this post was submitted on 09 Dec 2023
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The player will always have a somewhat outside perspective on the protagonist. Gameplay-wise the player could be trying to keep the protagonist sane... or if the player leans into the insanity suddenly the game reacts and punishes the protagonist for trying to immanentise the eschaton. Make the player fight for the fate of the protagonist within the protagonist.
Also I'd highly recommend against going that route if you don't have a well-marinated schizo as script writer, we know dealing with that "eldritch horror" all to well it's called the genome. Ever wondered why virgins can have realistic dreams about sex? Realistic as in sensation, I mean. Certainly can't be personal memory.
I mean babysitting a lunatic from the outside feels like a risky manoeuvre from a game design perspective.
It'd almost have to be a 2nd person game to get the weirdness in a way that doesn't require you try to explain the incomprehensible to the perspective of the player, because honestly I feel even letting the lunatic act as a narrator has too much of a risk of failing the test of incomprehensibility.
It's like we're trying to pass the anti-turing test, you know that protagonist you're controlling is a human but they're just so fucking cracked in behavior and mannerisms that they feel completely alienated from the player empathetically, like we'd be trying to send them into the uncanny valley just on how they talk and act.
Also, it can't be a 4th wall breaker, that's an obvious reach for "I saw beyond the veil and into the eye of madness" but it's been done so many damn times that the players would immediately catch wise once the hint was dropped and we'd be the latest cash grab for MatPat by the end of the week.
Honestly the writers shouldn't be able to imagine what the protagonist saw either, this is a guy we sent into the void of madness and we gotta write him as if we're just watching someone who went insane then recovered then went insane again in a cycle lasting what could have been nanoseconds or eons by the protagonist's reckoning.
This guy needs to be the perfect equivalent of that ant that saw the circuitry and understood it then came back only remembering that it understood for the brief moments its was "above"