Interaction/emotional strategy game where you live the life of a shutaway person with a broken computer who has forgotten how to connect to others from being alone. You have recently been pushed to apply for a job, and will be working with and around people for the first time in recent memory. You hate attention, and as a result have found that the easiest solution is to do what everyone does and pretend to be fine. The game is played over a span of days which start when you wake up in the morning, and how you prepare for work will influence how relaxed or stressed you are from how piercing your alarm is to how stale the cereal is to whether you accidentally bump into walls or break cups or plates while still sleepy. It starts at a rough value depending on how well you slept - usually terribly at day one - and decreases when faced with negative stimuli like harsh noises or social phobias.
At work, the tasks are usually away from people and are simple tasks such as stacking shelves or wiping tables, but coworkers and customers may come and talk to you from time to time and you will have to navigate dialogue and maintain your body language/composure using comfort objects or escape tactics to keep stress down so they don't guess anything is wrong. The higher your stress the harder this will be, and people wondering is a likely occurrence in the first week or two if things don't improve. Other random events include day to day trials such as laundry days, extra responsibilities, the chance of picking up a stray pet and having to feed it, being mugged after a late shift, and even tripping over the sidewalk and not being able to afford the health insurance until you heal.
With the money you earn, you can afford things like a better mattress, medication for asthma and sleeping, cleaning clothes more often, new music, confectionary treats, and other things for general hygiene and mental health that will reduce the effect stress has and make it easier to fool people into thinking you're okay. If someone suspects something and tries to move closer, though, your stress will ramp up for as long as they're focused on you and the effects of relaxation will have less of an impact the longer it goes on, all the way to zero. If stress hits maximum at any time, you will have a breakdown - if anyone sees you during this you will be found out and referred to a therapist, which will use up any money you would have put towards repairing your computer and result in a failure state.
The aim of the game is to work shift for as long as it takes to afford a repaired or new computer - depending on how many days played, more parts will be needed as your computer breaks down - without being found out in the meantime so that you can fix it in as few days as possible and go back to how you were living before you had to get the job.
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Picture: Dream Life by ImaginarySmile on DeviantArt http://imaginarysmile.deviantart.com/art/Dream-Lif...
An atmospheric 3D walking game where you have to get from point A to point B, with contextual clues such as arrows drawn on walls, lighting cues, and trails of things on the ground that lead where you need to go. You walk along the route's twists and turns featuring alternate pathways, finding your way to the goal inside a generous time limit.
The twist is that your camera isn't from your point of view. You can't see from third person in the sense that the camera follows behind you, you can't see from the first person. You can only see yourself from the point of view of people who are currently looking at you, with the screen shuffling itself as different people - up to a few at once - look at you from different angles on the streets. Once someone stops looking at you, that part of your vision disappears, so you have to keep positioning yourself in such a way that at least one person is always looking at you. If nobody is, you start to rapidly dissolve into a vapour, and can only slowly come back together while being looked at.
Your controls stay true to your character, meaning if someone is looking at you from a mirror angle, forwards will be backwards and backwards will be forwards. People won't really react to you while looking at you, instead looking straight through you as though you're not there, so you can't act strangely to attract attention - you have to constantly be putting yourself in people's line of sight while reading the world around you to figure out where to go.
If you manage to make it to the goal without dispersing, you unlock the next level. If not, the game lets you retry, and gradually adds a person or two more to make it slightly easier, or gives alternate, shorter routes.
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A modern day 3D survival/slight horror game in the vein of LSD: Dream Emulator where you fell asleep and when you wake up, everybody has the head of a goldfish and is acting and talking strange, so you can't tell who's who and they always have the same facial expression no matter what they're thinking or doing. When you wake up into this, you somehow seem to catch the attention of just about everybody regardless of where they are and they will most likely have a plan for reacting to you if you talk to them. Some will hunt you down. Do they mean you harm or help? No way of telling. You could try reading their facial expression, but it never changes...
--
The aim is to survive for as long as possible in this strange world with your human face intact. Many might have plans of killing you in one way or another, whether that be through murder or something more horrific such as sedating you into an illegal fight pit or blackmailing you into assassinating someone else with nothing but a fishing knife. The means will tend to be as surreal as the premise, with situations straight out of a thriller. Some will not do this and will actually mean to save you from the others who are hunting you, but they nonetheless seem shifty because they have a goldfish for a head and that makes it hard to tell if they're trying to trick you like the others. Some will be genuinely indifferent to you, although still warrant paranoia since they might be trying to avoid being noticed, and still others may be on a mission to remove your human face and put a normal-sized goldfish there instead as the next best thing, of course ending your life.
The game is in first person and you can walk around, run distances, interact with everyday objects like keys or pay phones, talk to people, elbow strike as a way to break things open or defend yourself, and sleep, which you have to do every now and then with the drawback that so many people know where you are and being alone and asleep is a fantastic way to end up captured. The game has a lot in common with titles such as DayZ when it comes to choosing who to trust - going with nobody will leave you wide open, but going with the wrong person or people will leave you dead, and it seems everybody is lining up to do something with/to you.
Who do you trust when everyone has a goldfish for a head?
