A semi-turnbased RPG in the vein of some of Final Fantasy's more recent ATB systems such as in XIII. The player is a customised character, but within the idea of a solitary, very resourceful warrior who tries to overcome impossible odds by using everything down to the tiniest resource to win.The setting is some sort of wasteland, most like Shadow of the Colossus's deserted plains after a series of natural and unnatural disasters shattered the earth and splintered the terrain into pieces. Twisted creatures from these fallouts roam the land, and with survivors few and far between, the warrior has taken it upon themself to be the single hand to make the area safe again.
Similar to Colossus, the main focus is boss battles, but there are still smaller enemies to supplement as it's not primarily about battling bosses but rather collecting and converting resources in preparation for those battles, then the boss battles, where the player can use everything they've prepared to attempt to succeed against far more powerful opponents.
As an example, the player has defeated the previous boss, and sees that the next fragment of earth is charred and the sky is dark. They decide the next zone is fire-based, look through the books they've collected along the way - books of alchemy, first aid, leatherworking, and so on - and see the alchemy book has a recipe for a potion of resist fire, and the leatherworking book has an antifire cape recipe in it. They backtrack to the last wasteland merchant to buy some empty phials and some thread, then hunt down imps for their leather and ashes, as well as some fireslimes for their fiery ooze. They combine the ooze with the ashes and water to make a potion of resist fire, and use the potion in combination with some imp leather and the thread to make an antifire cape, then make some more resist fire potions. They combine linen cloth with ground-up blasting powder from mining and use more thread for a wick to make some stun grenades, as they've been doing so far, then set off after selling their boots and buying some better ones from the merchant with the rest of their gold.
Defeating the boss of an area will clear it of many of the monsters and the rest will be easily avoidable when passing through, making it much safer, but the monsters are still good for experience and ingredients until you defeat the boss.
The twist to the game, and the reason for its name, is that remnants of the deceased linger where they died, as restless as the destroyed earth they walk on. They continually re-enact the scenes leading up to their deaths, like a spectral projection from the past into the present. These are sometimes contextual clues to warn the player when they get near hazardous terrain, to fill in the story or atmosphere such as seeing a group falling after a natural bridge collapsed when the player comes up to its remains, and so on. But the most important reason for their being there is during the boss battles. The remnants will phase in and out of the player's fight as though battling alongside the player, but without being aware of the player's presence - they're fighting the boss in the past, and as they die to it you can see where they went wrong and learn from their mistakes during your own battle. The fire boss might curl up, ready to counterattack the player with a massive attack if they swing at it, but if the player waits just a second they can see someone in the past trying exactly that and being incinerated, so the player might instead choose to throw their stun grenade to draw it out, then attack, and so on.
The game is mainly a spectacle strategy, and the reward for playing is the scenery and vistas, as well as seeing all the different bosses and figuring out how to defeat each one, and finding as many uses as possible for everything around the player. It would be a game for people who enjoy min/maxing, roaming vast landscapes, analysing everything and theorising about what might be possible, and thinking outside the box when it comes to fighting powerful bosses.
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Image: http://www.newgrounds.com/art/view/keepwalking/frozen-desert
A first-person stealth game where you play as a person who can eject their eyes from their head at will and roll them around independently of the body. The person is a kleptomaniac, and uses this ability to steal objects they get the sudden urge to have. The game takes place in a small town, with a variety of houses, shops, and services, and lots and lots of objects. You are put into this town at the game's start and after a few minutes of wandering around, you will get the urge to have a specific item, such as a blue shirt or a specific phone charger, and a countdown will begin - your mania meter, which causes you to become more twitchy and have less time to steal the next item with every failed time limit.
To retrieve an item, you first need to think of a likely place for it to be. If it's an umbrella, for example, you might find one propped up on the inside of someone's door or at an outdoor supplies shop. The next step is to find a way in, using means that an ordinary civilian would have, although breaking anything that makes noise could give you away and you also have a great fondness for things being neat, so shattering a window or entering through a messy room will reduce your time left as you lose your cool at the mess. This is where your eyeballs come in - you can pop one out and open a splitscreen, and while your body is working its way around the house the eye can roll in the other direction to find a way in more quickly or watch for bystanders while you sneak into a building. You can release the second eye, but it will take over your body's half of the screen and you can no longer see from its point of view; you would need to look at it with an eye while moving it so you can see where you're going, as bumping into a wall may of course alert the residents.
The eyes can also be rolled around the floors of the house to check for people, although hazards exist. Factors like a wet floor will make the eye slippery, making control difficult. Housecats and other dangers may pursue or attempt to eat a rolling eye, and if it's stepped on, the eye is lost. Moving your body accurately is also more difficult with each eye you dislodge, since your view is divided with different points of view. The game ends when you run out of time, and with each item you managed to steal in the time you stole it, your score is added up and saved.
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Image: http://gawker.com/5640229/the-definitive-guide-to-...
A game about a child/young teen and a giant robot in a ruined mech mesa world. Played from a third person point of view similar to The Last Guardian where you switch control between the child and the robot S.A.M, with the other character being AI-controlled while you play as one. The child will be more cautious and wait for the robot to do things or give hints on where to go while AI-controlled, and the robot will try to move into positions where it can watch over the child or stay put while AI-controlled.
