How about a mod/game based on the work of Zdzislav Baksinski? Thread

Edit: Sorry for the typo in the title, Its Zdzislaw, not Zdzislav, and Beksinski, not Baksinski. I didn't check that before I posted, please forgive the error.

This idea is more of an art direction, but the images Zdzislaw painted could make a great psychological survival horror in the vein of the half life 2 mod Korsokavia.

Story: You are the other, taken from your world and thrust into a hellish landscape where space and time are stretched and mutilated, the boundaries of organic and inorganic blurred. The people you meet are lethargic, traveling in an apocalyptic wasteland full of the bones of civilizations past, only to stop at shrines to talk to the confined deities. When traveling in this world, you find that you are being followed by various malevolent entities, waiting for the perfect opportunity to corner you. It is obvious that these transient permutations of sentient space time know why you're here, but they are too interested in your flesh to care about giving you an explanation. You find that you must use the leftover technology to make yourself more like the creatures who walk these planes, if only to survive, much else can hardly be expected.

Features: Open World, RPG Elements, High contrast environment, "Phase shifting", multiplayer that de-emphasizes combat.

Theme: Slower paced, puzzle game play (oh yeah another portal clone!) in a disturbing atmosphere, with lots of contrasting colors. Why is color contrast important? Well, most of the popular games I've played are pretty much a mix of dull brown, grey, and green. While this would be a mod or an indie game, its important to try to break out of that color scheme slump. Don't get me wrong, there will be plenty of brown, grey, and green; but important things should stand out(without being gaudy, no neon colors, thank you!), or be cleverly concealed among things that stand out. Entities that the player can converse with, or be killed by, should also stand out, unless the point of the character is that they don't stand out of course.

Game play: A first person adventure game with play similar to amnesia:TDD, but with rpg elements. You find artifacts in the ruins of cities and in the wilderness, to take them to the shrines so you can be augmented by the confined entities. The challenge is that various cryptids are after you when you are away from the shines or any of the strange benign people you come across. Some of these monsters act like Slender Man in SLENDER, others actively seek you out like the creatures in A:TDD, and others have inscrutable, but undeniably hostile, behavior towards you. You cannot attack these creature, all you can do is run and obtain artifacts from the ruins in an open world. Take these artifacts to the shines, and the shines' god will augment you, giving you an extra advantage when it comes to escaping your enemies; however, your augmentation comes at the price of losing some of your humanity, and the choices you make will determine in the end whether you will go home, become like the wanderers, or become one of the creatures that tried to kill you in the first place.

Phase shifting: Like the Prey spirit world, but has a gradient of immersion that you control with the mouse wheel. You have a phase "spectrum" and you can move along that spectrum to occupy a different physical space without moving. Basically, this game would let you travel in the 4th dimension, kind of like the game miegakure. A lot of your adversaries might move through these phases, so an enhanced ability to shift your 4d position will help your survival(some enemies might not phase at all, some might do it slowly, other might thrive in the phases). Also, phase shifting will be vital to solve some puzzles. While I don't want to make it completely mandatory to finish the game, if you don't phase shift then you will miss out on some story, characters, and upgrades you couldn't get without solving those particular puzzles.

Multiplayer: The goal of multiplayer maps is to survive as long a possible. One player becomes a random cryptid, and must kill the other players, and the players have to split the resources on the map and outwit the powerful cryptid player. Needless to say, this will be fairly slow paced and not for everyone, however it would still require a lot of skills. You have to decide who gets what upgrades, you can't have just one player get all of them because that makes all the others vulnerable, and if the super player with all or most of the upgrades dies, then all the players are doomed to the cryptid. Most maps will have a goal artifact that the cryptid is guarding, others would be Last man standing style, last person not dead by supernatural forces wins. Other maps will be kill the cryptid maps, where there are multiple crpytids and players are given the tools to kill them, making it kind of a more traditional multiplayer battle, but with out actual fighting(the artifacts given to the regular players are more like a spell that cancels out the entity, or something that drains an entities power).

That's the basic idea, its not very fleshed out yet. What I want is some input about how such a game would be received, I don't want to try to make something that nobody is going to like.

Edited by: MachineShop