PixlBit

It's not every day we get a game that encourages the use of imagination in the form of creative writing. There’s no fate for humanity to be won or quest for the ultimate armor to be had.  While the game does take place in some quadrant of outer space, there's not a single creature to kill or flying craft to destroy. In fact, there's nary a living soul to interact with at all. Instead, progress is made by using the power of prose.

You play the role of a nameless astronaut drifting in space. Your name, gender, and circumstances surrounding your situation is never explained. But such details aren't as important as exploring the 3 planets in the sector of space you currently occupy. Named after 3 British poets--Shelley, Byron, and Keats--each world is devoid of intelligent life. Something appears to have transpired, you just don't know what. Your goal is to observe the landscape, structures, and artifacts left behind and write your interpretation on a futuristic tablet.

After selecting the planet you'd like to explore, you are prompted to select a writing style to set the tone. The choices are fairly interesting: You can write in the style of a short story describing the demise of a civilization, a letter to a loved one, excerpts from famous poetry, so on and so forth. If none of those options are appealing, you can also choose to freestyle your own story. Once you’ve made your selection, it's time to explore and get to writing.

As a game designed to inspire creativity, it definitely succeeds. As you guide your character from one scene to the next, a quill pen appears below any section that requires descriptive input from the player. Pressing the “tab” key opens the writing prompt where you insert the text. Personally, writing anything other than game-related material is completely out of my comfort zone. So I initially approached Elegy for a Dead World with a bit of trepidation and felt as though I couldn’t be creative enough to make it interesting for me. But after stepping foot on the first planet, such thoughts quickly dissipated.

The ambiguity of the events that transpired in the world around you worked to good effect. The worlds are beautifully illustrated in hues of purple, orange, and blue, which add to the ambience of each scene. Certain areas are populated with buildings, sculptures, and other constructs that are either technologically advanced, ancient, otherworldly, or at times a combination of the three. The environments of each planet pulled me into the experience enough to forget about my writing comfort zone and just enjoy making up the scenarios of what happened in each world however I saw fit. I enjoyed exploring each world so much that I soon discovered the game’s greatest shortcoming--its brevity.

While impressive in visual presentation, all three worlds are surprisingly short in length. Just when you’ve become entirely vested in discovering more about the planet you are exploring, it’s over before you know it and you just repeat the same process for the other two worlds. The game offers nothing extra such as new worlds to explore or any hope that your character ever achieves a fate greater than being forced to stay within this small foxhole of a greater universe.

The only extra content is that it allows you to publish to the Steam community so others can read your writings and vice versa, and you can always go back and try out a different writing style or pattern of thought that can completely change the dynamic of how you see the worlds. The possibilities are endless, yet I wasn’t that interested in reading stories from the community too often. I’d rather have more planets to explore, or at least a longer journey through the three worlds.

All things considered, Elegy for a Dead World is a competent creation that succeeds as an alternative form of gaming. It does a great job of captivating the imagination and inspiring creativity in the player. It’s just unfortunate that the experience you're sucked into ends so quickly. For those who really enjoy writing fiction and reading different interpretations of the same source material, the community sharing features of the game will more than make up for its shortcomings. For those players less interested in such activities, this won’t be much more than a brief foray into creative writing. If you fall into that latter category, you might want to hold off on buying it until a nice sale comes along.