Save the Date is a game about dissatisfaction. No matter what the player tries, they can’t manage to achieve a “good” ending. Yes, there are technically some endings where everything ends happily, but even then they feel hollow. The game finally ends when the player accepts failure and stops subjecting Felicia to increasingly comical deaths. But why is the game so unsatisfying?
There are uncountable books and movies where the main characters fail to achieve their goals or meet otherwise tragic ends, but many of these are amazing, and we feel satisfied when they end— something that Felicia even tries to tell the player. However, when it comes to video games we feel robbed of satisfaction.
I think that part of this is a product of the main gameplay loop we have come to expect from playing other games. Whether it’s a puzzle game, rpg, or FPS, players encounter obstacles where they fail over and over until, through growth in skills or knowledge, they succeed. This makes perfect sense, most forms of games necessitate some sort of challenge, winning isn’t satisfying unless we have overcome something along the way. But in Save the Date, players get all of the buildup, but the buildup never brings us to a real victory state. The tension and player knowledge grows to what feels like a critical point and then… nothing.
This feeling of overcoming obstacles also seems to relate to gaming as power fantasy. Games are often used as an escape into a world where the player has more agency or control over their environment. There are obvious exceptions, many horror games restrict player actions to running and hiding, but we can see that the goals of these games when it comes to player experience are very different. The assumption built in to other games like Save the Date is that player choice matters to the outcome, and on a bigger scale the assumption that we have power in the world of video games. By subverting both of these, Save the Date is able to leave players more unsatisfied than a book or movie which might end in the same way.
I just wanted to leave a comment saying that I absolutely hate dissatisfying endings. That being said, this post serves as an important reminder that these bad endings are exactly what the creators wanted. Whether that makes it sting more or less when it actually happens, I can’t really say. I really enjoyed reading this post!
I’m curious about your point saying how it feels worse to get a dissatisfying ending in a video game because of player agency. In other media, we are the helpless audience, and in a video game we create the dissatisfying end. I am not sure if I agree or disagree. I think that in a video game like a say a movie, we feel trapped like the video game designer didn’t offer a satisfying ending. I think this experience is a different dissatisfaction, but I’m not sure if it is worse.