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Let's make a Game Design Doc, guys!

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Spluff:
My idea of a horror/western RPG:

You play an aged ex-vigilante, tormented by his own violent past. His dreams - when he could sleep at all - provided no solace, reliving each of the four murders he had committed in the past- honourless murders that he undertook in the dead of night for nothing more than a bit of cash, pulling the trigger before the victim had even awoken.

The game starts in the eleventh year of his life sentence. Withered and deathly ill, one morning he wakes up to find that he is alone in the prison. The game goes on from there, and as the plot is slowly uncovered, the player realizes that he has slipped into some kind of fever dream*, a disturbing nightmare world populated only by people had wronged in his life.

*maybe gone into a coma?

The first level/part involves escaping the prison, the next four 'levels' involve confronting the four people he had murdered, trekking through his increasingly demented psyche to find each one in order of the guilt he feels about them (ie. the first is just a murderous gunslinger, and the last a teenage girl). He expects to have to fight them, but they end up helping him, or at the very least pushing him towards a further goal.  

I figure the scenery and the artwork would get progressively surreal and disturbing as the game went on, from basically realistic in the prison to incredibly fucked up towards the end. Each victims level would be representative of the environment in which they lived, and their personality, etc. Throughout the game there would probably be cutscenes of him writhing on a bed or something, a reminder of the real life player character as he struggles with the illness, as the dream/nightmare version of the character works through the nightmare (the game).

As the game goes on, he realizes the only way to escape the hellish dreamworld is to somehow right the wrongs of his life. Later on in the game, after the fourth victim has 'helped' him, and he puts all their clues together it becomes apparent that the grand overarching antagonist, the 'villain' trying to impede his progress is actually himself, and that his journey leads to a confrontation with himself. At the very end of the game, when he confronts himself, he ends up killing this alternate version of himself (whether through dialogue or through combat, a la Fallout or PS:T depends on the player) and in doing so releases himself from the dream world. It turns out, however, that by killing the alternate him in the dreamworld , that the real him, the version who had succumbed to illness and gone into a coma was killed as well.

The last scene would probably be a 'flashback' to the bit of the game where he discovered that to escape the dreamworld he had to right the wrongs of his life - implying that killing himself was how the wrongs had to be righted.

[EDIT]  I realize this doesn't really say much about how it's a western... my idea was that all the characters populating the game (the people he had wronged, as well as the player character himself) would all be from the western setting, and that many of their individual conflicts (the wrongs he had done to them) with the PC would generally be related to the harsh ways of life on the frontier. The settings would also be western inspired (ie. I see the level for the gunslinger to be like the Max Payne drug level, but based around a saloon).

Alex C:

--- Quote from: KvP on 07 Mar 2010, 15:24 --- That's a failure of game design - If you're going to force an outcome in a situation, you need to at least present it such that it's apparent that it's the only way it can possibly happen.

--- End quote ---

This. It has never failed to annoy me when some RPG roadblocks my party into being defeated despite the fact that mechanically speaking I'm mowing through motherfuckers like it ain't no thang. The only reason I accepted Baldur's Gate II's opening premise is the simple fact that they never even showed your capture to begin with.

Alex C:
Also, it's too bad that you fucks voted for horror. We could have made a cheesy outlaw themed turn-based strategy RPG with recruitment options. The goal would be to assemble your gang, rob shit, get away, fight rival gangs, (the turn based stuff) get drunk, hire hookers, and ultimately die of syph, cirrhosis or tuberculosis (these could all be mini games). Sort of a Pirates! meets Fallout Tactics or Jagged Alliance kind of deal, except travel would have been an homage to Oregon Trail instead of a pirate ship. Instead, you guys are shitting things up with your surrealism and plots and shit.

JD:
Could still have a cheesy horror story.

Alex C:
No. That would be shit.

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