iamb(ici)

The central conceit here is that we're accessing a network of chat rooms focussed on poetry. On entering a chat room, we're paired or grouped with other users to work on whichever form of poetry is associated with that room, thus improving our poetry writing skills. How the story works out depends on how we interact with these other users, and finally with that one guy we meet when we finally are allowed into the Haiku chat room.

Interaction is basically a matter of choosing one of three different attitudes when we first enter a chat room. That seems rather reductive, but I don't fault it for that, given the potential complexitities of NPC interaction. All things considered, I thought the NPC interaction scenes quite well-written.

There are multiple endings depending on these interactions, but only one in which the whole truth behind everything is revealed, and it's rather a lot. Enough that I rather wish we could have discovered it all slowly over the course of our interaction rather than have it all delivered in a single denouement after we've essentially "won" the game.

I should probably dock a point or two for the time-dependent final puzzle of the "true ending" -- all the more annoying since, without a save-game feature, the only way to try again is to replay the whole thing from the beginning -- but it's a bit late for that now.

If this were breakfast, I suspect it would be something like buttered toast and a small protein smoothie. The actual "solid food" part of the meal is light and goes down easily enough, but all the important stuff is in the thing you wash it down with.