==
Image: http://www.dhgate.com/product/goldfish-head-mask-c...
A tower defense-like game where you play as a race of animate tongs who live in a kitchen, but it's being invaded by the attacking race of holed ladles and the tongs need to defend it to keep their home. The player has access to their tong defenders at any given time, to drag them to a different position, change direction, and so on. The player also has time at the start to drag furniture and objects around to make it harder for the ladles to reach and attack the tongs, but different objects weigh differently so dragging a chair fifty centimeters would take the same time as making a little barricade out of empty cartons, for example. The player can still do this at any time, but directing the tongs is far more time-efficient so it's not ideal once an attack has started.
The ladles approach from any side of the kitchen that's left open, which is inevitably at least a couple of sides, or one really big gap, or lots of little chokepoints. The ladles have holes in them, and to attack them you deploy boxes of pellets around the kitchen next to tongs. There are different sized pellets, and the ladles have different sized holes in their faces, so smaller pellets have more of a chance of hitting ladles with finer holes and larger pellets are ideal for taking down ladles with big holes that might cause smaller pellets to miss, but smaller pellets are more common. Hitting a ladle with a pellet will knock it back or down depending on the size, and if the pellet is just the right size that it gets stuck in one of the holes they'll be slowed down by each pellet until they fall over.
The pellets are limited, and can be bought with credits given at the start of the game and awarded when a ladle is downed. They can also be empowered with special effects at the cost of credits - pellets that split into smaller pellets, pellets that coalesce into larger pellets midflight, pellets that explode for splash impact, pellets that launch like a mortar and come down delayed, but powerful, and even pellets that temporarily freeze and warp the struck ladle to an alternate dimension for a while.
If the ladles get close to the tongs, they will start whacking them with their ladle heads. Do not let this happen! The tongs are valuable and cannot be replaced. The game ends when either the ladles run out of reinforcements, or the player runs out of tongs.
==
Image: http://indoornice.com/images/img-10/kitchen-design-with-island-layout-best-design-ideas-3.jpg
A team-based, most likely top-down sportlike game where the objective is something sportsy like kicking a ball through one side of the field or putting it through a hoop to score more sports points than the other team's sports, but half of each team is AI-controlled and nobody has any names, making it difficult to identify who's a player and who's a bot. What everyone does have is the ability to possess another character aside from themselves and control both at the same time via separate ends of the keyboard, which would be done to intercept positions, coordinate between two characters more effectively, imbalance the team numbers in your favour, and so on. Teams would be small - 4 to 8 or 6 to 10 - and controls would be simple to accomodate this, but the twist is that if you attempt to possess a human player, the two of you swap places and teams, meaning you might now be on the losing team - so losing team players are more likely to be possession-happy than the winning ones, at least until they swap roles. If someone possesses a bot you've already possessed, the control goes to them and your possession is locked out for a short time, making identifying player mannerisms and correctly guessing their controlled bot to be rewarding.The first person to get the most sports points in whatever sport the map is imitating wins, similar to real life sports, but with the souls of the damned wailing around the field and into players.
==
Image: http://sport.maths.org/content/charting-more-succe...
It's that game. You know the one. It's horrible in every way - the graphics look like they would run on a phone from ten years ago but it still halves your framerate, the sound quality constantly fluctuates from muffled studio to on-the-street recording, there are about three animations and none of them look any good, and the soundtrack could be recreated by an amateur orchestra in an earthquake.
And everyone's bought it.
"Oh, that? Um, it's not mine, it's on rental."
"Oh, it was a gift from my auntie. I haven't played it."
"Oh, it's my little brother's, not mine. It's one of his friends' copy."
Then why did it sell so much?
--
This "game" is an experiment in marketing, and is more or less designed to be as low quality as possible. From unfinished collision models and physics to bugs affecting the game constantly to terrible controls, everything about the game makes you want to forget about it as soon as possible while being annoying enough that you just can't. It also has really good marketing, the kind Sega employed against Nintendo to make Sonic a success. (Unrelated: WATCH_DOGS) The experiment part is by the company - they've watched trends in the gaming industry and have made it their mission to see how far this can go by making a game so bad people would be repulsed by it, but see if good enough marketing can save it. On estimation, it would be a modern military shooter set in a world of blocks, with crafting systems, a killstreak functionality, online DLC, DRM, survival elements, paid content, boring items, unfinished content, an "open beta" status, a "Z" at the end of the name, retro "indie fresh" pixel graphics, and everything else that's popular these days but done in a way that is so bad not even the rule of "so bad it's good" can save it from its monotony. There are posters for it everywhere though, and it does have really nice press...
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Image: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dwJ9BN8CWRs
A strategy RPG where you play as the final boss of some other hero/ine's quest, but in this game you do what final bosses do while waiting for the them to show up. As a final boss, you are very punctual about these sorts of things. Showing up to your own boss battle is extremely important; but you also have a list of chores to do in the meantime, such as razing a village for spare souls, setting up traps and platforms in your hideout, sending minions after the hero/ine, and hunting down rare artifacts and pieces of equipment to add to your loot table so the hero/ine has something nice to aim for when trying to kill you, which you want because you can only win the game by defeating them in the final fight.
