Save the Date! has you time and again fail to save your girlfriend’s life

We’ve all had those days where we’ve said or done the wrong thing and it’s spiralled out of control, and you wish you could go back and give it another go, see how events would have changed if you’d acted differently. Many games with branching storylines offer the opportunity to restart and try all the different approaches to a situation before committing to one.

Well, Save the Date! is all about those instances. You’re trying to get through a romantic evening without your date dying. It seems that every possible choice leads off to their demise, and there’s a lot of branches to choose from.

But it’s a lot more than simply a case of running through a list of each and every conversation option.

Your first playthrough is going to be a little difficult to stomach. You wake up to a ringing phone, your date for the night, Felicia, is wanting to know where you want to go for a meal. This spawns a list of options, whichever one you pick she’ll go along with. Yes, her boundless enthusiasm for your choices is uncomfortable but fight through that because this first playthrough is the set up.

Wherever you end up going, whatever you end up eating, whatever seat you choose in the restaurant, Felicia, through no fault of your own, will die.

So, we start again. If you go through the same options as before you’ll find now there is a new option when you hit the point that previously led to Felicia’s death, an option that will allow you to dodge her demise. In my case I had her move two steps to the left on the balcony moments before the stone floor gave way (which previously led to her drowning). Of course, now she wants to know how you knew this, so I told her that we were in a video game and that I’d reloaded my save.

This is where Save the Date! starts to get good. The options that start spinning out as you play the game over and over become increasingly surreal, Felicia stops being the optimistic foil that she is in the first playthrough and starts working with you to keep her alive. The conversation options reflected those I genuinely wanted to explore, too.

I don’t want to spoil and more of the game for you so go download a copy from here.