I was walking past an elderly care home and I had an
idea
for a puzzle-based computer game, probably 3rd-person
like Grim Fandango—man that game was great.
You play a slightly eccentric, quick-witted, middle-aged
man called Andre Smith-Jones who has been incarcerated
in an retirement home.
You
talk with the old guests, most of them are past it,
but
one of them (Charlie Fox) is still sharp and you converse
about your big ideas and plans. He’s very supportive and
inspirational. Once you fully explore the conversation
tree
with Charlie he gives you your first clue for escaping the
retirement home. If you try to escape out the door it is
either locked or a member of the nursing staff _helps_
you
by escorting you back to your room and putting you back
into bed saying “there, that’s better now isn’t it.”
Whenever this happens Andre says something witty like
“these people just love to get my pants off.” Above all
else
Andre doesn’t understand why everyone treats him as old
or insane. Some people are just plain scared of him, at
first you put that down to the Alzheimer's of the guests
but
it continues as a theme throughout the game when you
escape into the real world.
Once you have your first clue, you go round getting
objects
in the retirement home and construct some clever means
of escaping. Maybe it involves a strange concoction in the
kitchen or getting a passcode from a secret notebook or
something, I dunno. The point is, you escape.
The rest of the game consists of you going round a
completely normal present-day world where you learn
about terrible things that are happening and try to
improve
the situation for people. Each time you do so you seem
to
attract more and more animated attention. Also as the
game progresses people seem to be increasingly weird,
sometimes downright barmy.
All the puzzles you solve are of completely non-violent
means and a lot of them are really positive; you
generally
go round helping people and making their lives better.
Although they don’t always seem to be able to
appreciate
it because they are so weird.
After a while you meet the strangest person yet. He
wears
extremely unusual clothing and seems to know about
everything you’ve done and talks about how great it all
is.
He also keeps mentioning how you should wake up and
see
things for what they really are. After a while he becomes
a
pest so you ditch him by helping him in some way.
As the game concludes you start to piece together your
big
plans for improving the world. Your actions start to have
wider reaching implications of the people. Andre voices
his
concerns about why he is going to all this effort if
everyone
is clearly insane and promises himself that once he fixes
the world he’ll start fixing the people too.
As you put the final piece of your plan into action, a
crowd
of people approach you, all in strange clothing and they
start dancing around you, smiling, and singing songs
about
how great you are. You think this is pretty weird so you
try
to run away but you ultimately fail. They force you to
eat
lots of peanuts, which you think is a bit odd but you go
along with it anyway. Then, the peanuts start to have an
effect. The environment chances and instead of seeing
Andre and a crowd of strange dancing people you see an
old man surrounded by doctors and nurses and the
peanuts
are now pills.
The ending sequence of the game show and explains how
you weren’t really a middle-aged man you were actually
a
really old man and you were completely delusional and
dangerous throughout. It shows you how being in the
retirement home was really the best place for you and
how
all the helpful things you did were actually violent or
barbaric. It shows you how you ruined peoples lives and
how all the people who you thought were most
supportive
of you were actually telling you exactly the opposite and
trying to make you see your insanity. And finally, it
shows
you how your big plan you just completed was to release
a
deadly virus into the water supplies of the world and
you’re now responsible for the deaths of millions.
I call the game: Abnormality. A nod to a similar title of
Normality where everyone really was weird and you were
the only sane one.