This is the one hundred ninety-eighth entry in the Scratching That Itch series, wherein I randomly select and write about one of the 1741 games and game-related things included in the itch.io Bundle for Racial Justice and Equality. The Bundle raised $8,149,829.66 split evenly between the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund and Community Bail Fund, but don’t worry if you missed it. There are plenty of ways you can help support the vital cause of racial justice; try here for a start. Lastly, as always, you may click on images to view larger versions.
Our one hundred ninety-eighth random selection from the itch.io Bundle for Racial Justice and Equality is asking us difficult questions. It’s Our Love Can’t Save The World, by Mitch Schiwal, and its tagline in the bundle reads:
2-Player RPG where you can save either your relationship or the world.
That… actually doesn’t seem like a particularly difficult choice.
Mitch Schiwal’s work has appeared in Scratching That Itch before: random selection number 110 was The Reaper’s Almanac, a letter-writing game about life and death that Mitch designed. Like that game, Our Love Can’t Save The World is a two-player tabletop role-playing game, but this time it’s played together in the same room, and instead of letters it uses a standard deck of playing cards. But it’s still all about creating a story together, and in this case acting out scenes.
Players must first establish the nature of their failing relationship (which need not be romantic, but could be familial or even friendly if desired), and the nature of the world-ending threat they face. As the short 8-page PDF book (offered with light or dark themes) says, “These are of equal importance”. It’s up to players to decide which to save. The book states that the game doesn’t judge players on their choice, on how they decide to spend the limited time they have left. And it doesn’t! But I do.
I generally lack the motivation to recruit players and actually play tabletop entries (or any multiplayer games, for that matter) in this series, but in this case I was also turned off by the premise. The choice, as presented, doesn’t seem like a choice at all. To place one’s own desires over the lives of every other person is the height of selfishness. What about their relationships? Are they not worth saving? Their relationships might not even be falling apart, like the players’ relationship is! I sort of get what what Our Love Can’t Save The World is going for, in that the pain of a relationship ending can be quite intense indeed, and yes, I have experienced it myself. But I’ve also come to realize that if a relationship is failing, there’s often a good reason, and maybe it’s better for it to end. Especially if doing so means saving the entire world.
I mentioned the premise of Our Love Can’t Save The World to my partner, who pointed out that most people — arguably — prioritize their own selfish ends in their everyday lives rather than taking action to improve the world. Which, I must admit, is a great point. But I think a big reason for that is the dauntingly huge task of improving the world. What can a single person do against climate change, against capitalism, against wars and systemic oppression? They can engage others in their communities, organize (or join existing organizations), start conversations, work for political action. But those are big tasks, and meaningful change requires collective effort and a lot of work. It’s a lot easier to, say, buy a new videogame or watch a funny TV series, and make oneself feel better for a while.
Our Love Can’t Save The World doesn’t specify what the world-ending threat is, but it does require that the two player characters have a hope of stopping it on their own. They are in, it would seem, a unique position to stop the apocalypse. So it’s not just complacency that would prevent players from choosing to do so, but the explicit opposition to the goal of saving their relationship. This choice remains at the core of the game, and I simply cannot condone letting the world die.
In practice, of course, players may not have that much choice. The deck of cards that guides play dictates whether scenes pertain to the global threat (black suits) or to their relationship (red suits). Players cannot see each other’s hands of cards, nor give any hint as to what they’re holding, so there’s a lot of guesswork as they alternate playing a card to initiate a scene, and hope that their partner has a higher card of the same suit color in order to successfully navigate the scene. There’s not much guidance for how to act out these scenes, but there is a discussion of safety, including the use of the X-card as well as the concept of “lines” and “veils” to denote hard and soft limits on topics that might arise during scenes. Players will want to be comfortable acting out scenes together before choosing to play, however, as there’s no advice for the actual acting here.
The deck of cards also acts as a timer, where drawing one of the two jokers (placed in the deck during setup) means that either the relationship or the world is past the point of saving. Players can choose to end the game before this, but they’ll need to be confident that they’ve accumulated enough points in either red or black suits to save their relationship or the world. It is technically possible, but very difficult, to save both. I suspect a more likely outcome is drawing a joker, as players push their luck as they try to earn enough points for a positive outcome. Since players’ hands are random, and there are dire consequences for completely running out of one suit color, players may just end up going for whatever scenes they think they can pass successfully, rather than explicitly picking their relationship or the world. This feels more real, in that sometimes there’s no way to win, no matter how hard you try. But I worry that it might undercut the choice that’s supposed to be central to the game.
Then again, undercutting that choice makes the game more interesting to me. A game about two people trying to save the world while their relationship falls apart would make for a nice tension if the two things were intertwined. I assume the player characters in Our Love Can’t Save the World are working together to avert the apocalypse, but if their relationship is failing, how well can they do their work? I’m imagining a variant where spending all of one’s time trying to save the world is doomed to fail simply because the two characters can’t get along. But spend too much time patching up the relationship and it will be too late to save the world. Sadly, as written, the rules treat the two as completely separate. Any connection between them is left up to the players as they act out their scenes.
This one isn’t for me, but others might enjoy getting to act out an apocalyptic scenario together. If that’s you, but you missed it in the bundle, Our Love Can’t Save the World is sold for any price you with to pay, including free.
That’s 198 down, and only 1543 to go!
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