When you enter this game, you are dumped unceremoniously into a star and cloud-filled void. You are given no context,no prompts, no direction. If you activate your thrusters and wander a bit, you find three glowing portals.
Through these portals, you find three abandoned alien worlds. The ultimate meaning and story of these worlds is entirely up to you.
Float through the nothingness or don’t, Elegy doesn’t care.
Elegy for a Dead World
Release Date: December 10, 2014
Platform(s): PC
Elegy for a Dead World is an interactive series of writing prompts where you are the last survivor of a group exploring the beautiful, desolate tapestries of abandoned alien landscapes. You can choose to fill in the blanks within someone else’s writing, do grammar exercises where you correct statements that appear at certain points in the landscape, or go full blank slate and write whatever you want, wherever you want.
Between the three wormholes in space and the game’s bleak, almost philosophical tone, it’s hard to not draw parallels between it and the movie Interstellar. Every line I wrote, I heard in the voice of a pontificating Matthew McConaughey.
Use the game’s prompts to fill out its story or write your own.
An Experiment in Fiction Writing
Elegy is about words, and one word that I wouldn’t really use to describe it is “game.” Elegy is only a game in the sense that it’s an interactive digital experience. Defining the word “game” is a largely pointless and pretentious exercise, but many consumers of games look to that word with a certain set of expectations. If you’re looking for a “game” in the traditional sense, Elegy for a Dead World might not be for you.
There are no rules. There is no structure. There aren’t many instructions. You cannot win. You cannot lose. The only potential for achievement or accomplishment is from publishing your story to the Steam Workshop and hoping someone out in the world gives you a commendation. The ultimate result of the levels you play is an odd little storybook that takes snapshots from the locations you wrote stuff and adds your writing.
This page corresponds to the previous screenshot.
Some of the images the game provides for the books don’t look like much.
More Experimental, Less Fun
Reading the game’s Kickstarter page and various other materials released by the studio, I don’t know that I totally grasp what the experiment of this experimental game was supposed to be. You are given the freedom to write whatever you want, however you want on these three beautiful, desolate little worlds. And you can do that. It’s a morose, atmospheric Mad Libs in space.
Elegy does everything it set out to do in it’s various mission statements, but it didn’t really set out to do all that much. If this experimental game was testing whether or not writing stories about a lonely alien world was fun in a conventional sense, than I think it proved that no, it’s not. Not for me, anyway.
If the experiment was testing whether a standard creative writing assignment could be made more engaging by putting it in the framework of a game, then Elegy returned a positive result. Totally nailed it. This would be a great creative writing toolkit to spark anyone’s imagination.
Even if things end up a bit too heavy, we’ll all float on alright.
The entire game can be experienced in about an hour and there are some neat references to the works of John Keats and Percy Shelley. As a writer and former serious game developer, I can see tremendous value in Elegy as a potential homework assignment for a creative writing class. Students could each make their own little stories and come in the next day to share and see where the different prompts take them.
As a commercially-available PC game with a $15 price tag, this game makes slightly less sense to me. Elegy for a Dead World feels like it walks you in the direction of something fascinating, but quickly loses steam when you realize you’re doing all the heavy lifting and the only person likely to see your work is you.
When you really boil it down, Elegy is like someone drawing you a series of cool pictures and asking you to write them a story. That can be incredibly fun, but you really need someone to share it with.
The Verdict
Let me be clear: This game is not for everyone. If you aren’t interested in writing or are looking for a more conventional gameplay experience, don’t come anywhere near this game. It’s trying something different and, in true indie fashion, makes no attempts to be something it’s not.
If a pensive, artistic, creative outlet in a sci-fi setting sounds interesting to you, you’re not going to find anything else like Elegy for a Dead World. It scratches a weird itch that no other game could scratch. It’s a unique flavor in an environment full of safe bets.
If you’re a parent with a kid that has an interest in creative writing, you should waste no time getting this and playing with them. Elegy is the ultimate 2-player game where Player 1 is a kid that’s excited about writing and Player 2 is a parent to read whatever craziness is produced.
