Social Anxiety Survival Horror. You’re a guy at a friend’s party trying to avoid conversations while putting in an appearance with your friend so they know you were here. You can deflect conversations with small talk you pick up by eavesdropping, but it won’t work on drunk people, so you also need to run and hide. Your ex-partner eventually shows up and is hunting you down to have a frank conversation about your relationship, which is instant game over.
You can checkout https://store.steampowered.com/app/1392820/Milk_inside_a_bag_of_milk_inside_a_bag_of_milk/ - it’s not that but it’s a somewhat similar thing
I probably wouldn’t want this game to actually exist, but it’s been stuck in my head for years so here goes. I described this one a while ago. A friend of mine was on mushrooms once and described a first person WW1 game where you’re an Austro-Hungarian courier running across battlefields. There would be parkour, time management, stealth, stuff like that. Sneaking through trenches and whatever. At first the missions go ok, easy enough. But then you’re given more complex missions that waste your time, or are foolishly planned.
Your character begins mumbling under their breath about how the generals are doing everything wrong, the war is lost. Your character becomes more deranged as the missions become more fruitless. Eventually your guy will start screaming deranged conspiracies and wild racist shit. There would be a mechanic where you start to need amphetamines to function.
Then in the last mission you catch sight of your reflection in a puddle and you’ve been playing as Hitler this whole time.
NOTE: Someone probably has developed it, but I’m too poor to buy a decent computer.
I’ve been wanting the shittiest, most grindy military logistics game possible for a bit now. Like, “oh you didn’t upgrade your Sock factory? Fuck you now your platoon has trench foot” type Grindy.
I want to feel pain
Rimworld is probably the closest thing to that right now. Watch your village starve as their clothes wear out and they get frostbite.
Or dwarf fortress if you want to get medieval
I want a game that is a standard sci fi/fantasy RPG, except the main characters each suffer from a mental health condition that affects their gameplay (and of course the story).
My brother (now deceased) had both schizophrenia and numerous personalities. He had visual and auditory hallucinations thanks to the schizophrenia. On top of that, in my last conversation with him, he mentioned that all his personalities ‘shared information’ except for one that was in denial. Because of that, when a different personality took over after that one, he would have no idea what happened during the time that denial personality was in control. Sadly, my brother passed after he had stopped taking medications for a week and decided to use computer duster (something he had finally got clean of) to sleep and never woke up.
Now, imagine that in a high sci fi or fantasy RPG. You might begin fighting and wasting energy on enemies who aren’t actually there, but you think they are. You can go into battle and no other party members will help because, as you find out after, those enemies weren’t really there. Maybe you become weak because of a would and have to get through a dangerous area to get to a hospital. There you find you never had an injury, it was a hallucination (based on a 911 call my brother made thinking he had slit his throat when he had not). Maybe you go to learn some key information from a character who then dies dies suddenly. However, you don’t remember any of it.
Most important though, in the end, you are still the hero and still save the day. The idea being that yes people with these mental health challenges struggle, but they aren’t monsters. My brother was one of the kindest people I know and loved to help people. A game like that, if done right, could help players understand what these conditions are actually like (not hollywoods bs) and show that they can still be heroes. I think that would be cool
You should play Hellblade: Senua’s Sacrifice. I’ve finished it and it’s awesome. Wear headphones. It’s on Gamepass if you have an Xbox.
The game’s narrative serves as a metaphor for the character’s struggle with psychosis, as Senua, who suffers from the condition but believes it to be a curse, is haunted by an entity known as the “Darkness”, voices in her head known as “Furies”, and memories from her past. To properly represent psychosis, developers worked closely with neuroscientists, mental health specialists, and people living with the condition.
I’m thinking about ways to implement other mental health conditions. Generally staying on the lower end of severity because I’m more familiar with it, but you could represent anger issues by having skill checks when other characters do seemingly innocuous things, and if you fail all the dialogue options are bad. ADHD could be done with a required mini game of correctly identifying all the steps in a process and having cooldowns between them to reflect executive disfunction. Hyperfocus could be implemented with certain objectives not being completeable, or even showing up in the game anywhere outside of dialogue, until one is. Seasonal affective disorder could be shown with a characters stats just drastically dropping when the seasons change, and the HUD colour scheme becoming more muted.
Mirror’s Edge-style gameplay (specifically first person) for experiencing Spider-man’s first few weeks of having powers, including the time prior to having built the web-shooters. I have wanted this ever since the teaser trailer for the first Andrew Garfield movie.
