When I played Save the Date way back during fifth week, I was under the impression that this game was little more than a dating simulator with no win state. Somehow, I never clicked on the “I reloaded from a saved game” option, and I didn’t make it to class that week, so I never even realized that there was a massive chunk of the game I was totally missing. I never got further into the meta-conversation with Felicia than telling her the number she’s thinking of is 7.533. I just got frustrated and assumed that this was the point of the game: to frustrate with the lack of a satisfying ending. But clearly, I was wrong. I think what is funniest about this is that my group’s final project ended up going in the direction of a time-loop metagame, which is extremely similar to Save the Date, and I didn’t even realize it until now. So, I guess my question now is, what makes these two games, Save the Date and Finish Your Essay, different?
Both of these games are time loops. However, the time loops actually work rather differently. In Save the Date, by the end of your first date, you know something strange is happening. Meanwhile, in Finish Your Essay, it is not apparent that there is something out of the ordinary going on until you wake up the next day. In this situation, the time loop itself is seen as the problem, the obstacle to overcome, but in Save the Date, while the time-looping is frustrating to some extent, the problem lies really with Felicia’s death. The goal of Save the Date seems to be less so about breaking the time loop and more about saving the life of Felicia. From the beginning, Finish Your Essay seems to be about solving your own problem and saving yourself from the misery of a never-ending final project, while Save the Date seems to be about helping somebody else. I think this creates a completely different initial mood between the two games. In one, you the character are expected to be selfless from the beginning, while in the other, you are allowed to be self-serving, at least initially.
I think another key difference between the two games is how meta-ness emerges. In Save the Date, the meta-conversation occurs between two characters in the game: Felicia and the player’s avatar—presumably some man we know nothing about. On the other hand, the meta-conversation in Finish Your Essay is meant to be between the player and the avatar. By the end, it becomes clear that there is a separation between you and Brad. You are not Brad. You are you, and you’re just helping Brad out. But in Save the Date, this is not the case. As the meta-conversation emerges, I think the border between you, the player, and the character you are playing becomes less and less clear. Are you, the player, talking to Felicia through some sort of simulation? Are you supposed to imagine yourself as the character, existing only within that world but somehow knowing this is a game? Brad may be an arbitrary, blank-slate, UChicago, underclassman, but really, we know nothing about the character you play in Save the Date, which strikes me as odd and leads me to believe that in this game, the character is you.
