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...
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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?
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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.
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Image: http://indoornice.com/images/img-10/kitchen-design-with-island-layout-best-design-ideas-3.jpg
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 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.
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You are now aware that you are blinking.
...
Goddamnit.
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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.
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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"
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::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?
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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"
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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...
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Background: http://bpsola.deviantart.com/art/The-Fallen-Angel-...
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
"In this profession one has to endure heat, hunger and hard work, to sleep little and often to keep watch. And to be exhausted and to sleep uncomfortably on the ground only to be abruptly awakened. And you will be powerless to change the situation. You will often be afraid when you see your enemies coming towards you with lowered lances to run you through and with drawn swords to cut you down. Bolts and arrows come at you and you do not know how best to protect yourself. You see people killing each other, fleeing, dying and being taken prisoner and you see the bodies of your dead friends lying before you. But your horse is not dead, and by its vigorous speed you can escape in dishonour. But if you stay, you will win eternal honour. Is he not a great martyr, who puts himself to such work?" -Geoffroi de Charny, French knight of the 14th Century
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A game where you play as a knight who has been in his line of work for a long now and has lost the excitement he once had for his craft. Instead, he suffers the onslaught of post-traumatic stress disorder from the years of screaming blood rushing through his head. The land he lives in stands on the brink of yet another civil war, and with that threat looming over the hills, political figureheads of his country seek him out by name and call for him to come back into service. But he is exhausted; disillusioned with the horrors he's cornered himself into with every skirmish, and only wants out.
It works a lot like many 3D action RPGs, with the exception that your quest is to do all you can to avoid adventure. This will not be easy. Quests will be foisted upon you by many of the locals you may need to talk to, guards may recognise you and cause a scene, nobles will attempt to coerce or blackmail you into their service. With your quiet life being constantly trampled on by the clamour around you, find a way to earn enough of a living to pay for meals and boarding while keeping your stress and exhaustion levels to a minimum. Will you live as a hermit and forgo all luxuries, or attempt balance yourself in the storm of unwanted attention and political string-pulling?
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Image: "The Tired Knight" by Simon Cox http://storybookmurals.co.uk/new-shop-now-online/
A 3D survival game where you and a partner start on a desert island in the middle of an endless sea. Unlike similar survival games such as Rust or Don't Starve Together, the focus is off player versus player and combat with monsters. Instead, the challenge of the game comes from simply attempting to survive. Crafting will not be straightforward menu-based clicking; do not expect to be able to make a torch from grass and a stick like in other games, oh no. It will be as difficult as you trying to survive on a desert island would be in real life; you have no idea how to do anything, and your attempts at making shelter or catching fish are clumsy at best. First you'd need fire, then suitable materials to make the torch - a stout stick and some sort of fuel, not too dry, not too moist, so as to catch the flames well. Then you need to carry the fire to the torch or vice versa. With Surgeon Simulator-like grabbing, this will not be easy. Assuming you managed all that, well done! You have a torch that will keep you slightly warm and won't go out unless it runs out of fuel, is held in too strong wind, or is dropped in the sand.
In order to make this ordeal easier, your partner will be there to assist you. But here comes the catch of Mixed Messages: any attempts at communication will be slightly garbled. Text will be partially obscured by strange symbols, and microphones will be filtered. You will have to be interpretive when trying to decipher what your partner needs your help with, and you will need to construct some sort of shelter before night falls. It gets very cold here during the nighttime. Maybe in the morning you will have time to gather water that's safe to drink.
Good luck surviving...
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Image credits: http://www.slideshare.net/Marianelajp/how-to-live-on-a-deserted-island
"The price of a memory, is the memory of the sorrow it brings." -Pittacus Lore
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Evening light shines through the windows of the empty house, casting a jagged shadow on the kitchen's cracked tile floor. Water stains seeping down from the sink blur into something dried and red. Cupboards hang ajar. A lone lightbulb swings loose from its socket, dulled and powerless. Something terrible happened here long ago.
You are a ghost, and that's all you know of yourself. Drawn to this abandoned house, unconsciously, you found yourself awaking as you spent time inside its broken walls. There are memories everywhere here, and you want to remember...
