With Those We Love Alive is an interactive one-player fiction game created by Porpentine, with music by Brenda Neotenomie, playable through Twine. Its audience values experimental play. Playing it as a feminist means reading the game not just as a fantasy story about an alchemist serving an Empress, but as a system about survival inside power.
This connects to Shira Chess’s argument in Play Like a Feminist. Chess argues that feminist games do not need to simply include women characters or positive representation. Feminist play can also come from narrative structure, agency, emotion, and mechanics. With Those We Love Alive fits this because it rejects the traditional idea that a game should be about mastery, conquest, or a climactic victory. There are no weapons, scores, levels, or enemies to defeat. The main actions are small and bodily: “Get up,” “Exhale,” “Do your meditations,” “Return,” “Work on telescope,” or “Put it back.” The player is not trained to dominate the world. They are trained to notice how the world acts on them.
I think the strongest feminist mechanic is the way choice is deliberately limited. In one screenshot, the player sees “Stained schematics depict a metal tube with a glass lens,” and the options are “Work on telescope” or “Get up.” Later, if the player tries to work, the game says, “Too tired to work,” leaving only “Get up.” This is a smart use of false agency. The game gives the appearance of choice, then reveals that the body has limits. In many mainstream games, agency means doing more: fighting more, collecting more, optimizing more. Here, agency includes being unable to act. That feels feminist because it challenges the fantasy of the endlessly capable player. The character’s tiredness is not a failure of skill; it is part of the system.
The game also uses mechanics to make interior states visible. The breath screen gives three options: “I need a shorter breath,” “I need a medium breath,” and “I need a longer breath.” Mechanically, this is not a dramatic choice. But it reframes play as self-attunement. Instead of asking the player to choose a weapon or strategy, the game asks them to choose what their body needs. This connects to Chess’s discussion of games as affective systems. The interface is not only delivering story; it is making the player feel exhaustion and care. Even the repeated “Exhale” option after the line about childhood spices turns memory into bodily action.
The narrative structure is also feminist because it exists in what Chess describes as the “narrative middle.” The game does not move cleanly toward a heroic climax. It loops through chambers, gardens, workshops, meditations, smells, tools, and memories. The palace courtyard screen presents locations like emotional geography: balcony, chambers, garden, workshop, city. These are not just navigation links; they are relationships to power. The “throne room is closed for the Empress’s inaugural blood bath,” while the player’s “workshop is in a cabin down a shady path.” The Empress occupies ritual, violence, and spectacle; the player occupies labor, craft, and survival.
This is where the game’s feminist critique becomes most powerful. It shows how oppressive systems can make violence feel ordinary. The line about the “blood bath” is presented in the same calm interface as the garden or balcony. The game does not force a dramatic reaction. That restraint makes the horror stronger because it suggests that the protagonist has learned to live inside brutality. A feminist reading notices how power becomes normalized, especially for those who must keep working under it. The protagonist’s labor as an alchemist is not neutral creativity, but it is service to an empire.
The game’s visual design supports this argument. The teal-to-purple gradient, white text, and pink links create a soft, dreamlike interface, but the content is disturbing. This contrast matters. The game refuses the idea that feminist or queer games must look serious or realistic to be meaningful. It uses beauty, softness, and ambiguity to hold trauma. Clicking “Return” or “Exhale” feels more like touching a wound than pressing a command.
My main critique is that the game’s ambiguity can become inaccessible. The poetic fragments are powerful, but some players may feel lost about what their choices affect. Feminist design does not have to explain everything, but it should consider access. A small journal, memory map, or optional recap could help players track emotional changes without ruining the mystery. The game could also make its systems of oppression slightly more legible. The Empress, palace, and labor structure are evocative, but the political stakes sometimes remain abstract. Ethically, this matters because the game is asking players to sit with trauma, coercion, and survival, so it has a responsibility to help players understand the systems being critiqued rather than only aestheticizing suffering. Its cultural message is strongest when it shows how violence becomes normalized through routine labor, but more consequences tied to work, refusal, rest, or memory could make survival’s cost clearer. This would strengthen the game’s social impact by showing oppression not just as atmosphere, but as a structure that shapes what choices feel possible.
Still, I do not think the game fails as a feminist game. Instead of offering empowerment as control, it offers feminist play as attention to exhaustion, coercion, memory, embodiment, and the limits of choice. Utilizing feminist perspectives does not mean adding a strong female protagonist or a simple rebellion plot. In this game, feminism appears in the mechanics themselves. The player learns that agency is complicated, that rest can be meaningful, and that survival under power is not the same as freedom. This is a feminist game because it asks us to question what counts as action, progress, and power.
