You Can't Save Her

Adapted from an IFCOMP24 Review

Two friends, separated by competing orthodoxies, now violently pitted against each other because somehow these orthodoxies are more important than interpersonal connections.

What a ridiculously unrealistic concept.

Completely unrelated and by the way, anyone watching US domestic politics?

This is a work where you bounce back and forth (helpfully and satisfyingly cued with color) between two perspectives of a tragic collision between former friends. The setup is a religious/sci-fi setting where young acolytes respond quite differently to forbidden knowledge, and it develops tragic consequences. I mean, it’s right there in the title. They are both awesome fighters, with anime powers, though that is the least interesting part of the work. Certainly the central tension, with some flashback time devoted to how it got here, is the primary narrative aim.

It is a pretty fraught subject, no? There’s two ways to go about this. One is to contrast each perspective and portray it as a tragedy of the universe. The two variations of this are ‘both are right’ and ‘both are wrong.’ The second way is to double down on the tragedy by showing one side is right, and the other wrong, and the tension still unavoidable. Kind of a ‘My Nazi Best Friend’ situation. The details of the ‘sides’ really matter a lot here, what their tenets are and what they demand of their adherents. Where do we fall on that spectrum?

Well, the work definitely paints the ‘blue’ side as wrong, both in its tenets and demands. We spend most of our time exploring this through the dual protagonists’ eyes. What the work is either less sure about, or does not convey clearly enough, is the ‘rightness’ of the pink side. There is of course the inevitable charge of ‘opposing bad = good,’ but this conclusion seems consistently undermined by the sparse, suspect details we are given. By story’s end, I was convinced both are wrong, largely on the strength of their shared sanctioning of righteous murder. The challenge to this kind of two-sides narrative is to give equal dignity and empathy to the ADHERENTS without necessarily transferring implicit approval to their DOCTRINES. Man does that take a deft hand, and probably quite a bit of table setting.

I found YCSH to be both too shallow and too short to accomplish this. I rejected both doctrines as presented, and could not figure out why the protagonists determinedly did not. I had no true understanding of either adherents’ motivations. That’s not exactly true actually. Indoctrinated intertia and fear v. self-important rebellion are clear enough motivators. Importantly, what they are NOT is a deeper relationship with their orthodoxies. How do these characters respond to the tenets of the faiths they are willing to kill for? We don’t know. Are those doctrines humanistic or self-perpetuating hate machines? We don’t know. What about the underlying doctrines appeals to these characters, and convinces them they are actually the ‘better way?’ Unexplained. Those details are CRUCIAL to aligning the reader on the proceedings and understanding the protagonists. The work is not concerned with those things though, only in setting up the dramatic confrontation. It’s just, short that understanding the tragedy of their opposition is hollow. A narrative manipulation with opaque justifications.

There is a read of course, a deeply cynical read, that not only are those tenets vague, and maybe not even UNDERSTOOD by the protagonists, they are completely unimportant to the conflict. Ideological conflict is its own self-perpetuating feature of human experience, and is its own force independent of the purported ideologies involved. This is a statement for sure, but one that I find unsatisfying and unappealingly fatalistic. Perhaps if the work spent more time convincing me of this thesis I could at least engage it as a disturbing but worthy observation. Here though, it is seemingly asserted too shallowly to convince me.

By story’s end, I’ve got a ‘both sides are bad’ conflict where the core conflict is earnest but superficial. Superficial ‘both sides’ narratives are kind of poison for me. “Both sides are equally bad” is a patently bad take when one side blatantly denies reality, commits sexual assault, treason and insurrection and still demands and gets abject fealty. Just to pick four inarguably bad examples out of a hat, completely at random and not related to reality at all. HA HA. Ha.

Ha.

So this work’s somewhat muddled thesis did not land for me. Like, at all. Without clarity there, the characters never sung for me either, so their conflict was unmoving. This made for a Mechanical (nearly Bouncy) experience with a seamless, kind of attractive implementation.

