Elegy For A Dead World puts you in the position of controlling a strange little astronaut who just can’t help writing about the weird worlds that they visit. The game opens in a floaty expanse that acts as a hub world for the actual goings-on in the game proper. These goings on involve traveling to three different worlds inspired by Romantic poets Byron, Keats and Shelley, with the work of Mary Shelley somehow being excluded from this constellation of Romantic thought in a huge oversight on the part of the game’s developers.
On entering each of the worlds, the player is asked what kind of prompt she would like. These prompts are suggestions of what to write about and in conjunction with. For example: you can choose to write a history of the world you are about to witness; or you can choose to write the diary of a young girl fleeing the capital city of one of the world; or you can alter a poem by the inspirational writers; or you can just free write whatever you want.
After you choose your prompt, your tiny spaceperson is plopped down on a beautifully animated world. You can walk left and right, or you can jump and float, or you can go in the occasional building. Sometimes you will come upon a little feather beneath the ground, and if you hit tab you can start writing something. Your little spaceperson starts wailing their arms around like it’s going out of style, and you fill in the blanks that are presented to you.
In some ways, Elegy For A Dead World is MadLibs with beautiful backgrounds and a soundtrack. Short of being a freewheeling badass with a penchant for total desecration of the sacred (aka a freewriter), you mostly spend your time elaborating on themes already presented to you. There are spaces, you fill them in, you move on to the next one (they’re conveniently counted for you so you can be sure you didn’t miss a prompt).
If you’ve got a lot of stock in the purely contingent nature of the universe, you can ignore the spaces provided for you. While the gaps in the MadLibs are plainly where you are supposed to type, there’s nothing to stop you from going above and beyond the call of duty. Using your bioorganic senses of rhythm and language, you can fill up each prompt with hundreds of characters of useless information. I read one piece of fiction from this game that filled up every possible prompt with Tolkien-esque backmatter historical information about characters, their families, and how populations survived on the dead world that the spaceman was writing about. I myself mostly stuck to writing about crouching stone gods and capturing the funk of a hidden planet.
You might be wondering how I accessed the writing of another player in Elegy. There is actually an entirely separate secondary level to the game where, at the end of each world, you can view the work you just made and the work of other players. I mostly skipped through my own, but I poured over the user-created content that I could access. It was much as I expected: angsty poetry, good-faith attempts to work toward the prompt, and even a comedy set that made fun of the very idea of playing the game. I cheered some on and ignored others and there was a good time had by all (by me).
I’ve been mostly descriptive through this review because I honestly have no opinion about the game’s mechanics and what it is attempting to achieve. I’m not sure about the net benefits of a “responding to prompts” game beyond a few minutes of fun. I mostly understand the mechanic itself as a novelty, or at my most cynical, a gimmick.