You Can't Save Her

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.