The bulk of the game will be spent charging up to your final form by gathering souls, which is a boss's equivalent to the experience that heroes and heroines hoover up like discount candy these days. But you are a true old school final boss, and you are doing it the traditional way, which means gathering souls. With more souls, you achieve greater forms, at first starting as essentially a glorified minion and working your way up to supernatural overlord and eventually some sort of terrifying space demigod, as it so commonly happens to be.
But before all that happens, you start in your lair, which you can customise any time with an outfit of hazards as a safeguard against the hero/ine and any help they might bring - you can see whether they have a party with them at any time, along with their status. You want to whittle away the help, but leave the hero/ine still standing so you can have your final faceoff - it's not really defeating them otherwise. Accidentally killing the hero/ine at any point other than the final battle will of course result in a game over, and/or a return to checkpoint.
Leaving your lair, you can travel to local villages to raze them for souls, although they will start barricading against you and receiving soldiers after a few attacks, so this will stop being easy quite quickly. You can also hunt down legendary warriors who are in your journal/bingo book for their loot, which will make the hero/ine more likely to hurry up and get to you already because they want it, so it can be useful if you are ready for the final fight and want to entice the hero/ine, who will be otherwise wandering around taking generic quests from people and grinding on monsters most of the time.
You can at any time see the hero/ine's inventory, health, and stats, so you can decide whether or how many minions to send, how difficult to make the traps or whether to disarm some of them, and whether you should be collecting more souls to reach a form more powerful than the hero/ine currently is before the final battle arrives, as well as when to return to your lair so that you don't miss the battle.
Future expansion pack will allow you to custom-write your own final boss pre-battle speech, although it is unlikely the hero/ine will care much.
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Image is enemy "Demon God" from RPGmaker VX ACE by Enterbrain Software (2011) http://www.rpgmakerweb.com/
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-...
::Warning: Graphic content::
Not all that glitters is gold.
..
My name is Steris. I am a young adult. I enjoy superstition and trashy romance novels. I used to wait tables in a diner. I am currently dead.
These short sentences are all I can remember.
I was the subject of a mysterious group's mindless experiments. What they were supposed to test is not clear. How long I lay on the operating table under the flashes of busy scalpels I do not know. The only thing I remember is walking home from work after a late shift, then... nothing. Nothing at all.
When I came to, there was nobody around and the warehouse was in a state of disrepair. My body was twisted, mutilated from the repeated dissections. My mind was clouded. And my heart was stilled. But through all this, I now understand one thing. And that understanding seethes in me, burning brightly so it is all I need with which to see the world.
My name is Steris. And life is no longer sacred.
--
A reverse-horror/stealth game in a constant state of night where you play as Steris, an unliving human-turned-weapon whose morals and sense of humanity were stripped away as a result of macabre experiments performed on her body and mind for unknown reasons. Awakening in an abandoned warehouse on an operating table, the game moves in a 2.5D format using 3D graphics to create a third-person sense of winding alleyways and dark corners, with the player having an overall sideview and options to move in other directions.
Unlike other horror games where you run from a predator, you instead play as the predator, skulking around darkened militaristic streets. As a result of the strange experiments, your wrists end not in hands but in oversized surgical blades, razor sharp and waiting. The area is rife with all manner of targets, from home guard to hoodlums to ordinary civilians, each with a different face and story to tell. But you won't be talking to them. Your new body has a keen taste to blood, and every time you claim a new victim you receive flashes of their memories and feelings through absorbing it. You hope by doing this enough times that you may unlock secrets within yourself, as well as the adrenaline rush from fulfilling your new calling. Different people have different memories and skills, so while a policeman has knowledge of firearms and intimidation tactics, a shopkeeper would make a safer target while still giving a chance of uncovering something useful.
As for useful, looking at people's memories and thoughts can be nice. But what you are really after is a lead to the shadowy group who took your life and left you discarded on that table. You look forward to returning the favour. Your scalpel arms can deal quick, devastating flurries that quickly rip through armour, your hangman's rope can be used to yank victims closer, your pain suppression can be activated to withstand punishment, and your eye of fear paralyses your victim where they stand or scatters others far and wide. But your one drawback is that you have a limited reach on your attacks and are vulnerable to being outranged by targets with firearms. You will need to sneak or ambush your target, making use of the element of surprise to single out small numbers of victims - or even one at first - and prey on their memories. As you become better at what you do, you can follow the chain of memories - reviewable at any time - to pursue high-value targets that become clear and hunt down the shadowy group once and for all, as well as the mystery surrounding the experiments.
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Strategic turnbased RPG game with a focus on scavenging and crafting supplies where you are a ragged old warrior in a desolate, volcanic ashland. This medieval-fantasy land used to be green and idyllic, until the days of Ragnarok - the end times of legend - tore the land asunder and began a godly war the land would not recover from until the days of rebirth, far in the future. But you survived Ragnarok, hiding while the gods fell dead and thunder tore the sky apart. You used to be a King's prized warrior, before you broke away from the politics and formed a band of elite mercenaries, living off the rough. A few of these mercenaries survived with you - only to find the land barren of bounty and full of mutated, feral creatures, with remaining resources few and far between. As you clamber back to the earth's surface in the wake of the reckoning, you saw a twisted landscape where ash darkened the skies and fire seethed beneath the cracks.
