Oh my God yes
The success of Recettear and Moonlighter show there’s a market for subversions of the genre and I’m here for it.
Just spitballing but what if the faeries’ actions wear down the boss’s defenses over time. Also they can loot the chosen kid’s body for stuff to pass on to the next one.
The kids have psychological profiles. Most of them are dicks who have done something to deserve their fate but you can get a random roll of a kid who is a shining moral beacon, and that run gets to take advantage of his +25 Power of Friendship or whatever. (He probably still dies, but you can make a lot of progress that way.)
Oh! And what if the faeries can affect the quality of kids they’re getting? Something like a PR campaign they can run in “our world” where, if their quest is whispered into the right circles, they can get a kid who’s more studious or works out more, or something. They get better at this over time, which is important because towards the endgame you actually need a pure Chosen One to achieve the win state, and the only way to pull that off is good marketing.
EDIT: to add that after the first run, the game over screen lingers on a shot of the kid’s corpse on the ground. After the second run, the new kid’s corpse is added on top of the first kid. This continues throughout the entire save file until you win; by the end it should be a sizeable pyramid of dead chosen ones.
Void Bastards, but it’s Christopher Robin.
Never heard of Moonlighter but I used to love Recettear. It looks a lot like Recettear now that I’ve googled it actually lol.
Thank you for the ideas, i might really start to work on that from time to time.
I was thinking in having the faeries follow the player so as new weapons and armor are found the faeries may give different random options at the start of each run. Also have the player earn something like mana crystals instead of money so the upgrades would be done by the faeries magic.
I really like the idea of having different kinds of kids, it reminds me of rogue legacy, but i like more to have then with a more generic base so as the runs goes the game becomes more and more tailored to the player and his play style.
Having the faeries loot the body of the dead kids would be a great way to have the player recover a portion of the loot from each run, i could totally add a animation for this everytime the player dies.
As for the dead pyramid it could work as a window at the starting area where the corpses would be disposed, so after a couple of runs you would notice the pile getting bigger and bigger until it covers the entiry window.
I definitely had rogue legacy in mind! Great game, but I don’t think it leaned hard enough into just how grim and manipulative the whole enterprise is. Also I think you could have a lot of fun with the “marketing” mechanics, like, can the fairies explore the “real” world at all to find the right place to leave their macguffins? Can they leave better “bait”, like magical books for the chosen kids to find, or even a shiny sword where it doesn’t belong? Maybe they can recruit agents in the real world whose only job is to guide kids into their meat grinder.
Fairies could have a system like dead cells where ate the end of each stage you could equip a skill to a maximum of 3, the more i talk about it the more i want to work on it, but i just started another project for a jam, but i’m going to use the next month to create a prototype
