Poems Make Games Better

Late last year, Jon Ingold put out a call for 500-1000 word essays on narrative design and game writing. The collection—The Game Narrative Kaleidoscope: 100+ Essays on the Craft of Game Writing—is out now and includes my essay on poems as videogame assets. I encourage you to buy the book, but I’m happy to make my essay available here. And despite owning a copy of this book, which is literally next to me as I write this, I still managed to misspell “kaleidoscope.”

 Including poetry in a videogame is bold. I don’t mean games where one expects to find a poem, like Lawra Suits Clark’s Play a Hot Number or Doki Doki Literature Club (2017, Team Salvato). I am thinking specifically about games where poems appear as part of environmental storytelling or as a lore object. As a poet, I am inclined to think that poems make a game better, but I suspect that the probability a player is reading these texts carefully, especially mid-run, is low.

Reading a poem carefully means spending time with it, ideally, rereading it many times. The analogy is a cliché but nonetheless apt: rereading a poem is like peeling back the layers of an onion. The features that can make a poem daunting—figurative language, unconventional syntax, oblique images—are precisely what makes rereading a critical practice. Every time you reread a poem, the parts that feel obscure and confusing start to make sense—they start making sense to you, in a way that strikes a balance between the meanings a poet encodes in a poem and those that your reading creates.

Including a poem in a videogame is bold because there is no guarantee that a player will have the interest, attention, or opportunity to revisit the poem. I am always moved when I come across a poem in a game, knowing how much work goes into writing a thoughtful poem. I am currently playing Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 (2025, Sandfall Interactive) and assiduously collecting journal entries from previous expeditions. The entry for expedition 36 is a poem by a poet named “Isabelle.” You find it by beautiful white tree, in a scene that feels like you are in a painting. There is no obligation to spend time with this poem; you even have the option to turn off the voiceover reciting it. To move on, you need to close the inventory. The poem remains there, available to be reread, but there is so much else to do in this game, and nothing else the game asks us to do with Isabelle’s words.

Roguelikes, on the other hand, are well equipped to encourage, even compel, poetic rereading, but doing so requires intentional narrative design. Unless picking up and rereading a poem is essential to the completion of the game loop, let alone the game itself, its recurrence does not guarantee that a player will engage a poem more than once or at all. In Returnal: Ascension, the free DLC (downloadable content) for Returnal (2021, Housemarque), interacting with a book in the hospital sequence reveals two poems, “The Lamentation of Sisyphus” and “Prayer of the Moirai.” Completing the hospital sequence requires that a player return to this space several times, but repeated interaction with the book asset does not further affect the scene or game. But what I love about this poem is how it explicitly connects the story of Returnal to Greek mythology, specifically the roguelike myth of Sisyphus, condemned to carry the same rock up the same hill for all eternity, as well as the Fates, who weave the course of human lives (the web-like textures in the main game may be a reference to the latter). While evocative, these poems are optional worldbuilding features, designed for the kind of player who enjoys meticulous interaction with the environment and its storytelling.

Hades 2 (2025, Supergiant Games), on the other hand, is an example of how a game’s narrative design can achieve an obligatory integration of poetry in the game loop cycle. Interactions with NPCs (non-playable characters) like Circe, Arachne, and Medea introduce players to a range of poetic language and forms, from couplets to quatrains, full and slant rhyme, and more.  The poetic dialogue activates the moment Melinoë, the playable character, enters their rooms and continues until the player approaches the NPC or the poem’s recitation has concluded. Either way, between entering the room and triggering the NPC interaction, the player hears some of the poem.

The poems of Arachne, a spider, include references to weaving and allusions to her backstory, even a nod to the roguelike structure of the game itself. “Once more” or “And, back again” are among the final lines she will say before repeating the poem one more time. Circe’s poems consist primarily of potion ingredients, but this language frequently acknowledges the game’s inventory system and gardening mechanic—“heap of soil, chip of stone,/ harpy feather, knuckle bone,” for example.

Elective or obligatory, the roguelike game loop of Hades 2 and Returnal encourages a praxis of rereading that enriches the role that poetry assets have in these games, where they often call attention to the finer details of the game world. But these poems also have the capacity, as poems often do, to speak directly to a player’s experience both within and outside of this world. Medea is addressing Hecate when she says, “I first encountered you whilst in a haze,/ and you returned to me my will to fight,” but she is also speaking to and for us.