You start in an abandoned skyscraper with S.A.M waiting next to it, and from there must jump/climb and use S.A.M to clear the way to the window so you can climb onto it. From there you can steer S.A.M around and interact with features and landmarks - clearing the way, demolishing, or other similar functions - but each of these actions use up energy, and the only way to recharge S.A.M is to gently drop the child onto the street or into a building so they can run around on foot and look for power sources. Being a tech head, the child is capable of using their tools to sap power from anywhere electricity might be found - powerlines, plugs, so on - and store it in the portable battery in their backpack. Through radio comms you can order S.A.M around the building to defend it from threats - namely, other giant robots like S.A.M. These are the reason for all the ruin, although you managed to reprogram one of the biggest fallen ones you'd found and turn it into S.A.M, capable of fighting off most of the other robots.
Just as you need S.A.M to defend the child while they wander around the streets and buildings, you need the child to be collecting energy to recharge S.A.M so that it doesn't get too weak and collapse, which would require a full battery to bring back online again. The end goal is to find a way out of the city with S.A.M and to a safe zone that was advertised on the radio on Day 1 of the fallout using S.A.M's inbuilt satellite map, while collecting energy, managing two characters in tandem, and fighting giant robots along the way.
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Image: S.A.M by Richard Marazano and Shang Xiao
A game where you're in a populated city where a riot has broken out and all the vehicles of the confused people trying to escape has caused heavy traffic jams so nobody can really go anywhere anymore. At the same time, the riot is still happening, so people are throwing area-of-effect molotovs around and looting buildings and cars, causing general chaos on a wide scale and making things inconvenient. The game starts with a short series of images showing that you were at home doing chores and watching the news when you saw the riots and the bridges out of the city jammed with traffic, and you decided you have to find a way out and ran to your car, as most other people did.
You start on your driveway, standing next to your car. The camera is a bird's-eye view, and you can walk/run omnidirectionally with the camera centered on you, enter vehicles and drive them if possible similar to running, vault over/under obstacles, and attempt to "use" - talking to a person, wedging a door open, using a radio, and so on.
The goal is to drive/walk/run/climb/crawl around the city, avoiding roadblocks and traffic jams and dodging the chaos, trying to find a way out of the city. You will probably have to abandon your car at some point, but you can hopefully find another one if luck smiles on you - not that you'll be able to get far much of the time in a vehicle.
The hazards and paths are randomly generated, but there will always be at least two or three ways out of the city. This can change over time, but there will always be at least two at any time, even if you get blocked off on one side of the city. Avoid the choking smoke, rioting populace, crowd control teams, and veering traffic/news vans to find your freedom from the carnage, or revel in it and throw a few molotovs at riot squads yourself.
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Image: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:New_York_City_Gridlock.jpg
A game where you inhabit people at random and, from the moment you do, you start to fade away from the world, losing memories and your sense of self. You start as a different person each time, and will be able to look around the place they were in when you inhabited them, such as their living room, office cubicle, or apartment. Examining objects familiar to the person will increase your sense of self, slowing your decay, and starting in the living room would be a lot easier than starting in a bathroom or on a train. Once you have examined an object, its reminding value is gone, and you will have to find more objects that belong to the person to stay existing. You can also talk to people who know you, and each subject will help keep you longer, but if you fade away too much they will forget you existed and you will not be able to talk to them. Photographs and teddy bears and other vivid things like that will help you more than a pen or other normal objects, and you can use phones or computers to access files relating to you as well, as long as you're still existing enough to use them. Things that have bad memories attached to them, like a rusty kitchen knife or a certain news station or a friend's goodbye letter will bring you sharply back into the world, but will also increase the speed of your fading as your person's mind loses their will to continue. Eventually you will run out of things to keep you here and will fade away forever, returning to the empty white title screen where you can choose to start over with a different person if you want to try again. A reason to keep restarting, apart from drifting through the lives of different people each time, would be to see the world in the background piece by piece and try to understand why the disappearing is happening, although it will never be completely said why...
Image: http://mindyveissid.photoshelter.com/image/I0000HiaCd7KnhcU
A exploration game where you travel around a regular city as a regular human being.. with just two differences. The city has an extremely high mortality rate... and you have the ability to stop and start time.
As you walk around the city, situations will unfold that place people's lives in danger. There is no "goal" or "objective" to the game or levels to complete, and if you don't care to get involved, this is as complex as the game will be. But this is a game of choice, and a game of chance.
As you are able to stop time, you may use it to interfere with the uninterrupted flow of the city, and pause to give yourself enough time to change the situation so that people don't die. There's only one problem: although you can pause time for as long as you want, and resume it whenever you want, you can't rewind at all. If someone does die, they're gone forever.
This is a game of harsh choices, and it's unlikely that everyone will survive as mistakes can be made that will cost lives. You might see someone standing on a rooftop and pause time to get up there and resume to try to talk them out of it, but in the time spent saving them, the person passing right across the street you were on just before dies as a result of a nearby armed robbery gone wrong. And it turns out the person on the rooftop wasn't going to jump after all... at least not for a few minutes. That would have been enough time to save the passerby on the street, and then get up to the roof afterwards before the jump happened.
So you may restart the game. And this time you know better, so you push the passerby out of the way of the robber's stray bullets, and then you get up to the roof. But the direction you pushed the passerby in was towards another civilian, and it turns out the passerby was a drug dealer and the civilian was armed and craving. Now the civilian is dead from the dealer's self defense.
You should have pushed them the other way.
If you had played it out flawlessly, if you had known the perfect golden sequence of events, you could have been able to save everyone. But there was no way you were supposed to know what was going to happen. How could you have? It wasn't your fault. You can't keep everyone alive by yourself, after all. But will you try anyway? Or just watch it all play out?
Every minute is priceless in this city.. and some people are just out of time.
Image: "Gen's Stage" - Street Fighter Alpha 2 (Capcom 1996)
