With Those We Love Alive

by Porpentine profile and Brenda Neotenomie

Surreal
2014

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- Max Fog, January 25, 2024

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
The Queen requires your services., December 21, 2023
by Rovarsson (Belgium)

Wait. The Queen will notify you when there is work to do.

You are an artificer of sorts, making things of glass and metal, and of substances more rare...
While you are waiting for the orders of the Queen, you are free to roam the palace and the city.

The writing in With Those We Love Alive is extremely good. Short paragraphs with a few poignant words ignite the imagination of the reader, summoning forth a world of symbols and dreamlike juxtaposition. There are minimal glimpses of a world, with slight (and unsettling) variations in the descriptions. These sparse but association-filled descriptions offer fertile ground to the player's mind's eye to fill in the rest, and to let the mood suggested in the text percolate through.

With Those We Love Alive opens with a rather unusual direct plea to the player: have a pen nearby and draw symbols on your own skin when the game arrives at transitional moments. Related, but less immediately fourth-wall-penetrating are cues to participate in the events and surroundings in the game, like a breathing excercise, or strong sensory cues inviting the player to imagine the location as vividly as possible.
I was all-in, pen and breathing and wide-open senses and all.

The first part of the game lulled me into a slow and soothing routine. Each day-cycle I would take a tour of the palace and city, tinker a bit in my workshop, and go back to sleep, all the while waiting for the Queen to call upon my artificer's talents. Despite the relaxed repetition of familiar actions, there was always a feeling of looming threat.

Things change when outsiders show up. The pulse quickens, new elements and shards of backstory are introduced, intruiging but hard to connect.

The finale charges forward in a frantic flurry of impressions, a fast-propelling chase/action sequence, fragmented and breathless.

There is a notice at the start of the game: "Best experienced with headphones." It is. The soundscapes and music are an integral part of the experience, guiding the player's mood and heartrate through the acts of this story.

While I appreciated all this, and was impressed with a lot of elements, the piece didn't move me in the way it obviously did others.

Despite the meditative calm of the first act's routine, and the additional assurance at the start of the game that "Nothing you can do is wrong", I was still put off by the seemingly endless repetition. The small variations in the text seemed to hint at events happening behind my back, but however much I visited all the locations, precious little changed. This caused a certain level of background distrust in the game. Was I missing something obvious to move the plot along? Was this routine really supposed to drag on for so long? I started to feel lost, disconnected from the intentions of the author, pointlessly flailing wandering.
Of course, in hindsight, this might well be exactly the feeling that the game wanted me to have. If so, it didn't really take.

After the change at the start of the second act, things do start to happen. I remained quite unsure what things though. Except for the most superficial layer of actions and events, I remained in the dark about any meaning the game was trying to convey.
The associative dream-like style left me without handholds, bewildered, drowning in a sea of unconnected symbolism. I felt something deeper was going on, but I couldn't for the life of me get a handle on it.

Having read several other reviews, I do acknowledge the impact of this piece on many people, but this deeper impact stayed largely outside my grasp. I experienced a sequence of beautifully written symbol-laden associative story-fragments, with a sense of deeper significance always out of reach. It left me with a sense of missing out, of reaching in vain for context and meaning.

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- Catalina, December 6, 2023

- aluminumoxynitride, October 22, 2023

- Edo, August 16, 2023

- Drew Cook (Acadiana, USA), July 26, 2023

- Marsh (Oxfordshire, UK), July 4, 2023

- Kastel, March 29, 2023

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
Life Changing, December 21, 2022

"With Those We Love Alive" was the first piece of online interactive fiction of this kind that I remember engaging with. Before it there had been webcomics, DeviantArt choose-your-own stories, Quizilla supernatural romances, online forum roleplays. But even among all of those, this was different. I got a marker and stared at the screen, sucked into this world surrounded by the darkness of my room, navigating imagination through the kind of ever-fraying sleep deprivation that is unique to schools.

I was an impressionable young creative who had a mind soaked in unreality and a longing for things as strange as I was. I played through much of the story in one sitting, within one night, and I believe I came to some conclusion after another day of play. Two nights, and even though it was eventually tucked away into some obscure corner of memory that I no longer have access to, I cannot overstate the deep emotional and inspirational impact it left on me. I have never forgotten this story-- not its name, its themes, its format, its style of worldbuilding. I was starstruck by how it constructed itself out of the mundane grotesque, how it structured the story navigation to allow for repetitive exploration while also rewarding curiosity. I had never considered before the possibility of creating a story like this, in this style, or having these kinds of themes. It was also, I believe, the first time I had ever encountered a canonically trans protagonist. I do not recall whether I was aware of my own genderfluidity at the time, but witnessing our main character apply what is explicitly an estrogen patch in the form of a glyph awakened something in my mind that would have remained neglected for years otherwise. I hadn't known that this sort of artistic expression or worldbuilding experimentation was allowed. I hadn't known it was possible.

All of that to say, now that I do have an account on this forum and have come across this game again, I did replay some of it. I have a more nuanced appreciation now that I am mature, but age and experience could never be what influence this review. No matter what my more modern experience of the game is, I would be doing everyone a grand disservice if I did not allow my younger self to finally be able to express the way this game bound itself onto a part of their soul. With each new symbol I was instructed to draw on my body, I was absorbing the game and this experience deeper and deeper into my skin, until it embedded itself upon my artistic psyche forevermore.

Thank you, Brenda and Porpentine, for being such a formative part of my growth. I hope to be able to pay homage to this gift you have given me with my own creative works in the future.

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- fakeliix, October 24, 2022

- Cerfeuil (*Teleports Behind You* Nothing Personnel, Kid), October 11, 2022

- Sarah Mak (Singapore), August 19, 2022

- Kinetic Mouse Car, July 28, 2022

- Bell Cyborg (Canada), July 1, 2022

- Nightmace, June 9, 2022

- cgasquid (west of house), January 31, 2022

- loopernow, December 16, 2021

- OverThinking, June 26, 2021

- Jonathan Verso, April 20, 2021

- mifga (Brooklyn, NY), October 15, 2020

- William Chet (Michigan), September 14, 2020

- Ry (Philippines), June 12, 2020

1 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
A masterpiece, April 1, 2020

Porpentine uses the same device than in Howling Dogs : a place around all "events" (including wandering) take place, but she plays even more on time, forcing you for instance to sleep or meditate if you want to advance in the game. This apparent loss of time helps you to appreciate more the following events, until the freeing end, which the fantastic world finally appears like the shape taken by sorrow. Another brilliant Twine game (with a good sound design as well).

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- kierlani, March 26, 2020

- tempest102, February 17, 2020


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