Played: 10/9/24
Playtime: 15m, finished
Artistic/Technical ratings: Mechanical/Seamless
Would Play Again?: No, experience feels complete

Artistic scale: Bouncy, Mechanical, Sparks of Joy, Engaging, Transcendent
Technical scale: Unplayable, Intrusive, Notable (Bugginess), Mostly Seamless, Seamless

Y’all probably know by now that I’m the kind of reviewer who likes to go outside the four corners of a work and look for connections to other games, or books or movies or whatever, that might be touch-points or inspirations or just share a vibe – it has the potential to illuminate the ways a piece of writing is in dialogue with other parts of the scene, or trace intellectual influence to see how a particular author is putting their own spin on a set of ideas, though of course I’ll confess that it can reduce to an unedifying spot-the-reference exercise.

Another problem with this approach is that I have my blind spots, which is how I wound up gobsmacked by the end of You Can’t Save Her. The game is a short former-friends-confront-each-other-in-a-melodramatic-duel story that felt to me like a dark riff on magical-girl anime series like Utena (confession time, Utena is one of only like three anime series I’ve actually seen, so I am LARPing the “getting a lot of Boss Baby vibes from this” meme here). But per the credits, in fact the project was conceived as an homage to … Porpentine?

We’ll circle back to that in a minute, but in the meantime let’s talk a bit more about what You Can’t Save Her is in itself. The setting here isn’t exhaustively specified, but it’s the kind of science-fantasy world where a character prepares their blade by “anodiz[ing] it in dreams of martyrdom” or opting instead to “machine it with sigils of faith” – one of the most metal choices I’ve ever had in a game, kudos to the author for that – and then brings a laser-gun to the fight to boot. The religious overtones aren’t accidental, either, as both main characters were raised together in the same oppressive convent, before an encounter with a heretical book sowed seeds of doubt and led to one of them renouncing their faith and fleeing, and then the other to be sent to kill her erstwhile friend for her thought-crimes.

The storytelling is straightforward but assured, alternating depictions of the pair’s battle with flashbacks establishing the backstory I bottom-lined above. Across the game’s various acts, viewpoints shift and the rules of the game change slightly, which maintains interest across the fifteen minutes or so it takes to play You Can’t Save Her. There’s an especially effective change-up in Act III, which inverts the mechanics established in earlier sections – one cycling link allowing you to vary your choice of weapon or combat move or dialogue line or what have you, a second at the bottom of the passage locking in your decision and moving to the next one – due to various auguries having found the optimal plan of attack, so that the upper cycling link now just displays the single, proper choice. There are time loops, and portentous drama, and the talismanic repetition of the phrase “She is to the north” as you seek your quarry, effectively setting these events in a mytho-poetic register.

So yeah, I very much had fun with this tale of messy warrior-nuns torn between killing each other and making out, related in overheated, angst-friendly language. But like I said, the credits drew me up short. Because I wasn’t that engaged in the IF scene during the 2010’s, and since then have largely been focused on keeping up with new stuff, I’ve only played a smattering of Porpentine’s stuff – I think a bit of howling dogs, but honestly that’s probably about it? But just from general osmosis and reading other reviews and criticism, I have a pretty clear (though possibly incorrect!) stereotype of her style: intense, visceral physicality; unique, indelible imagery; catharsis through abjection.

I hope it’s no criticism of You Can’t Save Her that it does not strike me as particularly Porpentine-y. While there’s emotion here, it’s all heightened to the point of theatricality; the characters perform fear and longing, but as a player I was entertained but unmoved. Likewise, while one character has been scarred by her encounter with the forbidden book, this manifests as scars that glow with lurid pink light, a CGI-friendly mark of badassery but nothing that calls the body’s ugly biochemical reality into question. Per the citations in the post-game credits, it actually incorporates a half dozen or so specific lines from a few of Porpentine’s games, but the context around them is so reconfigured that they didn’t really stand out to me, seamlessly fitting into the action-yuri angstfest on offer – the game is so resolutely PG-rated that I couldn’t even recognize its gestures towards NC-17 stuff for what they were.

