Interactive Story Proposal

My idea for this project is to create an interactive game that lets the player walk through a series of stories. The concept is that the player is Death, an entity that reaps the souls of the dead on Earth. Death has fallen in love with a human, and they need to bargain with Life to help them reincarnate her. The player will collect souls and trade them with other entities for more desirable things, like dreams and starlight. Once they have collected enough of a certain resource, they will go to Life and bargain with them to give their human another life once they have died. Life finally agrees, and they go their separate ways until the human dies.

Once the human has died, Death collects their soul gently and brings them to an otherworldly realm, the Space Between. The player will now walk through a conversation with the human, where it is revealed that Death has been getting Life to reincarnate this human soul for thousands of years. The two characters will walk through some of the past lives she has lived through. Based on the player’s decisions throughout the story, the human will choose if she wants to be reincarnated or to stay with Death for eternity.

My inspirations for this story are Neil Gaiman’s comic book “The Sandman” and a webcomic called “Loving Reaper” by Jenny Jinya. I wanted to play with the concept of death being an entity that has favourites, and these pieces of media have been inspiring to me for years. This story is also has some influences from Greek mythology and Christianity when it comes to the concept of the afterlife and creation.

In terms of gameplay inspirations, I think the first part will be similar to “A Dark Room” because the player will be collecting resources first. The second half, I would like to make it similar to the Fire Emblem games and other RPG games where there are images of the characters when they talk and also the ability to travel through the world. I’m not sure which platform I will use to create this yet, but I have some experience in coding and creating games.

The interactivity of this story is a bit limited because there are only three endings that can come out of it. At the beginning, the player can decide how many souls they are willing to sacrifice to trade with other characters. Some characters will give the player useless things, so it is important for them to choose correctly. The player can also decide where to lead the conversation with the human in order to convince them to stay. It is up to the player to develop a personality for their version of Death, so the ending of the story is based on what they choose.