Main Idea

After going through my main ideas/genre-wise I think I found a way to implement my favourite ones and have a setting.

Within Firewatch, the most unsettling part for me was the interaction between Henry and Delilah because you don’t see Delilah. She can see you and what you’re doing sometimes, so you know she’s there, but you sorta just have to trust she’s on your side.

With this in mind, what if you interacted with someone who wasn’t necessarily interested in what was best for you? What if they needed you to do something and they were the only one there for you to rely on?

I want the player to be awoken up in some sort of space station, alone throughout the whole thing. There was some sort of shut down and the top level is locked off from the player. Through different computers and comms you are able to communicate with someone on the top floor, they’ll guide you on how to fix the station. But throughout your journey it doesn’t add up, exposing them does nothing because you’re trapped here and will die if you don’t get out so you have to decide how far you will go to live.

I liked how in Twine you could add passcodes and change the background and text color. I’d like to add other visuals if it was possible, making the screen more of a computer desktop interface.

I worry about figuring out endings and settings – I have ideas of how the player gets here in the first place, but feel as though a preface could be a reward, and explaining, for certain endings.

Another aspect I like in these unsettling games is the confrontation that reality isn’t necessarily what it seems. Like how in Doki Doki Literature Club we see it glitch and distort. You take what is in front of you at face value, and then don’t know what to do when you’re lied to. As a player, we will suspend our disbelief and trust the narrator- but an unreliable narrator is unsettling.

I hope to implement an uneasy soundtrack to further this. I’m not interested in jumpscares or harsh bloodshed, but more so a deep sense of wrongness.