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::Warning: sensitive content follows. Please read at your discretion.::
In this game, you play as a nameless ghost inhabiting an abandoned house, drawn to it by the threads of memories from the departed which still cling to objects; objects like a broken window, a fallen flower vase, a shattered picture. If you come close, these objects project glimpses of the events surrounding the memories, overlapping the physical with the ghost world to show portions of the past: a small body thrown through the window, a domestic dispute that swept the vase to the floor and scattered the roses, a lover scorned who destroyed a dear photograph amid their weeping.
As a disembodied ghost, you look in on these snapshots of lives once lived, disconnected from them; it is not their story you were drawn to. Amid the wreckage and scattered fragments of the tragic tale that played out in this house are small details and hints that remind you of something in yourself, tiny pieces that whisper to you who you might have once been.
Different rooms contain different fragments of memories to uncover or avoid, with varying danger depending on what happened in each one. But should you draw near to their objects, the unresolved memories of the two previous inhabitants as well as your own will emerge in the ghost world, replaying their scenes once again. As they appear, they may come alive and lash out at you, or wander off to roam the halls, stopping only to erase anything that would interrupt their drifting. Your purpose here in the now is to collect trinkets and talismans that reminded you of your own life when you were a living thing, sorting through the grief and the violence hanging in the air to find moments that make sense. When you find a memory that stirs you, you must carry the object it is tied to carefully back to the room you dwell in, upstairs; safe from the malevolent reach of the dangerous remnants yearning to unleash their grief on something. It is your altar, your place of refuge, and as you put together these precious fragments you also try to remember who you were and the life you lived through pieces of theirs, knowing that if you can just figure it all out, you may be free of this curse and be ready to move on from the threads of memory binding you here.
--
Personal note: I do not endorse or condone fictional or especially real-world instances of domestic abuse, and understand it is a very serious subject. If you know anyone who may be suffering from abuse or are suffering from abuse yourself, please seek help from any available source in your area.
An inventory management and slightly puzzling survival game where you are on your way to catch a flight. On the way to your flight, however, is a veritable horde of well-wishers and acquaintances seeing you off, every single one of which will offload some "thoughtful" gift onto your person regardless of how encumbered you are already or whether you may even appreciate the gift or sentiment.
As you take on gift after gift, you must manage your inventory and make decisions on how best to continue your journey (keep the platform boots in your inventory and add weight, or take time to put them on now and risk tripping if you need to run?), all while becoming further and further slowed from the excess of stuff placed on you by others.
You may attempt to steer straight past these well-wishers to avoid becoming further overloaded, but be warned: they will pursue you to attempt to press their gift onto you, and should you repeatedly ignore them they may take it spitefully and attempt to trip you up in some way or another later on. You may attempt to offload some of these gifts without a "helpful" passerby "retrieving" it for you, or airport security telling you you can't put that there, but watch out that you don't dispose of a gift along the path the gifter might travel, or they may see it and decide to turn on you.
Get yourself through the building without losing yourself in the menagerie of excess and the people that come with them. And above all, do not miss your flight!
It was a day like any other. People working their day-to-day as best they can, sunlight squinting out from between clouds, cars passing cars in the street. Business as usual.
Until the lights went out.
In one instant, all light vanished from the world. Lightbulbs, torches, the sun... Nobody quite understood what had happened. But everybody knew in some instinctual, undeniable part of them that something had happened that could never be reversed.
You are a Spark, the last light left on the face of the planet. Through dark streets you flit, guiding the lost people in crowds out of their cities in search of a place of illumination. You may move between lightbulbs, car headlights, streetlamps, appliances, and anything else that may normally emit light by highlighting it with the cursor and clicking to inhabit it. From there, you radiate light, guiding nearby people toward yourself like moths to a flame, and it is with this that you will lead them.
But be careful, for the people are fearful in the dark and will not move if they are not lit; you will need to be careful not to leave anyone behind. If you stay in one bulb or appliance for too long your energy will cause it to start flickering, eventually depleting its resources and short-circuiting it, which will render it unusable an decrease your options.
Be careful not to linger too long in the open air either, lest you burn out and extinguish yourself before reaching safe haven. With no stars left in the sky, you are all that's left...
