Dick reversal....

Hey folks,

So one game design I have been working on in my head is sort of a mix between Cowboy Bebop, Dark City and Sin City. A bit of a noir-ish detective story but done in total reversal. Meaning the beginning of the game starts at what would be "the end" of the game for most video games. Its a strange notion I know, but I think it could be pulled off really well if done properly. Remember how the movie Memento was done? Something to that extent basically.

What I mean by all this is that the game first starts with the main character being beaten, shot and nearly dead when the player first sees him. He is near death and is having a flash back about his life. Each flash back would be a different chapter of the game and it would basically lead all the way back to how everything built up to the situation he was first in.

The game play itself would be either first or third person depending on how the player wants to play. It would be a action game of course with a few puzzles here and there to keep people's brains going.

The world itself is a bit of a mix of steampunk and Dark City where there would be new sorts of weapons and gizmo's while keeping to a noir-ish feel like in Dark City. So you wouldn't have our worlds type of weapons, but you would have really cool new ones powered by a new type of energy source that is in this new world.

The main character is a private investigator who was asked by a old man to investigate the murder of his best friend. I am a bit tired of the "dame needing help" idea, so I thought I would go with something a little different. The plot seems very basic at first, but when told in reverse, everything gets a little twisted.

I don't wanna go into full story here, but its basically going to be about the detective getting caught up in this whole weird web of lies while trying to find out why this old man was killed. Like I said though, this would all be in reverse. So you actually don't find out who the real killer is till the very end of the game which is the beginning of the story. Lets just say there would be a few twists here and there to throw players off the real trail of who the killer was.

As for general game play, this will be a adventure action game. There will be some car chases, lots of fist fights, some heavy gun fights and even fights on top of a zeppelin type air balloon. As the memories keep unfolding, the player would be getting more weapons as well. You don't buy the weapons like in MGS4, but you get them at the beginning of each memory and loose them at the end usually during a boss fight or chase scene. That way the beginning of the game you only start with the typical pistol type weapon (remember the beginning is the end).

This could be a sandbox type game for sure, but I think that would be a bit hard to pull off without having huge amounts of side objectives to do as well which wouldn't fit with this game I would say. So a straightforward action game would be best with each "memory" being a sandbox type level that presses the player to move forward.

I am still working everything out in my head, but I wanted to get the basics down in this post. Basically a detective story told in reverse with a noir/steampunk feel to it. Some good action, a really deep story and some cool characters.

Anyway, thats it for now. May come back to this later if anything else pops up in my head.

-P. Knight