I LOVE YOU, ALIVE GIRL

In the nightmare future of 2026, the last remaining avenue for communication out of Lockdown City is in reviews of online products. If you want to reach your lover in the Outlands, you’ll need to hide your messages in reviews of products - from sites like Amazon and Ebay - you’ve never owned.

I LOVE YOU, ALIVE GIRL is a cyberpunk epistolary game. You play by writing internet product reviews that contain coded messages to your partner in the Outlands. Metaphor, allusion, and subtext are your palette, as the Algorithm that swallows inappropriate messages isn’t subtle enough to detect them.

YOUR PURCHASE INCLUDES: A two-page (or one-page, double-sided) pdf of instructions (see image) plus a one-page "extras" pdf that includes four game variants and an appendix. (Note to Hibernation Games backers: This is the same amount of content that's in the zine, it's just organized a little differently.)

ILU ALIVE GIRL was originally created for the Hibernation Games anthology of solo journaling games, edited by Lucian Kahn, where you can find it alongside games by four other incredible authors.

Big thanks to my playtesters: Amber (@TheSpaceJamber), Ansifael F, Ben Gemmel, Sara Jeffers, Cecilie K, Jams Mastodon, Giuseppe Navarria, Sally Tamarkin (@sallyt) and Birds Eye View Entertainment.

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What is Cyberpunk Epistolary?

What is cyberpunk? A collection of aesthetics from the 80s, when westerners were scared Japan would control the technological future? Nuh-uh. Cyberpunk is about how people on the margins hijack, subvert and appropriate the technologies that are used to control us in order to promote and express our own agendas. It is finding ways to exist in the crevices and voids of the machine that is grinding us to dust; to stow away onboard the engine and ride it closer to somewhere safe.

In I LOVE YOU, ALIVE GIRL, you write messages of love and perseverance, but you must hide them in the language of the commercial machine that would (and may yet still) kill all love. And hope it doesn’t notice too soon.