context
Can't remember who said it but the last time this was posted someone came up with "Harriet Potter and the Live Laugh Lost Kitty" and that's just perfect.
That concept lives rent free in my head, not least of which because I see how it could actually be made to work: by layering the game space over three parallel settings--an idealized vision of a cozy small town, a dying rustbelt small town, and a neighborhood in a cyberpunk city--that the game just sort of flows between day-to-day without skipping a beat, with a protagonist that's just "what if Akko from LWA was a burnt out grad student with a substance abuse problem and a god complex," and also the cat smokes cigarettes and becomes your sidekick after the first act because it's the only other character that can see how completely fucked everything is. Just really lay on the tonal dissonance without acknowledging it while playing with themes of how the idealized past was also fucked, the hopelessness of decay, and the seeming absence of a future that's anything but an intensification of that hopelessness and decay.
So basically the exact opposite of what the pitch is intending.
Day 1: I'm a young witch in a small village in the fantasy alps trying to find her lost kitty!
Day 2: (As i'm waking up and stepping outside, cute art style breaking down before my eyes, slowly turning into DE-style) wait I'm a middle aged unemployed tarot-obsessed woman in a small decaying town. My kitty went missing 20 years ago. I'm actually trying to find my missing child? Niece?
Day 3: (After failing an impossible skill check in the middle of a seemingly normal conversation) wait, i'm a young witch? middle aged woman? both? wait you, the person i'm having a conversatoin with, is the cat?
Day 4: I had a dream that the two versions are actually both equally fake, Philip Dick, style, and i'm living in a dystopian future where engaging with simulated possible parallel versions of myself and the happiness/pain of living in a world with trees and breathable air is the only meaningful job in this world. also cats have been uplifted to human intelligence level and can talk
Days 5-6: is it or isn't it?
Day 7: Haha just kidding i was just a witch the whole time, the evil wizard made me imagine weird stuff haha, and i found my kitty, yayyy (bad ending)
Disco Elysium's writing is so good because of it's grimy setting, and how grounded the characters are in it. I mean there are other reasons. But Martinaise is a massive part of it.
Like some of the best fiction, the setting itself is a character.
