Games You'd Like to Write

Game Development Writing and Content
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Hello, friends, writers and CoG enthusiasts.

The reason I did this thread was because I wanted a place where authors, already published or not, could list their ideas for future games, so they don’t lose it. And while there a few threads that are similar, none of them are quite like this one, so I felt I could go ahead and make it.

I’ve spent the last few months with some premises sitting on my head and I thought this would be a nice place to show them, so I’ll start:

-Frontier: A short, contemplative story about a human expedition to a small settlement in the distant future, in a far away planet, not so different from Earth. While many CoGs are action packed, I’d like this one to be more character driven, and exactly thrilling, but more inviting.

-Trials of the Monarch: a big, three part adventure and drama series about a duke from a low fantasy land, working in a country not so different from the Holy Roman Empire. Through an entire lifetime, will you search for riches and glory above all, or will you try to appease the powerful? Will you support separatist rebellions, or crush them?

-A game series about superheroes. I think that other forms of media sometimes emulate capes in their most superficial ways, with the tights and the sidekicks, but without the same substance that superhero comics have. My objective, in this case, would be to create a hero that would be unambigously heroic, but also give the players a character they can shape, and also giving it a taste of the ideas heroes often stand for.

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I have three real ideas that I’ve been banging around in my head (and a bunch of ones that are less thought out). These are all working titles and subject to ridiculous amounts of change.

Sol: A History: Sci-fi space opera. The player is part of the Earth space navy when the Solar system is gripped by intense civil war. Engage in sci-fi battles on the command deck and on foot, customise your experimental warship, solve disputes with the crew, make decisions that will shape the future of humanity for decades to come, and decide which of the three factions you’ll side with.

Hardlight: Teenage sci-fi superpowers with a dash of cosmic horror. The player lives in a small, sleepy American town where, one evening just like any other, they are chased by a monster and saved by some kind of weird space-knight. After a series of strange events, they end up fused with an alien symbiote that grants a variety of hardlight abilities. Will you use your powers to defend the town or help yourself? And what if the symbiote has its own ideas? Go good or evil or just plain selfish, focus on your studies or your abilities, romance the alien next door, etc.

And, of course, Paradigm Concordance: Paradigm City sequel. Set two years after Paradigm City, the player continues their journey into the mysteries of their global superhero organization. But there are greater, darker things out there than Sentinel and opponents that even IPSA dares not face. But if you can truly save the world, how far will you go to achieve it? Success demands sacrifice. The hope here would be to deliver something bigger and better and with a lot of the things people have expressed they wanted to see (for example, romancing Blueshift). If City was about being a cog in the machine, Concordance would be about what you can do when you realise that.

Less-thought out example: a fantasy world where the realm was protected by statue-like monarchs but they have been destroyed. Who did it and why? Who will the player, their faithful servant, put on the throne? In this world, death was ‘mostly solved’ a few years prior and the undead are a faction like any other. Also, the gods are dead and their huge bodies lie around the place. People mine fantasy-uranium from their bones.

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I could list a few I am putting on the queue:

  • A game about a hitman (the MC) who has a reputation in the criminal underworld for finishing their contracts with brutal efficiency. There is the option of choosing a tragic backstory, and each one has a twist associated with it. Romance included, though entirely optional. I’m open to ideas.

  • A game about a cynical and broody writer who needs a major shift in perspective after coming across writer’s block on their latest book. Primarily romance-centred, because I am a sucker for those.

  • Definitely, a game with animal-based mechas. Zoids fans, anyone?

  • Maybe another game that focuses on a MC with a military background . . . ? Not sure where to take it yet, though.

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I’d play that one! It sounds really fun. It kind of reminds me a bit of the Space Emperor game Max Gladstone seemed to be writing a while back. It could turn great, I think.

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I make no promises to have it up in a short-term time frame, but I have been working on a proof of concept which is basically the first chapter. I’ll let you know when/if I put it up here as a WIP!

