External Links


Also included in the collection Eczema Angel Orifice.
Play Online
Play this game in your Web browser.
Kiket élve szeretünk
Hungarian translation
Play this game in your Web browser.
Skull Romance Alt Ending
Play this game in your Web browser.

Have you played this game?

You can rate this game, record that you've played it, or put it on your wish list after you log in.

Playlists and Wishlists

RSS Feeds

New member reviews
Updates to external links
All updates to this page

With Those We Love Alive

by Porpentine profile and Brenda Neotenomie

Surreal
2014

(based on 101 ratings)
7 reviews

About the Story

no dreams

written by porpentine

scored by brenda neotenomie


Game Details


Awards

Nominee, Best Game; Winner, Best Writing; Nominee, Best Story; Nominee, Best Setting; Winner, Best Individual NPC; Nominee, Best Implementation; Nominee, Best Use of Innovation; Nominee, Best Use of Multimedia - 2014 XYZZY Awards

5th Place - 20th Annual Interactive Fiction Competition (2014)

32nd Place - Interactive Fiction Top 50 of All Time (2015 edition)

23rd Place - Interactive Fiction Top 50 of All Time (2019 edition)

49th Place - Interactive Fiction Top 50 of All Time (2023 edition)

Editorial Reviews

The Guardian
...this particular game asks of the player a particularly-intimate task: to draw symbols on your own skin while playing. It’s inventive and off-putting all at once.
See the full review

Rock, Paper, Shotgun
Physically Interactive Fiction: With Those We Love Alive
With Those We Love Alive is a free Twine game by Porpentine, a moving visit to a mundanely monstrous world. Her writing is so carefully measured, vivid yet small bursts, and a soundtrack by Brenda Neotenomie wraps the world around you. It is a beautiful and terrible game.
See the full review

Emily Short's Interactive Storytelling
The work itself is beautifully made, the words and images striking, the music effective, the mechanic of skin-drawing evocative and lovely. But . . . it was also painful and demanding to experience.
See the full review

80% Relatable
Two Queers Play! The Porpentine Power Hour: Slime Time Live
It's time again! Join the queers as we play a whole bunch of games by amazing game designer and queen of the slime girls Porpentine!
See the full review

Tags

- View the most common tags (What's a tag?)

(Log in to add your own tags)
Tags you added are shown below with checkmarks. To remove one of your tags, simply un-check it.

Enter new tags here (use commas to separate tags):

Member Reviews

5 star:
(52)
4 star:
(30)
3 star:
(15)
2 star:
(4)
1 star:
(0)
Average Rating:
Number of Reviews: 7
Write a review


Most Helpful Member Reviews


10 of 11 people found the following review helpful:
Wow, April 22, 2015
by Chris Longhurst (Oxford, UK)

First up, a confession: I'm really bad at high-concept stuff. To me, games are just games and as such I always feel like I'm missing something important with Porpentine's work - some point of contact that other people have and I don't.

But even then...

Even when I'm not getting the full experience -- playing, as it were, with a towel wrapped around my head...

With Those We Love Alive is a really, really good game.

The writing is brilliant. The world just the right level of underspecified to sink its claws into your imagination. Crammed with clever and interesting detail, but delivered with that sparse Porpentine style. And you can play through it in an hour.

I recommend this game to everyone. Even if you're not normally a fan of Porpentine's games, or find them inaccessible, or just too weird to play... give this one a shot.

Was this review helpful to you?   Yes   No   Remove vote  
More Options

 | Add a comment 

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
Life Changing, December 21, 2022

"With Those We Love Alive" was the first piece of online interactive fiction of this kind that I remember engaging with. Before it there had been webcomics, DeviantArt choose-your-own stories, Quizilla supernatural romances, online forum roleplays. But even among all of those, this was different. I got a marker and stared at the screen, sucked into this world surrounded by the darkness of my room, navigating imagination through the kind of ever-fraying sleep deprivation that is unique to schools.

