A game that is marketed as your standard fishing game and for the first 20 minutes or so you catch normal fish like bluegill and bass and what have you. But the further you go into the lake you start to catch fish with mutations and it gets more and more intense until you’re pulling in Eldritch horror monsters and sometimes severed human limbs. You realize you don’t recall how you got to this lake in the first place and the objective becomes to find your way back to shore. You have no real weapons but you can throw the creatures you’ve caught far away from the boat as a means to distract whatever is underneath you, bumping into the boat sometimes.
Additional items for the game.
A fishing pole with a radar that starts out with just beeps but later includes noises with hidden messages.
A GPS that displays texts and story elements.
You meet other boaters, all from various backgrounds, countries, and time periods. Some are friendly, others want to sacrifice you to the lake monsters.
You can also take the route of sacrificing others to the lake monster.
Or you can assemble a party and work to keep them safe.
The more fucked up looking the fish you catch, the closer you’re getting to a boss fight, which is usually running from something you can only see part of in the water.
????
And that’s my game idea.
More details.
It never stops being a fishing game. You are always fishing and searching for new areas where there is more activity in order to progress the story.
Depending on the choices you make and the amount of mutant fish you consume, you may start to mutate yourself. The fishing pole is part of your arm, you don’t notice it until later. If you consume mostly non-mutated fish and don’t sacrifice to the monsters you can keep the mutations to a minimum.
You can go full mutant and the boat becomes part of your body as well. This makes the monsters pay less attention to you, but you can no longer befriend or trade items with humans. You can still catch human remains and most of them are carrying items.
If you stay mostly human you can work to gather as many surviving humans as you find and assemble a fleet. The possibility of one of them turning on you always stands.
If you’re mutant you gain the ability to capsize yourself and view things under water. This is how you find ultimate monster.
If you’re human you can explore small abandoned docks and islands. These are where you find portals leading to different time periods and countries. You deliver members of your party to these. Only the person who originally belongs there can go through it.
Possible end game situations.
You find the portal leading back to your world, where you wake up on the river bank. You can catch normal fish before going home, making sure they are all free of mutations (they might not be.)
You join the monster, eventually overtaking it. You gain the ability to open time portals near water. You use lures to draw in humans.
I can’t think of anymore endings right now, I may have ruined the game with these new details so feel free to just enjoy the first part.
Terrible concept art. Mini game idea. Compete with members of your party to catch the most fucked up fish. Points awarded based on how many extra body parts it has and if it communicates telepathically with you.
Added my No-Romo posts to this because I feel they are the most important additions. (I am not a writer or game designer or really capable of making anything so this idea is just wishful thinking at best.)
Concept art if it was a more stylized, cute game. You would be able to customize your character and your boat. Sorry this became so big I’m tagging it with it’s working title “Lure” for now. I legit expect nothing at all to come from this, I just like to design and concept out things a bit.
Still watching this youtube channel about what I can only describe as “Dark Classical art” and this one absolutely floored me because I was unaware of it and I want to share it because it changes my perspective on this artist completely.
You might be aware of Louis Wain. If not by name then by his art. He’s the artist behind that series of cat drawings that slowly became more and more abstract and bizarre.
This series of paintings of cats are often labelled as a visual representation of Wain’s deteriorating mental illness and schizophrenia. Even more so often labelled as “a tragic display of a painter’s failing battle with schizophrenia.”
The paintings look like this and were painted around the very early 1900s.
Ok got all that?
So here’s the thing.
Although Wain did suffer from a mental illness that was strong enough for him to be institutionalized, his mental illness was never diagnosed with clear certainty. Although “Schizophrenia” is so heavily applied to him based purely on how his series of paintings LOOK, despite actual specialists widely disputing this. On top of this, although he did paint the kaleidoscope cat portraits during this time, it was not the only things he painted, and he was quite capable of painting “normal” pictures of cats.
The Kaleidoscope Cat portraits are more images of him experimenting with colour and shapes, something the Smithsonian themselves state on their website.
Wain had actually made his entire living painting whimsical images of cats, often for product adverts, before he was incarcerated and was actually a very beloved artist at the time. When his friends learned of his incarceration, they started a collection of donation money to help transfer Wain to the Bethlam Royal Hospital instead, one of the best mental health facilities of the time. Even the Prime Minster of the time donated, and they raised a large amount of money across England to help him.
4 years later, Wain drew this as his final image which he released publicly
I knew all about “the Schizophrenic cat Guy” but he had always been presented to me as some tragic case of an artist going mad and his skills and work unraveling as he went insane.
Which is why I wanted to share this information which was new to me. And because I think it’s important.
“I am happy because everyone loves me” legit makes me tear up
