You Can't Save Her

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.