--
Together with what is left of your group, you managed to fortify a base camp in the ruins of a small castle town. The wooden buildings were burned to cinders, but the stone structures still remained. Outside your camp, giant vermin and spiders crawl in the mountains, and the animate blood of the innocent still wanders the land, made restless by lives ended early. But others survived too - and many have become bandits or rogues, ambushing anyone they can find for supplies. You and your group have decided to fight for order in the wastes; battle monsters for experience and ingredients towards potions and new equipment, stock up your supplies back at base for the days ahead, then hunt down bandits and their leaders who would prey on the weak for scraps.
==
Screenshots taken using RPGMaker VX Ace by Enterbrain Software (2011) using Yanfly's Engine Script
http://www.rpgmakerweb.com/products/programs/rpg-m... / https://yanflychannel.wordpress.com/
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 an arcade floor, with flashing lights in the darkened room and people walking around and sitting at the rows of machines. You're not one of these people - you play as a coin in someone's pocket. When they reach into the pocket to get a quarter out for the arcade machines, you fall out, knocked by their fingers, and tumble to the ground. As you hit the floor, you bounce and start rolling to who knows where. But you're not too concerned about that, now that you're free. What you need to focus on now is rolling around between legs and chairs, avoiding the occasional foot's attempt to stop you in your path and using sweeping legs of walking or fidgeting people as speed boosts to kick your momentum further in the ways you want to go. You will slowly roll to a stop and start to wobble, so you need to use banks, centrifugal force, and moving objects to your advantage to keep your speed up while avoiding any attempts to grab you by gamers or deadstopping into a corner or wall. The aim is to roll around the arcade, finding ways up onto ledges to raise your altitude, and fall into a certain arcade machine highlighted in the arcade, different every time, so that you can be with your coin brethren and away from the prying fingers of humans. A simple arcade-style third person game in the style of titles such as Crazy Taxi and Re/Volt.
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Photo by Rob Sheridan http://www.rob-sheridan.com/tourist/tokyo/
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
This Is Fun is a game where you hold the stick to go forward until an enemy pops up, then you pull the trigger to shoot them. It's a good game. It's...
No, wait, let's try that one again.
This Is Fun is an exciting game of cat-and-mouse where you play as a world-weary desert soldier with a big gun and a bad attitude. You must fulfill your duty and gain honour on the battlefield by killing those insurgents...
Damnit.
There's got to be some way we can make this rubbish sound exciting. What do kids these days want? Achievements? Open world, perhaps? Dubstep, even?
Ah! Of course. Satire.
It's always cool if it's ironic.
--
This Is Fun is yet another satirical game made by an uninspired shoe and/or team of uninspired shoes at the world's biggest entertainment company. We aim to deliver a frustration-free batch of safe, profitable fun, approved by our leading council of cynical old businessmen. And by safe, we mean safe. We don't want the player to be unnecessarily frustrated, so to take that to its completely logical conclusion there will be no frustration or difficulty in this game at all. Bullets will be completely unable to deal more damage than your natural Wolverine regeneration unless there are a dozen enemies shooting you at once, and to circumvent this hazard we've capped the total amount of enemies spawned to 3 - to avoid any confusion or panic that may arise from having to deal with more than one enemy at a time. This has somehow caused a lot of bugs, but we'll work on that in future patc- DLC. DLC is what I meant.
Now, I know what you're thinking. "World's Biggest Game Company, I've played many shooters before, each more adrenaline-filled than the last. What will your game offer that's different?" Well, good bundle of money with legs, I'll tell you what we're doing differently. Nothing! That's right, we're going for a revolutionary approach here by not even attempting to disguise our cash cow with gimmicks or extraneous features. It's the real deal! And even better...
--
This Is Fun is a lie that has to be told.
The above is the first half of this game. The player goes through the most ridiculously safe, boring, feature-bloated modern shooter yet. The incentive to keep going comes from the comic relief of the CEO of World's Biggest Game Company, who will be directly communicating to you through the UI, as you are the first - and only - playtester for their newest game. Suffocatingly egotistical and sure, the nameless CEO will hype up essentially nothing with advanced graphics that somehow look worse than before, along with a semi-constant Cave Johnson-style stream of demeaning praise and encouragement - similar to the Stanley Parable, filled with repetitive and patronising tasks with promise of something fun later.
As the game progresses, though, the bugs and glitches of the untested prototype - or "finished product" - will start to cause the game world to fall apart, and as it all crumbles down and the flaws are exposed the CEO will start to panic more and more, trying to hold his fake world together and force the player to enjoy it. His efforts ultimately fail, though, when the player's communication with him is cut off entirely due to a 30FPS-capped videofeed-related bug. As the player is left alone in the middle of an unfinished level with nothing but frozen AI and windy ambiance, they are for the first time free to do and go as they wish; to put their gun down and walk away, to the boundary where the level falls apart and beyond.
