With Those We Love Alive

• Engine — Twine • Released — October 2014 • Genre — Interactive fiction • Composer — Brenda Neotenomie • Modes — Single-player • Developer — Porpentine

The game was created using Twine. It uses pink text to navigate through the story and purple text to change a word within a particular node of the story. Readers put in information at the start of the story, which will change the text slightly. During certain points of the story, the player is asked to draw sigils on their skin. By the end of the game, the reader is left with a representation of their choices on their own body.

With Those We Love Alive takes place in a world that is both repugnant and beautiful with colorful language describing the twisted landscape and events of the world. It takes place in a restrictive society that gives you no choice but to obey and nowhere to escape. The story begins with the Skull Empress guiding you to her palace to craft many artifacts for her, but between main events, you are allowed to explore the palace and surrounding areas to be greeted with vivid descriptions of this fantasy world. The descriptions of these locations start becoming repetitive after subsequent visits leading some players to continually sleep to advance to the next errand the Skull Empress would have you complete. Adding to an overall sense of dread, "dead people" start to appear in random locations conveyed through blunt text, alluding to the fact that death is common or an expected aspect of day to day life. These aforementioned dead people are only ever acknowledged by the main character which may allude to the fact they are hallucinations, but whether or not they actually are is left uncertain. The culmination of the story explores resistance against the oppressive and escape into a future controlled by yourself, however uncertain. After your childhood friend arrives at the palace, you flee together with their future left uncertain.

Released in October 2014, With Those We Love Alive was created by Porpentine Charity Heartscape and scored by Brenda Neotenomie. It has been released in English and Hungarian. In a statement for Electronic Literature Organization's Electronic Literature Collection, Porpentine stated that they were influenced by "mob violence, trash struggle, C-PTSD, and child abuse". Porpentine thought of the various elements in With Those We Love Alive over a long period of time, but once they began work on the game they completed it in only a few weeks. They stated that their decision to have people draw sigils on themselves was due to their frustration with how sleek digital works are, and that wanted to have people "feel something" by bridging the digital and physical. After the game's release, hundreds of people posted images of the sigils they drew. Porpentine described the experience of having people draw on themselves because of them as overwhelming and intimate. They noted later that most chose to draw on their arm, both for its convenience and expressiveness, but they appreciated when people drew across the rest of their body. With Those We Love Alive title likely comes from a quatrain in the Bhagavad Gita:

Arts scholar Claudia Costa Pederson views With Those We Love Alive as an allegory to games communities, particularly of how they can form both oppressive and creative relationships. Pederson sees the relationship between Porpentine and the player via the sigils as one such creative relationship.

Video game scholar Stephanie Harkin and journalist Alice O'Connor note that, while the fantastical world initially encourages players to explore, once you explore everything you are left alone and waiting. The player will then build a routine of sleeping to advance time, only acting when things are demanded of them. Harkin compares this effect of this routine to that of the game Night in the Woods, and believes the incentivisation for players to stay in bed is evocative of depression.