Again, I don’t think this is a complaint about the game as such – I had fun with it, and but for the credits I would be writing that it accomplishes exactly what it sets out to do. And honestly, being inspired by some canonical pieces of IF to write stuff that’s actually significantly different, rather than trying for a slavish imitation, is if anything even more respectable. Plus per my admission above, my lack of direct experience of Porpentine’s work means I could be reading things entirely wrong. But will all those caveats out of the way, You Can’t Save Her is still an odd kind of homage, and I’m looking forward to reading reviews from others who actually know what they’re talking about.

Note: This review was written during IFComp 2024, and originally posted in the authors' section of the intfiction forum on 21 Sep 2024.

This is a scifi Twine piece, where two former friends face off, against the backdrop of a world with nuns and mysterious sacred algorithms. Can you change destiny?

I liked a lot about this. The writing is strong, I liked the atmospheric music, and the dual perspective view of the world works well.

On the downside I was a little confused by the interface, as can happen to me in some Twine stories. Sometimes clickable options would move the story on, but sometimes they would cycle through options. Even in the latter case I wasn’t always sure if I clicked to cycle through whether I was selecting the option I had just clicked on, or the option that then appeared. And then I clicked elsewhere.

I also was sometimes confused by the dual perspectives. Though not always knowing who was who and what was what was thematically highly appropriate.

However it was an evocative piece. And even though it’s short, it packs a lot in.

You Can’t Save Her is a short piece about two friends raised in a monastery in a fantasy setting. One friend finds a forbidden tome that reveals the existence of a different god and becomes a heretic, gaining strange powers in the process. The other remains loyal, and when the heretic becomes a threat, the church sends the loyalist to kill her.

The most interesting part of this piece, to me, is the way it deals with faith. The loyalist, it is suggested, also has her doubts about the god she was raised to believe in; her refusal to follow her friend into apostasy isn’t due to an unwavering commitment to the worldview the monastery espouses. Rather, it’s because she’s also skeptical of the new god her friend has found. To overcome the inertia of her upbringing, it’s not enough to no longer believe in her original faith; she has to find something else she believes in more. (Spoiler - click to show)(Which she does, ultimately, though it’s not a god at all.)

Leaving a highly dogmatic faith that has been a large part of one’s life to that point is something I don’t have personal experience of, so I can’t say if this rings true. But it is an interesting contention, and a somewhat unusual angle on this type of narrative.

The prose is fairly laconic, but there are moments of striking imagery—a cathedral that “pierces the sky like a stalagmite”, moonlight through stained glass “painting a rose of rainbows on the floor”, a rift in space that “closes like a wound”. It adds up to an atmosphere that’s beautiful, nearly empty, and uncanny, enhanced by a droning industrial soundtrack. The sparseness of the words on the screen (most of the time) also feels appropriate to a story that’s largely about two women alone in a vast desert.

The interactivity was the work’s weak point for me; I found that the choices felt largely cosmetic (does it matter if you’re trudging off to kill your best friend with a saber or a broadsword?). This was thematically appropriate to the earlier parts of the game, in which the loyalist’s perceived lack of choice figures prominently, but later on it might have been fitting to let the loyalist’s belated rebellion be something the player had more of an active hand in. (This not being the case then makes the earlier lack of meaningful choice feel less like a thematic decision, also.) Failing that, I think it would also have been an improvement to stick to the use of cycling links that probe a little deeper into the character’s psyche with each click, and just get rid of the choices that change a bit of text in the next passage but don’t really carry any weight. But it is an enjoyable piece of writing nonetheless.

Minimalist, well-designed Twine fiction in an evocative science fantasy setting. I enjoyed the cycling choices to emulate spiraling thoughts and the illusion of choice, as if the narrative could have had a different outcome (Despite the title warning us in advance). Although I tend to find flashback sequences jarring, they were incorporated smoothly in this game, and the added context made each iteration of the fight in the cathedral more heartbreaking, exacerbated by the music.

This is, as the chronically online kids say these days, giving doomed yuri. While there's no explicit romantic tension between the two female protagonists in the game, the dynamic is the same, and reminds me of the Richard Siken quote, “Someone has to leave first. This is a very old story. There is no other version of this story.” In this case, who leaves first is a little more ambiguous, but it sets our story to its inevitable conclusion.