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The Beast In Me - A game set in a small town, ala Wayhaven Chronicles, focusing on vampires but also throwing Old World mysticism, Catholic powered armor, and ten tons of sarcasm into the mix. Try to navigate life as a working class stiff in the only cafe in town, while also trying to keep your vampiric half from murdering everyone. A far less heavy project from the one I’m currently working on, may start coding it on the side.

Blue Corona - You are a bartender on a space station, in a post-Earth galaxy. Keep your customers happy, keep the lights on, and keep the bounty hunters from claiming your head for your crimes in a past life.

I’ve got a few more, but they aren’t even in the “concept” stage, they’re in the “barely thought up” stage.

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I’ve gotten several ideas for stories I would love to do.

The Gifted Shaman: It’s a comical story during the plague era about a shaman, who goes around house to house taken care of the ill and eliminating the plague one person at a time. The humor revolves around his inability to understand the devastations of the plague making him all too happy and sarcastic in a time full of darkness.

Brink of a New Dawn: The idea revolves around one company playing both superpowers in the cold war. One Scientist, you, have been accused of stealing sensitive data and sent to be a test subject. You escape and end up running from gentekk while having friends, foes, and the world fall all around you.

Brink of a New Dawn is still a little shaky on how it’s going to be executed but I am taking one chapter at a time and flow with my mind.

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There have been threads that tread similar topics of throwing around ideas, but I’ll bite.

Psychologie: You work as a psychologist – fixing people’s personal problems, understanding their desires in life, etc. – but that doesn’t quite describe your day job.

No, your job involves delving into people’s minds, and helping them face their inner demons head on, a la Persona.

It’s the most direct and helpful method, but comes with a couple of drawbacks:

  • Your practice has not received the best of reputations, due to the clients adhering to strict secrecy , so you only receive clients from the most desperate of people.

  • It involves a measure of magic, which is largely forgotten in this modern world of ours, and hence the strict secrecy adherence.

  • Being defeated by a person’s demons will destroy that person’s mind, and by extension, your own. So try not to fuck up, savvy?

Construct: The human race is gone, but not forgotten.

The world in which humans have created with their minds – including races of every conceivable mythos on the planet, every sort of magic imaginable – has been left behind in the wake of humanity’s extinction, and with it, a vibrant world of all of humanity’s creations exists, and left alone to their own devices.But that doesn’t mean humanity’s been forgotten. In reverence to their creators, construct their society based on a mix of humanity’s civilizations of old, with wildly varying differences. Much like our own world today, as a matter of fact.

However, what were to happen when a ruin made of hard and cold metal is discovered, one that seems to hold some egg-like contraptions? “Egg-like contraptions” is their description of what we would call “pods”.

Absorbing Comprehension:

  • There exists a being.

  • This being seeks to bring all under its watchful gaze, its protective conscience.

  • This being seeks only to have all that is autonomous, all that is living, all that is aware, under its control.

  • This being has been awakened from its eternal slumber, inflicted on it by the combined power of all the so-called “Gods” that exist within the infinite spectrum that is the multiverse.

  • This being will absorb those that resist into its consciousness. It’s only logical that those who aren’t aware of its existence or refute its existence are to be brought into the fold.

  • This being… is coming. And soon.

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Good golly gosh I have a lot.

So first and foremost is Icarus Sun which I started a long while ago, hit a wall when it came to my lack of skill and a couple of glaring road-bumps that I’ve since smoothed over, and fully intend to come back to after Model Citizens: Unmasked is finished and done (or at least close to, considering this one would be a lot shorter than that.)

Speaking of Model Citizens, I have a very loose idea of four (including the one I’m currently working on) different games in that same world. I say ‘loose’ because none of them would really be connected to one another- more just exploring the world from different perspectives. (Granted, they all had one similar main plot thread but, again, it was mostly concentrated around the idea of tackling one city and one problem from several different perspectives.) The names of those were (or, are, depending on whether or not they ever actually come to exist) Model Citizens: Underling, Model Citizens: Undercover, and Model Citizens: Mastermind (and there’s actually a reason why three, including the current, all start with ‘un’ words while the final does not. It’s not a very complicated reason but I suppose it is slightly silly. Just a fun thought pertaining to how they connect, really.)

