Theme change, bad endings, and eldritch horror

[Manofdusk]

Still in the brainstorming process about the world I want to create and the best thing I've come up with is to throw stuff at a wall, get some feedback, and see what sticks.

A while back, I came up with an idea for a game that never got off the ground and I thought I'd try melding that idea within the framework of the new game, giving it more direction and story.

I once read somewhere that if you were going to make a story about eldritch horror, then you couldn't really do your story about anything else but eldritch horror... but is that really true?

Spoiler: First Draft Overview

I was originally going to have the game start off on the surface as a standard trope-filled fantasy. Save the kingdom, restore the life-giving crystals, be the hero!

but if you look hard enough, the threat the kingdom faces is not necessarily evil itself. The king is a bit of a tyrant and the rebellion has some legitimate grievances.

then, if you look harder, you find out you're not the first "Hero of Light" and this drama plays out roughly every 100 years or so... so whatever you do will only be temporary.

and then finally, if you look even deeper, you start to find clues that all this is being orchestrated somehow and the "Hero of Light" is essentially just a way to diversify the population. If you keep digging, you find that there is something alien behind this whole ordeal.

Next, is it alright to make the "good" endings the easiest to get? Where, the more effort you put into the game, the worse the endings seem to get until you find out that the 100% complete ending is the worst one of all?

Finally, what is your take on sudden, dramatic changes in mood and pacing? Naturally, the change has to make sense story-wise... but what happens if a standard fantasy game suddenly has a stage where it plays like a horror game? I'm not generally keen on throwing sudden mechanical changes in gameplay at a player when it's integral to the main story... but what about for "deeper" endings?

For example, you can get several of the endings just fine, but 1 or 2 endings are locked behind a completely different playstyle.

Thoughts?

 

[Kes]

Please remember that Game Mechanics Design is not about feedback on specific games, but a broader conceptual discussion of aspects of game play. It's fine to use your project as a springboard for that discussion, but be prepared for replies which do not address the specifics of your game.

 

[Manofdusk]

That was the idea. I was asking more about what people thought about those three mechanics in general than how they related to my game specifically.

Another thing I'm curious about is what other forms of "use crystals to save the world" type themes people have seen out there (and liked). The only one that comes to mind is "the world is dying".