After wandering in the void for a brief while, the player will come upon something unexpected. A small island of colour and creativity in the distance, and upon drawing closer, an island of movement. The player will have found the secret hideaway of a small core of developers within the company who, just about ready to quit their inspirationless job, are discreetly working on their own project that follows a similar vein to games in the late 90s/early 2000s era, full of oddball humour and vibrant characters, with motion, sound, and colour everywhere. Upon arriving, the player is welcomed as playtester for this game instead, and the player can choose to either return to the drab, mundane shooter and wait for it to be patched or stay here and try the new game with the bright-eyed developers instead.
Just before the game's last level can end, though, the colourful world will suddenly be ripped away as the CEO re-establishes control and scraps the budding theme park of a game entirely. The developers are dropped from contact, and the CEO teleports you back into his world, with a "brand new" level for you to test - the first level in reverse with a copypasted boss near the end. This level doesn't have an end as the CEO continues to rearrange set pieces to make "new levels", and hints will be dropped with decreasing subtlety that the only way to beat this game is to do as the excommunicated core of developers would suggest, and stop playing this game.
==
Image: Medal of Honor: Warfighter (2012, Danger Close/EA) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JOHyD49DaeA
A survival, psychology/strategy game in a similar vein to goodbye where you play as an ethereal Spirit of Worldly Passage and starting the game puts you in the shoes of a random stranger. But this time you're not fading away, you're dying. You have one day left to live, and on starting the game you're given some information about the person you're inhabiting: their skills - the things they're best at; their fears - what could hold them back from doing certain things; their allergies, diseases, or conditions; and a list of the things they want to do before they die, which they have entrusted to you along with their body. This can range from something as simple as trying on a new coat from the tailor, or as extravagant as going hang gliding for the first time in their life, and it may overlap with the other categories - someone may want to have a strawberry milkshake but they're lactose intolerant, so you will need to find a way around that.
The goal of the game is to fulfill as many dying wishes as you can before their time is up. As a Spirit of Worldly Passage, it is also your job to guide the departed to the afterlife, and a restless soul drains multitudes more of your energy than a soul at peace to guide, meaning you will not be able to help as many people if you don't complete enough of their lists. With every wish you fulfill, your spirit grows a tiny bit stronger, meaning your third playthrough will be longer and more complex than your first - like leveling up, but without levels, just invisible experience. Once your energy is up, you return to the Place Beyond the World to be replaced by another Spirit, leaving you with the options to stop or start again.
==
Your time has come.
Death loomed over the bed of the dark child, bony hands around the scythe. But the child wasn't sleeping, instead sitting upright with held knees, staring back at Death without expression. If Death had had lips, they would be frowning right now. They were usually asleep. Why wasn't this one?
Death looked around the room of the child. There were photographs on the walls, leading towards the bed. Someone was missing in some of them. Clothes were scattered carelessly on the floor, and the ceiling was peeling in places. The window was translucent with dust, and looked like it hadn't been opened in a long time. Death looked back at the child again.
Still staring.
Still. Staring. How old was this kid?
...
You know what, screw this. I haven't had a day off in ten thousand years.
Death extended one bony arm to the child, scythe held horizontally between them, and let go. The child's gaze didn't flicker as the ancient scythe dropped into their lap.
Here, kid. Take it. Now you're Death for a day.
I'm off.
And with that, Death departed the child's door.
--
Open world adventure game where you are a young child who has been given the powers of Death for one day. As Death, you have a task list of people whose time has come. You can choose to follow this list, and claim the doomed in the dead of the night, so that nobody sees you as outlined in Death's contract. Or choose not to. Whatever. It's not like Death is around today. You can play this as a stealth game, sneaking into retirement homes, hospitals etc to fulfil Death's contract and complete the list to get the best score at the end of the day, as a GTA-like action game where you rampage the streets without a care, or whatever else you might think of involving being Death. You have a number of abilities including melting into a shadow and moving through other shadows rapidly, entering the land of the dead to go invisible while losing sight of the living, using your scythe to reap people, and a variety of other interesting and unique mechanics that influence gameplay but let's face it, everyone's just going to default to spamming scythe anyway because that's why you play a game about being Death. Go nuts.
There's also a Halloween mode where people think you're costuming and you can blend into crowds. Just be careful not to accidentally touch anyone, or they'll drop dead. You're Death now, remember?
==
You are now aware that you are blinking.
...
Goddamnit.