Another project I actually kind-of finished is The Captain (name still being debated), which was a short game I wrote in about two months for a seminar project that tallied up to about 35,000 words, total. The main branch was entirely finished but I had to cut off all of the mini-branching and scene variations that I had really wanted to put in due to my strict time restriction. I’d really want to go back to that and put it all the tiny-bits I wanted to and just smooth over some of the rushed dialogue because I really really liked the idea behind it. (It was based off of the old ELIZA computer therapist and essentially centers around the ideas of artificial intelligence and how human’s connect with one another.) Like Icarus Sun, I would love to visit this one sometime soon and finish it up, since it’s so close to done either way.

Finally, my ‘too-big-to-probably-exist’ idea would be Hourglass, which was sorta based around the idea of having the player have this big, grand odyssey that they kinda decide for themself how it goes. It was my experiment into just how big a ChoiceScript world could get, and see if I could capture that feeling of being on some grand odyssey- where even death is a level to complete. I had the plot and characters and places all fleshed out but whether or not it’s too large to ever actually create would have to be something I’d test for myself- dip my toes into it either way.

There’s a couple of other plots I’ve dabbled in as just stories in general, with the possibilities of being games, but those have never been too serious and were mostly just excuses to practice writing something specific.

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I have so many that are all precious to me, but these are all the ones that I have an actual good amount of work into and actually see myself completing in my lifetime. I have learned that I shouldn’t create a topic for them until I can stick to one, however, because I don’t think it would be fair to post a demo only to never update it for very long lengths of time. Until I can get the gumption to finally stick to just one, I will continue to loveeee talking about them.

  • Set in a post-apocalyptic, a la zombies, landscape of a futuristic scene, you are the sole child of a tyrannical mayor of one of the rare established safe cities. During a breach near one of the walled borders that protect the upper-class district, you are bitten by a zombie and thought as dead. However you awake to find that you still have your mind and you have not in fact been devoured. Your autoimmune disease, you soon discover, slows the progression of the virus but you are still slowly turning into a zombie and losing your humanity. The game goes on about you finding a colorful cast of characters including a sentient prostitute AI, a misfit group of survivors, typical zombie angst but intensified, your past lover/friends (depending on choices) learning that you have not in fact died, your father and his promise to bring you back no matter the cost, and your bizarre journey of being a walking death sentence.

  • I have book that I wrote back in my wee years of highschool, that is a loose nod to Frankenstein, that I’m trying to convert into a game and re-write with branching. In it you would take the role of the monster, but in the grander scheme of things - you take the role of the necromancer’s apprentice as the resurrected corpse of his previous. You might be in the same body but who’s to say you’re the same person? It is set in an alternate Victorian Era where the general public has no indication of the existence of magic, something a well kept secret among only the highest circles, and certainly not of the deranged monsters plaguing the streets of London that are devouring people without pause. You have to deal with that mess, the strange mysteries shrouding your odd mentor and the connection you have to the ordeals, and coming face to face with the people that loved you… that most certainly saw you die.

  • I have one that has you playing the role of a preacher’s child, attending a devout boarding school, who is soon faced with the unreal - your own guardian demon (apprently everyone has their own guardian angel - save for you), the school’s elite turning out to be demon hunters / agents of angels deciding whether to kill or recruit you, actual angels, actual demons, and of course a brewing war that you’re soon pulled into. Inspired by a writing prompt. I have a modern occult / small-town mystery where you are the ghost of someone who disappeared years ago, supernatural mysteries and creatures, the occasional stray god, the ones who never quite moved on past your death, and the misfit paranormal club who can actually see you.Then there’s a modern one where you are the next emperor/empress, and you are said to be married to a god/goddess and able to hear (and deliver) their words…but in reality, it’s all a sham passed on from generation to generation. That is - until the peeved god/goddess shows up in front of you.

