I like a lot of these ideas. Some of them aren’t actually too dissimilar from what I’ve been working on in my own scenario, Chronicles, although thus far I haven’t gone too far down the horror road. There are some levels that are definitely creepy (“Kill Your Sons”, “Entangled”, and “To Make an Idol of Our Fear and Call It God” in particular) but not to the point where I’d class it as a horror scenario. I’m… picky about horror. I think most modern horror relies too much on cheap tricks like jump scares and gratuitous gore. I love the old atmospheric Universal horror films, psychological horror, Stephen King, H. P. Lovecraft (racism and other issues aside), and similar works/authors, but I want the scares to be
earned, and I don’t feel like most modern horror does that.
However, I definitely want to explore the limits of human sanity in a game. The idea is that after the events of the trilogy,
Phoenix,
Rubicon,
Eternal, etc., (plus
Pathways if you subscribe to the thesis that it’s the same character), the player is going to have a massive amount of psychological baggage, no matter how much cybernetic technology they¹ have assisting them. I suspect that amping up the horror factor in the later levels of the scenario would certainly assist in that direction. I’ve had my own share of psychological issues and I want to build a game that addresses them honestly, because I feel the discourse about such matters, particularly in American society, is far from constructive.
One idea that I’ve had is that the player may progress through several different realities through the course of the game. It’s not
exactly what you’ve written above, but I intend to explore sanity through this method – specifically, the simple question, “What is real?”, which I feel is often not given due consideration. I’ve been replaying some of
Rubicon and this bit of writing jumped out at me:
They’ll say that things this bizarre don’t make sense, reason doesn’t apply, and that the world is not a logical place. I think the problem is not that the world isn’t logical, but that we don’t understand logic as well as we thought. How can you possibly understand logic? With logic? You can’t see the eye you see with. Or so they say.
Humans like to think of ourselves as rational beings, but we are not. Logic and science are the best tools we have for understanding the world, but we are not logical. We are good at rationalising, but we are not rational. We understand the world through what we perceive, but even if we are perfectly sane, what we see may not be accurate, because we see what we’ve trained ourselves to see – the brain discards signals it perceives as irrelevant, and it does that based on past memories, which themselves are fluid: the act of thinking about a memory changes the memory.
So all of this ties in with perception and sanity issues, and I definitely want to create a game that causes the player to question the reality of what they’ve seen, not just within the game but outside it as well. Another aspect of
Rubicon’s writing, where the player can’t be sure who around them is telling the truth, is an additional aspect I wish to address. I want the whole thing to be incredibly mind screwy, in order to train people better to understand when to trust others, and, for that matter, when to trust themselves. Understanding how the human memory and human perception work will make people… I’m not going to say saner, but less naïve. Less likely to get scammed.
In any case, I don’t think I’d have room to implement every idea you’ve suggested above in my scenario (for instance, I’d have to completely rebalance the guns and enemies if I were to implement all the behaviour you’ve noted above, and while I am pondering making a few changes to their behaviour, I don’t think I have it in me to make that many), but there certainly are elements that closely align with aspects of the story I’ve already written and/or outlined. IDK. You might want to browse the
Chronicles thread and see if the ideas interest you. It’s certainly easier to join an existing project than it is to create one from scratch. I’d certainly be willing to implement any writing or levels people sent me that were good and worked with the existing content.
Although the game is already completely playable, it is in nothing approaching a finished state; it’s still in a relatively early alpha stage, so there’s plenty of room to overhaul levels, add new ones, and alter the story (large portions of the terminals aren’t even written yet, as I’m not always easily able to write well in Durandal’s voice, or for that matter
Rubicon Tycho’s).
I also intend to completely overhaul much of the artwork; RADIX has kindly offered to contribute artwork (and, if needed, story) assistance, and I will probably write to her about that when I’ve gotten more of a concrete idea of what direction I want to go in.
If it’s not interesting to you, I’d still be interested in whatever you’d produce, because there are a lot of great ideas there, even if I doubt I’d be able to implement every single one of them myself.
¹I’m using gender-neutral pronouns to refer to the player throughout, awkward as it is, because at least two Pfhorums members – RADIX and ravenshining – are women. “He or she” is even more awkward than singular “they” and excludes non-binary people, and Strunk and White can suck it with their advice to use “he”. Plus, Shakespeare and Chaucer used singular “they”, so the whole idea that it’s ungrammatical is just wrong.