--
Game where you play as a very unfortunate person in an office building who has a mysterious condition where they suffer a different kind of obsessive-compulsive disorder every minute, continually changing in source. One minute, they have to flip every light switch they see four times or the world will end, the next minute they're fine around light switches but suddenly if they see a printer they have to put it down on the floor to the left of wherever it's sitting. You have to get them through a workday at their office without getting fired, while attentively trying to accommodate the needs that come with their condition. You can choose to ignore what their mind demands of them, but they have an "anxiety" bar that will rapidly fill up when their compulsions are disregarded, and a "calm" bar that fluctuates during the workday and is permanently shortened whenever that happens. It can be restored over time if all is well, or filled up by doing calming things such as talking with co-workers or making a cup of tea, but the anxiety bar drains much slower and must go down on its own, and causes calming to be less effective the higher anxiety is. If anxiety hits full, your character has a meltdown which accelerates the timing on OCD switches, and if calm hits zero, your anxiety gained from everything is doubled. Anxiety can come from anything to stubbing your toe to a co-worker not replying to an encounter with the boss growling at you. More or less the calm bar is a "shield" gauge and anxiety is "health", but they work independently and can both change at the same time, meaning you will need to strike a constant balance between doing your boss's bidding, catering to compulsions, avoiding possible sources of stress, and doing calming things. There is also a "fired" bar which fills up when you cause disruption and the boss is displeased with you, and if it hits maximum it means game over for self-explanatory reasons.
==
Image: Edit of "Office Quest" by Inspire Games Nexus http://www.inspiregamesnexus.com/officerace/
"I'm left alone with all the monsters in my head
They say to me, "you won't choose life, over death..."
-Peratus, "Wrought"
--
::Warning: sensitive content follows. Please read at your discretion.::
Psychological "survival" atmosphere game where you're walking down a dark, endless road in a surreal and shifting dream-like world, alone. In this world, colour is greyscale, loneliness is safety, and hurt is comfort. Depending on your level of injury, you will be incapacitated and movement hindered, from limping to stumbling to crawling to dead. Unlike normal life, it works in reverse here. The more wounded you are, the more "comfortable" you become, and the more relaxed and free your movements; the more unwounded you are, the harder movement is as you are wracked with psychic pains, with unmarred being agony to the point of being unable to move. The other side of this world is that your injuries regenerate quickly; even deep wounds fade in a matter of minutes, leaving clean skin behind. The only way to progress is to continually find ways to wound yourself, being careful not to go too far and end up deceased by your own hand.
Along the sides of the road are bodies - the remains of wanderers who came before you and were eventually taken by this world. There are also objects and landmarks, all in a constant state of slow decay. They are typically hazardous in nature, and can be used to inflict damage on yourself and give you the energy to keep going. A metal gatepost sticking out of the ground. Razorwire. Paper bags and other litter, as well as discarded possessions - stuffed toys and handwritten letters. Blank signposts. Strewn clothes with nobody in them. Some of these will be pointless and some not so, depending on what uses you might think of when looking at them, but they all break down by themselves and deteriorate to uselessness within a minute or two. This does not mean much, since there would be little point in staying in one place for very long anyway.
Walking away from the road will slowly shorten your vision, until eventually you cannot see it anymore and become lost in a thick black fog that will only go away if you can find it again. On rare occasions, you may see another wanderer walking down the path towards you, and they might try to make contact. Their presence causes your wounds to heal faster than normal depending on how close they are. You must avoid them at all costs, for if they touch you, you fall apart and die. They will never leave the road, and might call out to you or maybe even try to follow you, but you must not listen. Keep going, and never waver. Soon their voice will be echoed away by the familiar sounds of your own footsteps, and your regeneration will slow again, letting you move easier once more.
You can not continue forever. Eventually you will run out of ways to inflict yourself and your path will leave you joining the fallen, as clean as the day you were born, on the side of the road. There is no top score, but your last and most distances traveled will be recorded as memoirs, as well as an epitaph of your own writing once your journey ends. From there it is up to you if you want to start again, and see how far you can go.
There are no enemies in this game. It does not matter which way you walk, only that you walk. You are the only target, but also the only hostage. The road's endlessness is your antagonist. There is no motivation for going forward other than the player's own choice for what they hope to see.
Where is it you wish to go?
==
Photograph "the endless road" by Joesph West https://www.flickr.com/photos/77249984@N00/4597808082
Personal note: I do not endorse or condone fictional or especially real-world instances of self harm, and understand it is a very serious subject. If you know anyone who may self-harm or are doing so yourself, please seek help from any available source in your area.
"Fly away / fly away
From the torch of blame
They hunt you / The Lucifer's Angel..."
-The Rasmus, "Lucifer's Angel"
--
A runaway/statless action RPG game where you play as a fallen angel, once flawless. The angel was betrayed and cast down from heaven out of spite of their beauty, intelligence, and wisdom, becoming the second angel in many years to fall. Stripped of powers and grace, the angel landed hard in the World of Mortals.
The World had always been a superstitious place, and society was still in its emergent phases. Angels and gods were exalted and revered for their might, but also feared terribly for the same reasons. It was because of this fear that several cults and organisations rose to power among the mainly devout populace, the ambitious few who would seek to destroy the gods and tear down into ruin everything they stand for.
The most dangerous of these cults, the Blackswan, were there many years ago when the first angel fell - the sister of the second angel. Instead of killing her, they imprisoned her instead. She was one of the strongest magic-user angels in the realm, betrayed out of fear from lesser angels, and even on earth her magic is strong. The cultists siphon the magical energies into themselves, using their angel as a source for power and dominance. These same cultists now pursue you, having heard through one of their ears the tale a group of adventurers told in the tavern of a second angel falling to the World. You also face threats from any civilian who finds out your identity, as the fear of the gods may drive them to attempt to lynch or exile you now that you are a weakened Mortal.