They’re all kind of…dating sims with plots in the sense that they are relationship focused and varying degrees of cheesy. Those are all my developed ones with at least 25% written and outlines and all the sha-bang, plus my main three (Hades + Persephone, Romeo and Juliet, and a modern Fairy Tale royalty), and then I have three notebooks full of half-baked ideas of course. I need to focus on one instead of rotating and I might finish one day. :sweat_smile: And I just noticed - I really have a thing for dead/dying protagonists lol

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I’ve had a few ideas sitting around and one that I technically started, but life keeps getting in the way of me actually writing it

A Witch in Suburbia: A young witch moves to a town by the sea for college, only the town, the sea, and the surrounding forest are all kind of alive (and the school has a ghost but it’s kind of a minor thing) My original idea for the plot kind of went down the drain since I started to get more in depth in developing the town and other characters and realized that the original plot was kinda boring and didn’t fit in with everything else, so I have to figure that out now

My Dragon Age 2 OCs Outgrew Dragon Age 2 So I’ve Changed their Names And Story Details And Also Threw Them In Space ( a working title): I’ve had a lot of ideas really that have been at least semi-related to this ever since I went to Vietnam to visit family and it got built upon from talking with friends about things like how Star Wars has based itself off of Asian imagery, especially Japan and its samurai, but it took like three decades to feature actual Asian people and like that kinda sucked. I don’t have a true story or really much more than a few characters + character arcs, but I want to use it to deal with topics like identity, imperialism and colonialism (/ the effects of it), assimilation, and xenophobia, and also take popular tropes in current sci-fi and cyberpunk, like taking Asian aesthetics to make things look exotic and futuristic while also excluding actual Asians entirely, and turning them on their heads

So basically “sci-fi has been a politically charged genre since the beginning and my identity was made political before I was even born so I don’t even care anymore, I’m gonna write about it because I haven’t seen anything like it before besides a couple speculative tweets and blog posts here and there, and no one can stop me from making it a real thing”

And I have an idea for kind of “cut-scene” style bits that go into an NPC’s perspective that has choices for the player to make but every choice is true and each choice gives a different bit of insight into the NPC’s character in some way. The three main characters I have are pretty developed since I’ve had them for like three plus years now? And they have issues among each other and individual character arcs that wouldn’t be entirely appropriate for an MC to interfere with or be highly invested in (if anything, the MC would be a bystander to that part in particular) and also they are far too defined to make them into variations of MCs themselves (and yeah, I could just make something non-interactive with just them and I’m at the stage where I’m not sure what exactly I want to do is yet. Choicescript is just one medium that I happen to be interested in right now and think that this idea would be interesting to use with)

It’s kind of really huge though and I definitely don’t have the skill for it right now so it’s going to be in the brainstorming stage for a long time

And I don’t have real ideas for them, but I’d like to do something inspired by the Redwall book series and something in the “soft apocalypse” genre (not like the book Soft Apocalypse which I haven’t read and only just now found out about, but something like it’s been a few generations since “the end of the world” and some form of society has reformed and life just goes on, only with a bit more mutated toads and less indoor plumbing than in the current day, plus maybe the occasional ghost/land spirit left over from long-gone eras) They could even be combined, maybe? I just think they’re really charming and would be fun to see in a choice script format

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Ooh, so this thread is something like a collective todo-list?
Alright alright, no peeking :"

Summary

An 'ol school cyoa format story that I’ll divide into several books. But the first one is all about the background of the setting and a big plot twist about the protagonist(?)

Includes the good 'ol tropes (some may be subverted) such as medieval-fantasy-europe, magitek, evil-light neutral-darkness, light vs darkness, sword in stone, the chosen one, and isekai (this one isn’t rly old, to be fair)

Oh, and number management. A good number management :face_with_monocle:

Now I’ve written this, I can go back here to remind me what I need to do next.

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Let’s see

Murder Most Magical

As a new history professor at the famous university of Old Heddingsfield you stumble face-first into a murder mystery and take it upon yourself to solve it.
Face magic, demons and students alike on your way to the truth.

