Ideation/directions:
- Focus on discovery [inspiration: ARCH, Antichamber, Stanley Parable]: the player explores an emergent, fragmentary narrative that reveals itself as the player explores the open city world. The forest becomes a place of refuge, “safe” and where healing can happen; but to expand the story and uncover the mystery, players must travel into the city, where fragments of memories are etched on the walls and in buildings of memory, showing scenes of memories as you walk through them. These memories fall back down into the forest, harming that forest… but perhaps uncovering this information is what you needed to grow back fuller.
- Focus narrative [inspiration: Kentucky Route Zero, Oneshot]: the spirit finds itself awake in a forest, suddenly detached from the person they had bonded with, perhaps taken a semi-parasocial relationship or interest in. The spirit gets brief and fleeting windows into their person of interest’s life progressing, suggesting at first that they’re watching it happen in real time, trying to find ways to reconnect with their person of interest, maybe becoming jealous as they live their life without the spirit, maybe sad they can’t reach our to touch their life; or maybe even believing that they do have a hand in their life before realizing that in fact, they had none at all. Over the course of the narrative, it becomes clear that these windows are actually just windows to the past; and thus, the spirit must reconcile a certain kind of death: that of a person important to them, that may never have really existed in the first place.
- Focus challenge [inspiration: Celeste, Braid]: A brief cutscene where the spirit and their person of interest are together; then, in a moment, find themselves separated from each other (perhaps that kind of cross-over between spirits and non-spirits is forbidden by someone). They find themselves in a platforming-sidescroller where they must ascend through several challenging levels involving stealth and platforming to reunite. The story occasionally switches sides, where you play as the person of interest, descending to meet their spirit friend. They meet at the middle.
Spotify Sonic Moodboard: https://open.spotify.com/playlist/1SyTez1HgdsP0zvacdQtGo?si=7a5976da27a04026
Visual Moodboard:
