In lyrical limbo RPG Three Verses, you ask gods to help poets finish their poems

Hidden away on NASA’s Golden Record, an interstellar archive of music, image and sound, there is a recording of a poem by Charles Baudelaire, Élévation, which describes the astral ascent of the soul. Well, part of a poem. Both to free up room on the disc and perhaps, to edit out “the vast sorrows and all the vexations” of the second half, only the first two stanzas appear. The recording in fact ends halfway through a line, which conjures up an intriguing problem for the listener, inasmuch as the thwarted rhyme scheme reveals that the piece is incomplete. A poetically-minded alien might be tempted to fill in the gap. A fancier alien who took a module in postmodernism might hail the poetics of the fragment. A resolutely practical alien who thinks poetry is for losers might read the whole thing, instead, as a set of incoherent navigational prompts, made up of loose prepositions – au-dessus, au-dessus, par delà, par delà.

I’m shamelessly piggybacking on my own academic research here. But look, it’s on point. Three Verses is a grid-based first-person “typing RPG” in which you help poets finish their poems by asking various gods to supply the concluding line. “You” being a disembodied soul seeking elevation from a purgatory of royalty-free, PS1-style spaces – washed, pixel-scabbed streets tormented by metronomic trains, interiors made up of soiled slabs and motel doors. Not vast, but certainly sorrowful and vexing. Oh, and hovering synthwave mazes. And minigames featuring bubbled green cats and chunky dice. Your equipment consists of a pop-up organiser for note-taking, with phrases manually typed in. Typing is also how you’ll cast spells during simple turn-based battles with creatures like door-blocking gargoyles.

The poems themselves – all awaiting recombination, with no obvious opportunity to improvise or deviate so far – aren’t original to Three Verses. As detailed on the Itch page, which includes a free version of the game, they’re lifted from Brion Gysin’s Permuted Poems and Robert Ashley’s TV performance Perfect Lives: an opera, among other texts. As such, the game is something of a restless archive that triangulates some interesting links between various literary traditions, a cousin of the Golden Record that, again, invites the recipient to resolve or toy with the gaps. I played about 30 minutes of the Itch demo yesterday and got stuck in a puzzle maze involving sewer valves. I’d like to play more, perhaps after it launches on Steam. Now, what would be the most obvious and obnoxious way to finish this article. Ah, of cour