Your own magic was never as good as your angel-sister's, and without your powers your physical strength is greatly diminished, leaving you a little above an ordinary human. Your sole advantage is weak offensive and restorative magic, still faintly usable outside your realm. Your tasks: first to evade capture and gather your bearings, find ways to conceal your identity as an angel - robes, travel by night.. or even the irreversible process of removing your wings by Mortal means, if you're earthbound long enough for it to be necessary. The end goal is to find a way to locate the Blackswan headquarters where your angel-sister is being kept, then infiltrate or directly attack and rescue the angel before they find and capture you. The odds will be against you almost every step of the way. You may recruit Mortals you encounter along the way through friendship, a show of magic, gold, intimidation, or any other means, but the hearts of humans are easily tempted and it will be difficult to know who to trust.
The last thing is that depending on how you are on earth, you may become corrupted. There are many means to achieve your goal, and just as you might stay pure and compassionate, you might end up intimidating and bribing to get your way and become a terrifying leader of your own cult. You might rescue the other angel, but whether you'll be ascending with them back up to your realm is another matter...
==
Background: http://bpsola.deviantart.com/art/The-Fallen-Angel-...
A browser-based arcade arena game similar to titles such as Thing Thing Arena or Madness Interactive on Newgrounds where players load in, customise their characters, and enter the arena within minutes of starting. Players play as mages and have a set amount of spells, around 4-6. They can unlock more spells to put in their spell slots during customisation by playing and defeating increasing amounts of enemies, or fulfilling achievements such as dealing over 500 damage in a single charged fireball. The controls would be mouse to aim and fire, keys to move, and it would be a fast-paced PvP action game.
Once loaded in, players move left and right along a looping backdrop which scales in size proportionate to the number of players, from a small grove to a twisting forest. They have a health and magic bar, which refill over time - magic recharging quickly, and health regenerating slowly - and move while aiming spells and dodging to be highest on the leaderboards.
==
Characters: http://the-grandest-magus.deviantart.com/
Fireball: Fire Mario from Super Mario Bros. series (Nintendo, 1983-present) http://mariofanclub.wikia.com/wiki/Fire_Mario
Health and Magic: Stat bars from TerraFirmaCraft (Minecraft modification) http://cpy.zapto.org/terrafirmacraft/Anatomy.htm
Background: http://www.scrollsoflore.com/gallery/displayimage....
A game where you play as a man or woman who was sentenced and convicted of a serious crime, leaving you with prison with nothing but your hyperactivity and four walls to keep you company. In mind-numbing drudgery, you eventually resorted to scratching out your thoughts on the walls around you with a concrete-sharpened toothbrush.
At first it was just mindless venting. But then you got better at it. Over time, you started looking at the inmates around you, the perspective of the cell, and drew. And drew. And when you finally got out, you found you were still enjoying it. So you kept doing it, and eventually it got you attention: admirers of your unique style and background. But you got opposition too.
It wasn't long before people were calling your art sick, deranged, inappropriate, offensive, and a host of other labels. It ended up working. One by one, art shows stopped sending you invitations, and your works were quietly taken down. Eventually your progress dried up. In this game, you play as that artist in attempts to get recognised despite your convicted background and without selling out.
--
A sim//management game where you act as the artist's conscience, keeping them fed and influencing their decisions on when/what to draw and what topics to explore. You also act as their financial manager, directing which outlets they approach and how they sell their work to make a living. At the end of every day, they will go to bed and you will see the thoughts running through their mind before they fall asleep. These are things you need to address to keep them sane and content with what they do, like feedback from the artist to their mind. The goal is to gain popularity without getting on the wrong end of controversy and spread your artwork as best you can despite the odds.
Art by Kago Shintaro: http://wewastetime.com/2013/01/13/kago-shintaro/
==
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 real-time strategy game set in a medieval fantasy era, around the time of great warlords such as Alexander or Genghis, where you play as a Witch-doctor with a number of mystic skills, including reanimating the ashes of the dead. Your home is a small nation trapped between two much greater powers who are currently at war, and your nation's failure to choose a political side has left it very vulnerable. Now, with one nation making a move through yours to their enemy, your infrastructure is collapsing under the invasion's weight.
Your only advantage is the chokepoint location of your nation; situated between two valleys, there are only two or three major fronts you can be attacked from, with a scattering of smaller points of entry to watch out for. Your nation still lacks mighty heroes, however, and this is where you come in. The fall of your nation would mean your death, as Witch-doctory is considered heretical in the invading nation and you would be executed for your crimes.
--
Through your farseer mysticism, you are able to see major battles and leaders as glows on your world map, allowing you to track the campaign's movements and see which important heroes are where at any given time. This will be the means you can use to position yourself - your resurrecting powers are the key to your nation's survival, but you need to travel to the places it is needed so you can be of use. This is instant for the player, but takes time in the game, and before you leave your map will be shown the state of the campaign at the time you will arrive, so you can decide if it's worth trying to come to the defense of one front over another.
You have to position carefully, though. You need to first get into position, then contact the local defense via your mysticism so they can bring their fallen champions back to you. But if you choose your place badly, enemy movements might stumble upon you and execute you, or steal information of your allies.
