Poetic Justice
by Onno Brouwer
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.
Time: 15-30 minutes