How do I even rate this vn? Do you give stars to something based off your own personal enjoyment, or based on the achievement of a certain goal? This really is just an HSS film in fvn form. The dialogue is stilted, the cinematography is nonsensical, the choices are ultimately meaningless, and the timeline is all sorts of fucked up. For me, HSS movies tend to be kind of hit or miss. I come away feeling like I learned something, or got a secret peek at an intimate part of someone else's human experience, or I feel very "well that's 70 minutes of my life i'm never gonna get back." The Poet's Visual Novel doesn't really push me in either direction, probably because it's pretty short. I guess I appreciate the cleverness involved (like the mention of renpy, and even the imitation of its default UI), but as someone who was quite a fan of the lead dev's previous work, I do wish this game had less HSS and more Purkka. But I don't think it's fair to critique something based off "the artist made something different than what I wanted from them."
My one source of critique (because I don't know that I'm qualified to speak on the rest of the game) lies in the engine itself. When scrolling on my mouse to go back, the speed is incredibly high and instead of taking me back a line or two it sends me back approx. twenty. Also the music volume slider is just fully nonfunctional. I turned it all the way to nothing just to make sure the short passage that functions as the game's soundtrack wasn't just getting louder each time because I wouldn't put that kind of insanity past HSS. But no, it just is regular broken.