Hey PeterPiers, while don't disagree with any of what you've written here, unfortunately the answer to your question is rather plain and unexciting. Not being able to save wasn't a design choice for this game, I made this game eight-odd years ago and did not know how to make a save function; I was still learning AGS. The three games I did prior to this one used a different template that added the function automatically. Anyway, suffice to say, all of the old games under the 'classics' header on my page are quite mechanically unsound in many ways.
Thanks for the reply, I must say I'm surprised; I thought the save function in AGS was always present, and if you didn't specifically disallow its F5 shortcut it would still be there. I re-downloaded AGS and I see that the empty game template doesn't include that, what a strange choice. Not a good one, I'm afraid. I'd thought you'd specifically gone there and removed the function.
Well, things are quite unclear when we're beginners, so whatever happened, happened, and that's the end of it. Thank you very much for the clarification.