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In my first play-through of Stanley, I gave the game the benefit of the doubt and did absolutely everything it told me to do; the game’s voiced-over narration explains which path to take, and I did what I was told. The result is a boring, cliché videogame narrative that takes only a few minutes to complete: the protagonist, Stanley, has been mind-controlled by a mysterious machine, and when he discovers this, he turns the machine off and escapes to the real world. The game ends with Stanley outside, finally “free” of having been told what to do … the irony being that I, the player, have done exactly what I was told to do by the narrator in order to achieve this result.

Elegy lets players write prose and poetry as they explore distant planets and dead civilizations. The player faces 27 challenges in three worlds, each riffing on a specific British Romance-era poem: “Ozymandias” by Percy Bysshe Shelley, “When I Have Fears That I May Cease to Be” by John Keats, and “Darkness” by Lord Byron. The different challenges find the player in various roles: an emperor rallying his troops before a doomed battle, for example, or a schoolgirl evacuating a city being bombed. Players travel through beautifully designed backgrounds, while on-screen text narrates the story. But much of the text is left blank—that’s when players tap their inner Wordsworths, finishing the tale with their own imaginations.