Curious Cuisine: Edible Escapades

You’ve been invited to join the Summer Season of ‘Cooking Cornucopia’, which traditionally will lead its contestants out of the studio and into the wild.
But while you are baking and roasting, trouble is brewing.

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That Dragon Age 2 in space idea sounds fascinating. I’m also an Asian who loves sci-fi and dragon age (DA2 is the best) and wants to see more (or realistically, any) asian people in both settings.

As for my ideas, I’m working on a few things sort of in this vein:

  1. “Cyberpunk California”: in the aftermath of a devastating Sino-American War, California has become an independent republic, a complicated and cosmopolitan country dominated by corporate interests and with severe inequality. Corporations, international agents, revolutionaries, and incipient AIs battle for power. I’m working on a Twine thing in this setting, with multiple perspectives, including a corporate wage slave who was imprisoned as a child during the war and a Chinese experimental clone soldier turned refugee turned revolutionary.
  2. “The People’s War: A Social Simulation”: A management/politics game where you are the mayor of a Chinese village during the Sino-Japanese war and Chinese Civil War. You have to balance the Nationalist, Communist, and Japanese armies in order to survive, as well as the peasant and landlord classes. Plus grow enough food to not starve. Oh yeah, and the Yellow River might flood. I have a very brief Choicescript skeleton of the yearly demographic updates, and some outlines of the yearly events that the player has to respond to. Inspired by Hidden Agenda.
  3. “New Harbin”: Takes place in a post-apocalyptic version of the city of Harbin, China, following a world war between “posthumans” and “baselines”. The posthumans won, but left most of Earth uninhabitable, except for a few domed cities where all the remaining baseline humans live. One such city is New Harbin, built over the ruins of old Harbin. Several years ago, an incident caused the loss of communications with all other human settlements. An army was sent to investigate, and you were the only survivor. Featuring: lots of conflicting factions! A layered city! Secret posthuman spies! The Party (which still governs somehow)!
  4. “Commonwealth”: A mostly optimistic far-future story. Steady technological and social advances have ended war, cured most diseases and aging, and allowed billions of humans to live throughout the solar system. But of course conflict still exists. The Commonwealth is the main political/economic coordinating system, based in orbit around Earth, a decentralized body that prefers to use its influence subtly in the form of its agents, a general “problem-solving” force. I don’t really have a solid idea for a game here, but it’s a setting I’ve had in mind for years now and I go back to it every once in a while.

Fun fact: 3 and 4 are parallel universes of each other. 1 is a prequel to both.

I’ve written a few short stores in 1, 3, and 4, if anyone’s interested, and i have a lot more notes scattered throughout various places…

(just noticed that all of my stories are about china in some way, even if not always in a positive light lol. other themes: alienation, cataclysmic wars and the effects on regular people, conflict within communities, technology as a tool for liberation or control. also of course there are a lot of lgbt asian people in all these stories, so much so that “chinese lesbian biologist/mathematician” is becoming like my signature character archetype)

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The one I wish I could do the most would be…
A medieval zombie apocalypse type game heavy on the romance and dark humor and hidden secrets for fun lol
You could play as a m/f/n squire (from a poor family), a middle class knight or the child of the king.
I’m not to good with thinking of actual story lines but that would be the gist of it. (however i do have the LI planned already xD)
You’d be able to like customize your character and the base, marry your LI, which depending on your gender identity and sexuality, would have repercussions on the story, some people wont work with you due to their beliefs and shit, adopt or have a child that actually has their own character and will do shit rather than sit around. How you raise/interact with them would matter. You could be a hero or a villain. .M.U.L.T.I.P.L.E.E.N.D.I.N.G.S.
because i love that shit

There’s others…
Like
A sci-fi type game set in the future. People who don’t fit into the norm of society and lower class men who don’t have jobs get culled. Probably made visual novel style, Point and click kinda like a mystery/detective thing with puzzles and stuff. You gotta solve the reason why this is all happening and over throw The Mother.

