flowers and eyes and lips and graves.

But more typically they’re brutal. My notes for one read “mud, blood, dead chickens for slaughter, ‘I lived in a house that made no sense’.” And here’s an extended excerpt from one whose title I’m pretty sure translates as “Carnage”:

Descending fog
of crows
to ingest
the meat
broken
I watch with
sinister
blind eyes
they jump
jaws clicking
the swarm
fluttering
hurried
wandering
rows,
rows,

This all sounds unbearably grim and serious, and it kind of is, don’t get me wrong – the fact that this is the story the author needed to construct as an armature for the poems at the heart of the game forces me to mentally revisit what little I know of Romanian history (they were pretty much the only post-Soviet country to have a bloody revolution and execute their dictator after the Iron Curtain fell, which is certainly a data point). But there are jokes! Pretty good ones! Like, there’s an early bit where the word-clicking is still yielding scientific-sounding elaboration, and in the definition of peta-FLOPS you’re teased with the existence of something called “yFLOPS”, but looking for further clarity there just tells you “you think it would be one of those numbers that looks silly written out.” Then there’s a bit where you come across a pond of liquid mercury:

Before you sits the still, strange pond. Diegetic and profane.

Clicking that standout word produces a reassuring etymology:

diegetic: from the Dacian “diegis:” burning, shining.

See, this use of diegetic is diegetic, it’s fine.

There’s also a poem eulogizing a Romanian revolutionary, which starts out undergoing the same transformation from half-recognizable Romanian text to disordered but pregnant-with-meaning literal translation before collapsing into melodrama:

Tender tears build in those who loved you,
Overflowing out onto your grave,
We follow your ascending virtue.
With resounding song, and love renewed,
On to Elysium.

Oof.

It’s perhaps worth pausing here, though, since this isn’t just a gag. If there’s this much similarity between how the translation process works when it’s using actually-good poetry, like “Carnage”, to invoke the aftermath of war, and jingoistic slop like “At the Grave of Aron Pumnel,” perhaps that’s a sign that it’s the process rather than the substance that’s important after all, and all the rigmarole about mutants, aliens, military intelligence, and tungsten is so much entertaining balderdash (I haven’t touched on the plot-qua-plot in this review, since I need to finish it sometime, but there’s definitely a lot of it, and the emphasis should be put on “entertaining” in the previous phrase).

Instead, it’s specifically the act of translation, with all that means and entails, that’s Verse’s true subject (well, plus the act of perception that precedes and is incorporated into translation, but appearances to the contrary I actually do intend to finish this review before the heat death of the universe). Again, it’s saying a lot – about the role of context, with the main character’s bosses obsessed with the possibility of a virgin translation, unburdened by outside knowledge (I’m pretty sure they’re villains), while the protagonist “[struggles] to distinguish between the emptiness of something untouched and something destroyed, flattened, cleared”; about the difference between “the living God, who can be interrogated [and] the dead God can only be interpreted; it has ceased to speak” (God is the text, duh); about the sterile language we mistake for cleanliness and the degenerate language we mistake for confusion and rot.

With that said, we should probably also translate the idea of translation. I’ll admit that I don’t fully understand every ingredient in Verses: I’m not sure about the color yellow. I have a guess about why the only word whose gender is mentioned is “năruită: ruined” (it’s feminine, unsurprisingly). I enthusiastically love the “cells”, “eight hundred meters tall and lighter than air”, and want a whole game centering on them, but will need a lot more than one delightful paragraph to have the faintest idea of how they work. But I’m pretty sure that the game doesn’t want to leave its readers just thinking about the movement from one language to another, but rather how all meaning is mediated through text – an especially apt concern for a piece of text-based IF, because what is the fifty-year history of our genre but an extended study of the possibility that one mind can encounter another, through playing with words?

Well, it’s also an extended set of examples about how incredibly challenging, and commercially unrewarding, that goal can be, and looking to the tradition of IF by queer creators that clearly informs the work, how especially fraught the attempt can be when the circle of communication is widened beyond middle-class cishet white men. To circle back to two points I made (aaaaaall the way up) at the beginning of this review, Verses is not a game that’s reducible to a single thesis, but nor is it a subtle game – so our ears should probably prick up when we come across its title in the wild. This fragment of a poem I think is called “Flowers of Rot” isn’t a keystone, I don’t think, but it may serve as an epigram:

verses from time lost
writing from the pit
thirsty and arid,
of hunger and ash
the verses of –

(Can we dare to hope that there’s something that can fill the blank?)