Elegy for a Dead World puts a spin on today’s entertainment by making you play storyteller instead of subject.
It seeks to give every writer a unique experience by allowing you to control the game’s protagonist (a lost astronaut) as he traverses Dejobaan’s three Dead Worlds inspired by British Romantic-era poets. With that said buyers be aware – the title of Elegy for a Dead World is to be taken pretty literally.
It is not as much of a game as it is a creative tool, with an apparent lack of action and the only feasible reward being self-fulfillment.
Elegy for a Dead World boasts a structure that is somewhat, sufficient for writers looking for inspiration. The game achieves the basis of what it is made for. Graphics are rooting and beautifully illustrated, great to put you in a meditative state.
It maintains side scrolling controls to minimise distractions, while supplying writing prompts that come from numerous story frameworks and formats that you can pick from. The prompts are relatively easy to fill in and you exit a world when you have filled them all in, with a narrative that is somewhat complete (depending on how your wrote it).
If you are not a fan of the structured confinement that Elegy for a Dead World provides, there are options for free-form writing, so you can go crazy and write whatever you want, with graphics and atmospheric audio to accompany you.
Even then, levels of confinement are pretty comfortable, you can still delete text in the prompts if they don’t quite float your boat.
While the sci-fi imagery of the game may still somewhat limit your imagination, the confines in the game boast the potential for focused writing as compared to aimless freefalls – kinda like how designers and writers tend to deliver better with feedback.
Though the game lacks major flaws, there are still limitations that make it lose appeal quickly. The game’s simplicity makes for a questionable lack of interaction and fresh content – graphics are constant throughout the three worlds (their beauty makes up for this) and story frameworks get old after more than one or two attempts. Stories cannot be exported or accessed outside the game.
The game also features a sharing option once you end a story, where players will be able to read another story as well, but just one. This is a big time bummer for writers who want to get their work on the game read, and for those who want to get the Steam achievement of receiving 1,000 commendations (the only achievement in the game).