Games we Wish we Could Make, part XVI

[Amake]

It's been a while since we had one of these threads. Pity, since the collective mind of the chat came up with at least two really neat games in the past couple of days that went largely unrecorded. But we'll just have to see what we can remember.

First there was a game which despite liberal and vigorous brainstorming we could not come up with a better title than "A game with wizards who drive cars." Essentially, what this would be is GTA: San Andreas with all of the cars, the characters, the missions, the maps and the thuggery stripped out and replaced with different cars, characters, missions, maps and wizards. We'd have a sturdy RPG system in place for training your character in a variety of spellcaster classes, and let you engage in drive-by fireballs, thirty-car pileup spells of mass destruction, disintegrating cab drivers and making the highways twist and crumble under your cosmic power.

It would at least be a pretty original sandbox game.

And then someone mentioned making a game with Slenderman in it. That to me immediately sounds like potentially the most uncanny, disturbing and frightening game yet made. Here's what I'm picturing: A convincing reality simulation game possibly along the lines of Shenmue or Oblivion or even Harvest Moon, where you can go along with your daily life without even trigging what the game is about. You might catch an odd story in the newspaper or an unlikely rumor, or a friend may say something just a little bit off, or you may think you see something in the corner of your eye, but it doesn't have to go any further than that. You can still back away.

But there's something moving in the trees, in the dark, late at night. If you look the wrong way at the wrong time, you might see him. He becomes more real and more powerful the more you think about him, and you'll start seeing glimpses of faces everywhere. The world may slowly turn, gradually, into a paranoid nightmare and before you realize it you're halfway into the scary part of Silent Hill and your friends and family start looking at you funny and one time you swear you woke up in the middle of the night and saw something outside the window, though you live on the third floor. You get sucked in, sucked down into strange depths and no one can tell you that there's no way to win this game, no way to survive unless you remember that it's just make believe and put the controller down.

If you follow me.