Saving Sarah.
A game about a writer, a room, fourteen days of lockdown, and how a person keeps herself company. Built to run in a browser.
Four hours of her attention a day. Every hour you don’t spend on her goes to the TV, and the number on the screen goes up.
Tap something. Anything.
The window, the kitchen, the roof door, the TV, the desk, the bed, the books, the lamp. Eleven things in one room, and a day that spends itself whether or not you choose.
The TV is the villain.
Hours you don’t spend on her, she spends on the news. The number on the screen goes up every day. Turning it off is the first real decision in the game.
The room is a game.
The mirror is a person.
Sarah in the room is a flat cartoon — small, movable, a piece you can spend. Sarah in the mirror is a posterised photograph in six luminance bands. Same woman, two registers, and the switch is the whole point: what you play with, and who is actually in there.
Flat fills. Ink outline, stroke-then-fill. Rounded corners. No gradients, anywhere.
Fourteen days. You spend her hours.
Each day gives you four hours of Sarah’s attention and nothing else. Hours you don’t spend, the TV takes. There is no winning screen — only the difference between a woman who comes out of two weeks awake and one who comes out merely intact.
Food, sleep, moving her body. Runs down whether you use it or not. Cheap to protect, expensive to recover.
The TV takes it. The roof gives it back. So does Suha at 3am, most of the time.
The one that actually decides the ending. Pages written, a plant kept alive, someone called back — small things, every day.
Open the curtains. Brush her teeth. Wash her face. The unglamorous maintenance of being a person.
Cook, or don’t. Order in, or don’t. The bank goes down either way.
Climb to the roof for the sky, the kite, the uncle who waves back like he means it.
Answer Suha, or leave her on read at 3am in Toronto.
Write. Chapter nine has a pulse, finally. Or it doesn’t, because you spent the hours elsewhere.
Turn the TV off and put the kettle on. It will come back on tomorrow.
A few minutes plays one in-game day. Twenty-five to forty gets you through a full fortnight to an ending. It runs in a browser — nothing to install, no account, no score to post anywhere.
Play it once quickly and you will get one ending. Play it deliberately and you will notice the game is not asking you to fix her. It is asking what you think a day is for.
Nobody was going to make a game about a woman alone in a room.
So it gets made here. Fourteen days, four hours, and a set of small choices that decide whether she comes out of it awake or just intact. Built out of necessity, like everything else in this studio.
Saving Sarah · a Poetica Studio project
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