I played with those we love alive.
with those we love alive, is trying to intrigue players by combining the oddity of mysteries and the fear of loss of autonomy into a game that makes players feel trapped into a story they have no choice in. Unfortunately, the game went too far in trying to put players in a space where something feels off, that now nothing makes sense. There is almost the framework of recognizable human civilization in the game, but so much has been changed and so little explained that it’s impossible to tell if this is a future or an alternate reality, or to feel invested in the game. Some phrases and concepts feel too real and out of place against the science fiction background. For example when you choose to observe the dry canal you can eventually watch urchins doing “rituals of luck against starvation and luck against police brutality,” which kicked me out of the magic circle to decide whether it made sense for them to have police or not in this world. Another spot where I got jarred by how straightforward it was in context with the rest of the game was during a scene where the Empress is hunting humans. The text talks about a custom that persists “because people are scared that if they question the custom they will fall victim to the intense cruelty of the custom, which persists because they fail to question it.” I was a little confused, because this whole world seemed cruel, this no more so than whatever was happening in the dream distillery, so why did this specifically merit such a clear and concise summary while everything else was obfuscated?
Many interactive fiction games have what Shira Chess calls a “masculine story”; one that moves forward linearly and eventually hits a conclusion. Others branch in a variety of ways for more of a “choose your own adventure” style game, that still can only end a finite number of ways. with those we love alive really tries to push back against this norm, and keep the player in the middle section of the game without having clear progression and linearity. The game attempts this by making a main courtyard that is kind of the center of all the places you can go. Most days, each thing reads the same, or cycles through a relatively short list of responses that quickly become repetitive. However, on some days, you’re required to actually make something, which often then appears later in the descriptions of your monotonous days. Other days, there are things happening in the city, which you only find out by clicking through things that rarely ever change. I spent many days clicking through every option, mostly to be disappointed by how little they changed. The only thing that was consistently different was the dream distillery, and what the dreams tasted like. Both the colors and the tastes didn’t make sense a lot of the time: I don’t think black can be bright, and I really don’t understand what genetic predisposition, or an aftertaste of agoraphobia is supposed to taste like. The game feels designed to make the player want to sleep until they are forced to do something else, such as “re-apply hormones.” This may be intentional, but instead of causing a sense of hopelessness (which felt like the emotion the designer was going for) I just got bored eventually, and wanted to see if the game actually even ended. From a quick google, I knew it did, and slept through the rest of the game to see the ending. The game was trying to do two different, opposing things; make a story that doesn’t allow much choice, but also make a story that doesn’t really have a defined ending. The ending is still ambiguous, but there is only one way for the game to end (other than quitting partway through, which I was tempted to do, but doesn’t count).