Or like… a farming game like uh… harvest moon but more story focused and with more things to do like battle monsters and hire people to look after your farm and business if you’re not married or don’t want your spouse to do it while you travel to different places. It’'s be more of an adventure rpg with like farming things in it as a secondary type thing.

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I have a few ideas/projects, only one of which has a title yet:

  • Soulstones: A fantasy game in two parts. I originally tried making this in the Neverwinter Nights toolset, back in the days, but I gave up because 1, I was a teenager who didn’t know the first thing about scripting, and 2, it was pretty clear that the engine wasn’t the right fit for the amount of customisation I wanted.
    The game was my take on the “hero academy” trope, but has evolved since.

  • Another fantasy game. It was supposed to be a more simple, shorter game to get me started with ChoiceScript, before moving on to the colossal undertaking that would be Soulstones. How naive of me to think it would stay that way.
    You are the youngest child of the ruler of a country. There’s an invasion, and you are turned to stone. Two centuries later, you are awoken by the descendant of your sibling, who wants to reclaim the throne from the current tyrannical king.

  • A contemporary game about handling the stressful modern life, as a youth in a new city, while dealing with education, jobs, dating, and old mistakes turning up again.
    The game was born from ideas for mechanics, more than plot, and will be genderlocked to different flavours of non-binary.

  • A deconstruction/parody of the whole “Chosen One” trope, involving a young idealist and their wrong genre savvy (delusional) mentor/grandmother, who thinks you are the love interest.
    This one will be set in a dystopian setting, and hopefully stay short.

  • More fantasy. You are a shapeshifter, a monster, who is saved from being burned alive by an affably evil gentleman, who wants to conquer the world. Now working as a spy for him, you have to navigate treacherous scheming to make a future for yourself.

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Democracy 101: You play as the newly elected president of a satellite democratic government, built upon the abdication of the late monarch and recovering from a recent defeat in a massive war. Your job is to efficiently handle the political and economic crises of your nation. You will have to not only rebuild an abysmal war-torn economy but also figure out a solution to paying your ludicrous reparations. You will also have to keep the power of the many parties and factions within the nations in check in order to avoid civil unrest from a population still bitter from the losses of recent war

(In case you haven’t realized, yes, this is based on the Weimar Republic)

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Well, my next two games are set, but let’s say it’s the year 2020…

A lighthearted comedic serial inspired by Parks & Rec and/or The Office told in third person where you can nudge pre-defined characters in certain directions over time…

A CCH prequel where you play as a young attorney learning the in’s and out’s of an emerging legal field: superhero law.

A game where you play as the mayor of a medium-sized American city. I don’t know, but dealing with police, sanitation, libraries, and roads just seems super fun to me.

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I have so many ideas, but like everyone said only so many that are flushed out.

My year is set with Swish and Animus so these are a far away.

Elemental - Rising Blood

Story revolves around a modern day world, but there is another world separate from our own.

In this world people are able to,use the powers of the elements, and it a through them and them alone that nature has not destoyed humanity.

The MC is in college when he is ripped away from,his quiet life. He soon finds himself in this magically world, helping fight off evil. This evil wanta humans killed, and power theirs.

Lots of battles and a deep family backstory.

Break - An Ascendant Prequel

A superhero book series called the Ascendants.

First book follows a group of heroes in training, who didnt have the money, name, or family ties to get into a hero school.

The MC’s would be genser locked but each has a different story line. One power set wouls be Glass.

Break - A Martial Arts story
I don’t have much put together for this story but it is another sport story revolving around competition. It will be action pack and fast paced.

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I’ve thought the idea of a choice game instead of the story progressing too fast, you have time to do things during the day and night until a special event happens. And along the way during each day you can build up your stats progressively similarly to Persona series. A murder mystery perhaps without putting too much emphasis on the “detective” bit, and more as a person who happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time and have to deduce their options, assassin perhaps, a few plot-twist that will make the player absolutely hate me but become a masochist in the process and continue playing.