Agentia
Agentia is a slow work of navigable, generative poetry, examining the unfolding of the world through the stories of animals, plants, and objects. It is part walking simulator, part hypertext.
Agentia was made by extracting short phrases from mostly vintage titles and arranging these manually into an interlinked body of words. Each scene you are presented with uses texts that explore or invoke the plant, animal, or object being depicted - often in strange and enigmatic ways.
Featured on Rock, Paper, Shotgun and arcane cache.
Instructions / Tips
Agentia adopts a minimalist approach to storytelling. When incarnated as an animal, you can wander the landscape freely, seeking out interesting features, and perhaps diving further into their perceptual, conceptual, or cultural associations. At times, additional stories can surface from the very act of journeying, or even standing still.
As an animal, you can either use the arrows or WASD keys to move.
Plants and objects, of course, do not move through the world in the same way. You are invited to be still with them, reading vignettes from time and space as they flow by, and so consider a distinctly non-human mode of being.
The piece concludes after a certain number of stories are told, after which you will be reincarnated. You are gently encouraged to explore slowly and resist excavating every possibility - there are no goals to reach, no puzzles to solve, and no rewards other than the texts yielded.
If you wish to reincarnate as another being (and another landscape) from the one you started with, press the R key. Press the C key for credits and M key for materials used. Introduction and instructions can be accessed using the I key.
Credits
Agentia was made possible using a range of free or royalty-free assets by various artists and organisations.
Hand drawn isometric tileset courtesy of Withering Systems, extended by author
Source materials courtesy of Gutenberg.org and Archive.org, or author's own
Musical theme is Solemn Solstice by George Georgia, courtesy of Audio Network
Typeset in IM Fell by Igino Marini
