Pixeled Some 1-bit Spooky Bois. 

Tokyo Dark Souls

raid v1 available now • video games + design • @raidmagazine

Super Banjo-Kazooie RPG

eelfroth | famicase 2018

Okiku (1992)

Game Idea: Urban open-world survival game where you play as a suspiciously sapient possum.

It’s Fallout Meets the Secret of NIMH Meets Untitled Goose Game.

The game is set in a few square blocks of an urban environment, with a mix of survival and stealth mechanics. You have all the standard aspect of a survival game, locating food and resources, building or locating shelter, etc,  Humans, depending on who they are, are likely to be hostile and if they become too aware of you they’ll devote time and resources to hunting you and making your life difficult, destroying your nests, laying traps and the like.

Fortunately, you can see in low light, so the night is a cooly lit world brimming with hiding spots. Daytime, by contrast, is swarming with threats and it’s brightness makes navigation and difficult. 

Carefully observing humans can unlock new crafting and skill options, however, making getting near them worth the risk. Early skills fit with abilities a possum might possess, like climbing, playing dead, and opening latches and working door handles. As the game progresses, skills open up like “stand upright”, “craft weapons”, and “imitate human speech.” 

You see, you’re not learning, you’re mutating. Through the course of the game, your aberrant intelligence grows and you connect with a network of abnormally intelligent animals to discover why you are the way you are, and what that means for you and the humans whose shadows you hide in.

Features:

Explore a familiar world turned alien through the nocturnal eye of a small, screaming marsupial. 

Scavenge the leftovers of civilization without the looming bummer of a nuclear apocalypse. 

Alternate playthrough styles including Racoon, Coyote and Skunk, each with different strengths and weaknesses (Racoon has advantages with anything needing hands but is combat-averse. Coyote is good in a fight, is active during the day and is able to work around humans (mistaken for a dog) but is terrible with mobility and crafting. Skunk takes a slight hit on hand-skills but has the spray which is very effective. Draws tons of aggro from humans)

Scavenge, farm, build, steal or fight to survive. Claw your way from scavenger to renowned cryptid, become one special human’s life-changing friend, or reclaim the world in the name of nature’s forgotten. It’s your choice!  Or just wander off to enjoy the survival loops and endlessly torment the human character AI. 

Elaborate branching dialog trees but all your lines are just various hisses. This provides no impediment to understanding you.

EDIT: Cover mock-up, I couldn’t resist.

Hear me out:

Animal Crossing, but you’re a traveller who settles in a seemingly abandoned japanese village because you got a sweet deal on the real estate. Then you realize that the village is not abandoned and is inhabited by animal spirits! You can befriend them and do all the other typical animal crossing stuffs, but your goal is to help your villagers pass on. When they “move out”, you have successfully put their spirit to rest. And new spirits for you to help are always coming into the village. Please? (Oh, and also the only other “living” person in the village is a fennec fox shrine maiden named Safaia)

Once In A Century, developed by Ribbon Black in 1991 for the Nintendo Famicom. An 8-bit RPG that follows one woman’s journey from a hired sword to the greatest knight the kingdom. Great graphics for a Famicom game, being that it was released near end of the console’s life cycle.

I won’t lie, I’m not too proud of the job I did cutting that label out.

Does it look like a good old gameboy action game? I wish it exist, BlackZone : the Silent Doom. You could control this robot guy with the massiv lightning arm, he would be a super engineer because there is not enough engineer as heroes of games. A cross engineer-detective. 

Alien Mystery: The Golden Tensei Gensei (Marvel Station: Secret Commando) (2003, Eypan) (GBA)