Survival of the highest

Game description

This game will be a first person puzzle game. You walk around the city, mainly, using arrow keys to move and your mouse to move your point of view. You’re able to enter certain buildings, but not all, where you can interact with people, find more clues and find more drugs.

story

You’ve just had a phone call from the police. Your brother, whom you haven’t seen in years, has been murdered. You rush over to the crime scene in disbelieve, where agents try to stop you from entering his apartment but you manage to trespass. There you see him, lying in a puddle of blood. A gunshot wound in his skull, from where blood has been dripping from his lifeless body. A soft moan escapes from your lips, after which you sink through your knees. Defeated you sit there, just looking at the unmoving body of your brother. Cold, he looks. Pale.

The police doesn’t put in a lot of effort to find the killer of your brother. They are corrupt and know it was a drug related murder. They see most of these things ‘through the fingers’ and you know that the chances of them pinning someone for his murder are very slim. You decide to take the matter in your own hands and get revenge on your brother’s behalf.

Your brother is a drug addict and ever since he got completely hooked on drugs you haven’t been in contact with him. However, you feel responsible for his death. After all, you were the one who introduced him to drugs. This will be shown to the player during the game. Every now and then flashbacks will come up where you see how he takes his brother to clubs and pushes him to try some drugs. However, you stopped doing drugs after a year or so. Your brother on the other hand couldn’t stop himself and got completely addicted. He started dealing and got himself into quite some trouble.

Mechanics

To find out who murdered your brother you have to roll into the world of drugs. This way you will be able to get closer to people who might have information about your brother. This does mean using drugs. Using these drugs will have different effects on you. Your vision will change, it might get blurry or it might all go slow-motion depending on the drug you choose. This will make it a lot harder for the player to move with the character. The goal is to survive, but there are many dangers. Taking an overdose will cause you to die. Taking a lot will cause you to hallucinate or make you unable to move at all. Taking too little will cause you to show withdrawal symptoms which will also make it harder for you to move around.

There will be a bar to measure how much drugs you’ve had so you do have an indication of how you’re doing. Drugs can be found all through the city, in various places. Sometimes they are just there in plain sight on the streets. However, there are cars driving around. Getting these drugs might be risky. Other times there are hidden in alleys and buildings, in places that are hard to reach. The drugs will be visualized as round pop-ups in the game. This is to make it obvious where to get them, though depending on the circumstances it might be harder to actually stop them.

Talking to people and walking around will give the player hints on where to go next to find the murderer. These hints will be subtle though and you will have to actually think to find out what has happened. This game is not supposed to be easy, it is very hard to reach your goal because of the drug abuse. A lot of focus will be on the visual part. Hallucinations, blurry vision and weird vision in general. These things will obstruct you in finding the murdered and avenging your brother. A balance is to be found between using drugs and trying to stay away from them. You can’t use the withdrawal symptoms, but you can’t use tripping on drugs either.

Characters

Throughout the whole game there will be many different characters you interact with. Too many to describe here. You will get involved with junkies, whores, shady people, drug dealers, you name it. With these people you can start a dialogue, by choosing the proper answers you might be able to get them to give you some information. Choosing the wrong answers will make your reputation drastically drop in this world and will work against you in future conversations.

The actual murdered will not be someone you expect. In the beginning of the game there will be a character that does not make him look like a suspect at all. He will have be perfectly balanced in a way that it is hard to see him as a suspect though he will give a subtle hint. The main focus will be led to a big drug dealer that was on very bad terms with your brother. You will be able to kill him, but then you’ll realize that he was not the killer you were looking for. And again, this puzzle will not actually be the biggest part of the game. It will be more difficult to get to them and stay alive than to actually talk to them and get answers out of them.