Once in position, there are a number of things you can do: gather ingredients for your other actions, although you start with a limited supply; set up traps, wards, and decoys to allow your safe escape should you be discovered by the enemy's patrols or mystics; contact the local defense and having them bring their fallen leaders to you so you can reanimate them, bolstering this front's defense; or use mysticism to enchant or bolster the soldiers, cause bad weather to impair the enemy's movements, or curse their troops with ailments such as ravenous hunger or sleeplessness. Be as much of a minx to the enemy lines as possible, but pay attention to the map so you know where to move to next, before your nation is overrun from a different angle. Above all, do not let yourself get captured!
==
Image: Voodoo Whisperer: Curse of a Legend (Gogii Games, 2014) http://www.bigfishgames.com/blog/walkthrough/voodoo-whisperer-curse-of-a-legend-walkthrough/
A sideview physics-based platformer game. Following the wake of an extinction-level event which resembled a colossal EMP blast that wiped human minds clean, sentience has almost been eradicated. But you won't be playing as the brave survivors, still clinging to their personalities and senses of self. Instead you play as a giant cyborg and her android companion. You were supposed to have been a technological experiment with possible military application, but the DNA used to facilitate the process "unfortunately" brought with it the previous human's compassionate personality and traces of memory, resulting in a pacifistic entity. The researchers were working on creating another cyborg from scratch as an attempted Mark II, but failed to implant the new subject's DNA before the cataclysmic event was triggered, so it remained entirely robotic.
Now, in the wake of this mess, you have escaped the facility with this blank android in tow, and have taken it upon yourself to search for survivors and help them. Most of the figures you see are mindless, brains wiped by the shockwave and standing comatose. On you jump, run, and climb, navigating the broken-down landscape in search of intelligence. The catch is that, being giant, your mass has heft and structures will buckle and collapse beneath you. You must guide yourself and the android through each location safely - as prototypes, you are not waterproof or very durable - by swapping control between cyborg and android and guiding them one at a time to safe spots. As the level buckles and changes under the weight of the leader, the follower will have to adjust their movement pattern to compensate, resulting in a different, dynamic experience the second time around.
The cyborg and the android have different capabilities that will make it sometimes necessary to consider who to lead with or at what point to swap their positions - the cyborg can use creativity to hack and problem-solve, and can communicate with any survivors she might find, but her android, lacking human parts, is more durable and does not suffer from factors like temperature or pain. If the android is destroyed during a level, the cyborg can still fix it if she can reach its remains. But should the cyborg be destroyed, it's game over. Be careful what you land on and where you choose to stand.
==
Cyborg: http://tehnohit.com/character-design/new-character...
Android: https://www.scirra.com/forum/raket-a-2d-run-and-gu...
Dust trail: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NPvrMh5YDiQ
Background: http://www.vancitybuzz.com/2015/06/ironworkers-mem...
In this first-person 3D detective game, you play as a castaway who has been washed up on an island in a strange faraway place with no recollection of being on any trip. There is nothing on the island except you, a forest, and a small number of other individuals, all of which are waking up as you look around at the empty land.
Only one of these people can be trusted.
You are the Human. You have been isolated on an island with no memory of anything before arriving, and are among five other people. These people are known as the Deceiver, the Poisoner, the Betrayer, the Murderer, and the Innocent respectively. But you don't know which is which, and neither does the Innocent. It will only become clear who you can trust over a length of time, but the other four all know who the Innocent is, and are aware you are one of the others. Will you be able to identify the Innocent? Will it be too late for either of you by then?
--
The island you live on is beyond time and memory, and you do not need to eat or drink to survive. But you do need to sleep sooner or later. As the hours turn into days, certain behaviours will start to subtly emerge among the people: the Deceiver will attempt to exploit mental vulnerabilities in the group and extract the secrets of others for later blackmail; the Poisoner will fill everyone's minds with hatred and distrust through subtle suggestion and scandal, making them less likely to work together; the Betrayer will worm into someone's good books, then turn on them when they have nothing more to gain in favour of another, leaving them helpless and with nothing; and the Murderer will case a victim silently, patiently, before finally cornering and preying on them alone, without warning.
A way out exists for you and the Innocent; at the center of the forest, beyond the dangers of the others. Should you both make it to the center, a way out will appear before you and spirit you away from the island. But the Innocent will not go into the forest alone with anyone else until they trust them, and will instead stay on the coast, watching the others. The Deceiver will appear to be the Innocent through tricks and guile. The Poisoner will spread lies and make it seem like someone else is doing the poisoning; the Betrayer will zero in on another, playing harmless; the Murderer will stay where the victims are, revealing nothing of their intent.
It is your task to figure out who the Innocent is before either of you fall victim to the other four's traps, gain their trust even as the others try to do the same, and with them navigate to the center of the forest, alone. There, in the Innocent's and the Human's combined presence, an escape to the outside world will appear. But beware: if the person you have found is not the innocent, it most likely will be too late...
==
Image from Assassin's Creed IV: Black Flag (Ubisoft, 2013)
