Victor's IF Comp 2024 reviews

[VictorGijsbers]

You Can’t Save Her by Sarah Mak

Immediately, I feel that I’m in the artistic vicinity of porpentine’s 2013 game their angelical understanding. The credits show us that Sarah Mak was more directly influenced by porpentine’s 2014 game With Those We Love Alive, but that comes to much the same thing. We are in a realm of circling Twine links, poetic diction, mere hints of strange harsh and beautiful worlds, no explanations ever, and characters that are less persons than cyphers of emotional-metaphysical ideas. Angel blades kiss in the moonlight while they whisper of death; gods might be born or perhaps die; and no one that you hurt can ever heal, least of all yourself. It’s beautiful. But it’s cold. Real cold.

There’s a sense then in which You Can’t Save Her is somewhat derivative, if we assess it stylistically. I don’t think that Sarah Mak would mind me saying so. She explicitly tells us that the game is based on a scene from With Those We Love Alive, so staying true to the artistic vision of that game is part of the point. And she succeeds wonderfully: the prose is sharp, the images are arresting, the stakes are as high as they should be. There’s also a great ingenuity in playing with different ways that Twine links can be interactive, up to and including repeating previous scenes with and without differences, and using fake choices as a prelude to the protagonist wishing for better choices.

You Can’t Save Her is moonlight falling on a garden of glass statues, each of which will kill you if you look at them the wrong way. Their black eyes show distant galaxies. It is all perfect.

For me, this style is too perfect. I like my characters as characters, whose fates have a meaning that is anchored in concrete experiences rather than Platonic realms of ideas. In 2008, writing an analysis of Metamorphoses, I complained about some of Emily Short’s stories:

Objects and people in these worlds do not appear in their individuality: they act as symbols of ideas and principles. And it is these ideas and principles, rather than the objects and people themselves, that dictates what will, can or must happen. There are no brute contingencies; the metaphysical reigns supreme, while the physical and the psychological are relegated to a purely supportive function.

The result is that everything fits together and that everything makes sense. But the fit is so perfect that we can only see the world’s surface–there are no cracks through which we can peek into the heart of existence, where chance hides, and ugliness, and the failure of meaning. In many of Short’s works, these things do not exist; the world’s surface is polished and unbroken like that of an ivory ball; and we are doomed to remain strangers, always at a distance, always looking through the veil that separates us from these perfect, self-enclosed wholes.

Short’s early aesthetics were certainly not identical to porpentine’s early aesthetics; in porpentine, there is no totality of sense, no necessity, and more cracks than all the king’s horses could mend. There is nevertheless some kinship. For here too we are doomed to remain strangers, always at a distance, admiring the poetry from the outside but never invited to live inside it. You Can’t Save Her is a pitch perfect example of this style. I admire the craft that went into it (and will rate it fairly highly). But love it I cannot.

There was already from the beginning another, funnier and earthier, side to porpentine, which I myself preferred, and of which the 2013 game ULTRA BUSINESS TYCOON III is a good example. Here’s about the first thing that game tells you: “You are a prominent businesswoman in the money business.” That’s not a line you could possibly have in their angelical understanding or You Can’t Save Her! It makes you smile.