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A sonnet subverted, March 21, 2024This is a short little game with nice styling. I enjoyed the setup—with several entangled relationships at a single’s Valentine’s Day party, some sort of drama is bound to go down… It’s a very effective use of Amanda's “reverse a poem” seed, with the dramatic longing of Shakespeare’s “Sonnet 128” recast to a modern-day setting where the PC is able to hit on his hot, married, harpsichord-playing acquaintance the moment he’s alone with her.
The game has some nice mechanics; informational text on the various characters is given via dialogue box pop-ups (although one issue with these is that, while the game lets you increase the font size—which is good, because the default is quite small—the text within the dialogue boxes doesn’t change.) The story is divided into parts (poetically called “first quatrain,” etc.), and at the end of each you can either continue the game or restart from the beginning of that part.
This is especially handy once you reach the final quatrain. Up to this point the game is mostly linear, but once the climax hits there are many possible variations. This is where the game really excels at reversing the poem, as the sheer existence of so many possible endings subverts the poem’s near-devout obsession with its subject. While there’s clearly only one outcome that would satisfy the poem’s speaker, in the game you might (Spoiler - click to show)get cozy with Aline, the object of your affections, OR end up kissing your friend Henry, OR reject Aline after she kisses you. Even if you do take the opportunity to get it on with Aline, the last line of that ending is, “it’s hard to see this bringing lasting joy. But for now, it’ll do.”.
Also, it was just fun to see how differently things could go within those few minutes of the story!