you are an ancient chinese poet at the neo-orchid pavilion by KA Tan
Flavor: satirical social commentary + court politics, and yeah, they’re all poets
Playtime: 27 minutes
I was excited to play this game based on the title. Yes, let’s write some poetry and discover some intrigue! Intriguing! At the open, we learn we are down-on-our-luck (I mean, not so down-on-our-luck that we don’t have servants, we occupy a particular class), and get a bit of an infodump about our backstory and the state of the world, but are off to the palace for the intrigue quickly enough.
The main elements of this game could be separated into two groups, and I think one of the puzzlements for me was that I couldn’t ever figure out how the two groups were thematically connected. In the first group I would put the standard “court politics” parts—rival factions! I’m an outsider asked to take a side! The emperor says “enough” because he’s tired of all this infighting! In the second group I would put all of the poets we meet wandering around the party. They all hang out in cliques, and display exaggerated behaviors that I took to be satirizing contemporary concerns (e.g., a group dedicated to protecting fruit that is flagellating themselves and holding self-criticism circles in the forest).
Plot-wise, yes, both of these parts of the game were involved in the plot, but it felt a bit to me like two different games pasted together (i.e., in contrast to all of the poets, the main rival figures in the “court politics” part were not sketched as exaggerated parodies of a modern “type”). This could definitely be a flaw in my reading/playing but I just kept expecting there to be some payoff or resolution of this juxtaposition and didn’t find one.
I enjoyed the chance to be involved in some poetry writing, and it certainly seemed to have a lot of endings.
Selected quote:
If you like this, you may like [other media]: in the spirit of the game, let’s go with a Tang dynasty banger by a guy who did not seem particularly interested in being subtle.