I was an impressionable young creative who had a mind soaked in unreality and a longing for things as strange as I was. I played through much of the story in one sitting, within one night, and I believe I came to some conclusion after another day of play. Two nights, and even though it was eventually tucked away into some obscure corner of memory that I no longer have access to, I cannot overstate the deep emotional and inspirational impact it left on me. I have never forgotten this story-- not its name, its themes, its format, its style of worldbuilding. I was starstruck by how it constructed itself out of the mundane grotesque, how it structured the story navigation to allow for repetitive exploration while also rewarding curiosity. I had never considered before the possibility of creating a story like this, in this style, or having these kinds of themes. It was also, I believe, the first time I had ever encountered a canonically trans protagonist. I do not recall whether I was aware of my own genderfluidity at the time, but witnessing our main character apply what is explicitly an estrogen patch in the form of a glyph awakened something in my mind that would have remained neglected for years otherwise. I hadn't known that this sort of artistic expression or worldbuilding experimentation was allowed. I hadn't known it was possible.

All of that to say, now that I do have an account on this forum and have come across this game again, I did replay some of it. I have a more nuanced appreciation now that I am mature, but age and experience could never be what influence this review. No matter what my more modern experience of the game is, I would be doing everyone a grand disservice if I did not allow my younger self to finally be able to express the way this game bound itself onto a part of their soul. With each new symbol I was instructed to draw on my body, I was absorbing the game and this experience deeper and deeper into my skin, until it embedded itself upon my artistic psyche forevermore.

Thank you, Brenda and Porpentine, for being such a formative part of my growth. I hope to be able to pay homage to this gift you have given me with my own creative works in the future.

Was this review helpful to you?   Yes   No   Remove vote  
More Options

 | Add a comment 

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
Liked it, made me feel and think things, July 3, 2015
by openmedi (Berlin, Germany)

I liked this one very much. There are bunch of reasons, but mostly because of the shared intimacy that comes with drawing on you own skin. I also became very aware how different genders manifest their reality and get manifested (if that makes sense) in very different ways. This leeds to very different ways of talking about our bodys "and using them" for world building. These are all pretty naďve points, but than again I'm but a naďve human… I liked that it was more of an experience than a skill based game. (Spoiler - click to show)And it made me kind of emotional, although the end came a little abrupt.

Was this review helpful to you?   Yes   No   Remove vote  
More Options

 | Add a comment 

See All 7 Member Reviews

If you enjoyed With Those We Love Alive...

Related Games

Other members recommend this game for people who like With Those We Love Alive:

The Queen, by Elliot Yokum
Inspired by With Those We Love Alive by Porpentine.

Suggest a game

Recommended Lists

With Those We Love Alive appears in the following Recommended Lists:

IFDB Top 100 by Pegbiter
An automatically updated list utilizing an IMDb style Bayes estimator to calculate weighted ratings based on all IFDB ratings. Questions and comments can be placed here....

Games I Have Played by Canis
Just so I can keep track of them.

Great Twine/Choice games for those skeptical of the format by MathBrush
I didn't like Twine at first, but slowly I've changed my opinion about it, until now, many of my favorite games are Twine/Choice games (including Varytale or choice-style parser games). These games tend to be very different genres from...

See all lists mentioning this game

Polls

The following polls include votes for With Those We Love Alive:

Getting back into IF, best re-introductions to the genre by Sorrel
I haven't played any IF for roughly the past 6 years and am excited to get back into it. So, what have I missed? What have been some of your favorite games released since 2010? Alternatively, what games do you think would serve as a good...

Games with graphics and/or sound by eyesack
I couldn't find an easy way to search for this, so I figured I'd ask the hivemind: What games use graphics and/or sound to enhance the gameplay, similar to City of Secrets and Necrotic Drift?

For Your Consideration: Games from 2014 that should be nominated for the XYZZY Awards by Molly
There were a lot of great games released in the past year, and now that the XYZZYs are coming up, it seems like a very good idea to take a poll of all the games from last year people would like to see nominated. The management has asked...

See all polls with votes for this game




This is version 19 of this page, edited by JTN on 2 December 2022 at 3:14am. - View Update History - Edit This Page - Add a News Item - Delete This Page