Save the Date (Chris Cornell)

savethedate
I know what I think the game is about, but the game is kind of weird and experimental, even by my standards, and I don’t really want to say too much in advance. Probably best for people to play it without knowing what they’re getting into.[Author’s description]

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36 Comments.

  1. That final scene is surprisingly moving. I loved this game

  2. Wow, this started off seeming like one of those generic “perfect date” games but this is really good. Especially the groundhog day/source code aspect to it

  3. GRAAAAH KILL SMASH DESTROY

  4. I tried it a few days ago and felt I had my fill after two or three full rounds. Any killer reason why I should go back and see the rest?

    • All of them. I don’t know how much to spoil here, but knowing what happens on a normal run is just the first step.

    • There are about half a dozen short paths to dead-ends and about half a dozen longer paths. If you haven’t reached a longer path yet, keep playing. It will take maybe 5 minutes to get to a longer path, and maybe half an hour to find most of the endings.

      • What I mean is that I did use the “knowledge” accrued in previous passes at least once in each location. It may really just be that I didn’t have a craving for that kind of meta at that moment, but past the initial surprise (and pleasure) I did not feel very compelled to keep digging. I might just go back anyway, but I was wondering if it added up to something even more surprising story- or play-wise.

        • It does. Trying to prevent the normal ending from happening one turn before it occurs is just the second step. Then you need to go deeper.

          If you feel like it, of course, because it could also happen that you just don’t like this game so much, which is cool.

  5. woah that was really interesting and surprisingly moving

  6. Spoiler Inside SelectShow
  7. This is really the most original and creative game I had ever played in my entire life.
    I finally got the good ending… but even after hours and hours of getting a bad and more bad ending… I still didn’t get that feeling that I achieved something.
    You, the author, and the other people who won the game know what I mean.

    And guys… the hint to get the good ending is: ‘game’

  8. This game is amazing! Really creative use of metagaming.

    So are there any better endings than the

    Spoiler Inside SelectShow
  9. It took me a while to sit down and play this game, and I’m so glad that I did. I love what it does; gonna be thinking about the ideas it tackles all day. It makes me want to create something, and that’s beautiful.

    (aside: I’ve been enjoying the output of FIgames so much lately, it’s always excellent but I’ve felt that over the last couple months it’s been consistently amazing; I’ve found so many games that have moved me and inspired me and made me smile that I would never have otherwise known about. Terry, Stephen, Aquin, Popentine, Noyb – thank you folks so much for working to make the site what it is! And to the creators, for your labours and for sharing your art with us!)

    /gushing

  10. Not a game. There’s no way I could’ve known that Felicia had an allergy to a particular ingredient, so I lost through no fault of my own. Interesting? Maybe. Moving? Not from what I played, and possibly in parts, but I didn’t want to keep playing to see it. A game? Definitely not.

    Tired of this argument? Then stop making things you call games when they’re not games. Call them interactive distractions, call them digital experiences, but don’t call them games because they’re not and no amount of protesting will lift them above pretense until you do.

    I really hoped that this might be the first step on cracking the problem of representing something a little more complex than death and killing (ie. virtually every game ever made so far) and instead making love and/or dating work in a game setting. This is a Choose Your Own Adventure product at best which asks me to have fun at the challenge of nothing more than process of elimination.

    • OH SHIT IT’S THE GAME POLICE

    • haha wow

    • One thing I love about games is their ability to affect you so profoundly on an emotional level. You got invested, Lee. You made the choices yourself, and it made you more frustrated than a non-interactive narrative ever could.

      That’s what makes it a game. I think you know it as well as i do, you just need to embrace it.

      The kicker here is that you won without even realizing it. You wrote your ending by dismissing it entirely, and for that I envy you.

      Wish me luck. I’m going back in.

    • The worst thing about the this-is-not-a-game crowd is that your list of requirements for what makes a game keeps growing and never makes any sense.

      If surprising deaths that you couldn’t anticipate disqualify something from being a game, then fucking Mario Bros isn’t a game. There’s no way you could have known that jumping on underwater creatures wouldn’t kill them or that some of those mushrooms are poisonous or that you have to go a certain way in that one castle.

      Stop making things you call games when they’re not games. Call them “interactive plumber simulators” or “digital princess-rescuing experiences”, but don’t call them games.

    • My favourite game of the year so far. Awesome.

  11. AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAH I can’t find the correct path

  12. By far my favorite game on this site, anyway to reset this for a later playthrough?

  13. comradebluesky

    This asks really interesting questions about narrative. I spend a lot of time thinking about stories and how they work – not just how they’re built but how they perform rhetorical functions. Like, as gamers, we’ve been trained to expect the sort of ending this game subverts, and it’s interesting to consider that. Stories we’ve been told – silly stories, about plumbers and ninja turtles and dragons and suchlike – have conditioned our real, physical bodies in perduring ways. It may not have been substantial, but it does subtly determine – in the weak sense of “adding to an inventory of satisfactory possibilities” – what our concept of “ending” can be. Every other sort of story, I think, from movies to older ones like La Morte d’Arthur and the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, have also done this work, and it’s fun and useful to consider how, in that sense, games have entered the cultural canon. This is a really interesting and fun entry in said canon! Is “postmodern game” a genre that’s been suggested? I mean, a term that would encompass games like this that take as a core mechanic questioning core mechanics. I’m really not up on the Gama Sutra-style longform contemplation of gaming as a genre, but if not, let’s make it so!

  14. Interesting… As much as I appreciate the idea that stories exist only as a dialogue between teller and listener, a story will always stand as it’s own entity. Consider for example the problem concerning the ship of Theseus. As components of the ship are successively replaced, how long does it continue to retain its “identity”? Likewise, the shape of a story is unbound. But how many liberties can we as listeners take until it is no longer the same story? Romeo and Juliet is a tragedy by identity and if I re imagined a happy ending to the story, most would agree I would not have understood Romeo and Juliet, rather than my own interpretation of it.