Milanote Moodboard Link: https://app.milanote.com/1PVosY1l25T9cV?p=6ovs7pi8sjq
Spotify Playlist Link: https://open.spotify.com/playlist/0UzoZpm5xjYBAkHhwQaBFW?si=7d925a7dbbc6403d
- While it’s hampered a little bit by the short length and one of the songs taking up a fairly large chunk, I wanted to convey a kind of three-part story, — with the beginning track “Trees” having a bit of an empty, lost feeling, followed by descent into darker moods with “Hollow Knight” and “Quiet and Falling”, with a gradual rise and recovery with “Reflection” and
“Comforting Memories”, resolving on “My Dearest Friends”. Overall I wanted the theming to be a little bit wistful and at times even hopeless, but to also evoke a sense of bittersweet happiness overall, all while maintaining a somewhat consistent audio profile (it helps that multiple tracks come from the same game).
Ideas:
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Puzzle-solving through shadows: I really like the idea of puzzle-solving in a similar way that Chicory does, interacting with the environment in some way to create new platforms or locations to continue moving towards the intended destination. Instead of using a paintbrush I think it could be interesting to utilize two different planes — say the player world and the ‘shadow’ or ‘reflection’ world in a similar way to SHIFT (an old browser puzzle platformer), where altering something in the shadow plane would unlock an area in the player world.
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Piecewise Embedded Narrative w/ Collectables — This is more of an aesthetic idea but I think the way that OMORI handles some of its embedded narrative with the use of the collectable “Hangman Keys” is incredibly interesting and adds a lot of mystery and intrigue. It creates an overarching question over the collectable process and anchors the overall mystery underneath the game to the gameplay. It also clashes both visually and tonally with the rest of the gameplay and creates a lot of dissonance while also subtly revealing information to the player.
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Puzzle-solving using Words — One kind of puzzle that could also be interesting is that the player collects pieces that contribute to the embedded narrative, but these might also feature elements that can be used to solve puzzles. An example off the top of my head might be the character collects a snippet of a journal entry, for which the word “KEY” is highlighted or wobbly. When they arrive at a locked door in another room, they might be able to pull out the word from that ‘memory’ to unlock it.
