ITT: What storyhooks do you find strangely absent in vidya?

ITT: What storyhooks do you find strangely absent in vidya?

Thinking about it lately i've been unable to think of a game based on the 'doppelganger/bodysnatcher' phobia. The truman show tier paranoia that everyone around you has been replaced and you are part of some experiment or exercise without your knowledge.

This seems like an idea that would have been good for a horror game but the closest thing i can think of is that terrible third person shooter based on the film The Thing.

What story hook do you think needs more love in vidya?

D2 also had that plot, kinda.
But D2 is really fucking bad, and really fucking weird.

I still believe D2 was some obscure fetish porn sold by accident in the west as a horror game.

Alan Wake's American Nightmare uses doppelganger fear, though a bit differently

Dude, SNATCHER…

SS13 has changelings

Basically one or more players are selected to be an alien that can assume other people's identities and are tasked with murdering certain other players.

Good luck finding a server that isnt garbage though.

much as i love remedy mr scratch was probably sam lakes most poorly written character, a good doppelganger story is about the world at large being unaware of the replacements who are sinister because they are relying on lying, guile and trickery.

Scratch was kind of just a shit freddy krueger.

I still don't get Mr. Scratch. Why would Zane make him? Why'd he go batshit? Why the fuck would a writer, who should be fully aware of the literary implications of the name Mr. Scratch, name his creation that?

Eternal Darkness has that between Max (and thus the player), and the bonethieves: skinny fucking things with scythe like arms that cut into people's necks and burrow their way in, taking possession of the host as a meat puppet to be used to further their patron god's agenda. Gets to the point it's hard to exactly tell during Max's chapter which of the Roivas mansion servants are possessed and which aren't (prior to them attacking), and which are just Max beginning to snap as he swears he sees a servant dump human organs in a pot to cook for dinner (going by flavor text when talking to some).

And then of course, sometime after his chapter, he massacres his remaining servants, gets taken to court, declared insane, and tossed in a hellhole asylum where he wastes away and dies, since no one would believe him.

They're not real fun to fight either. They're fast, if they manage to possess the character it's a game over, and when their host body is ruined, the burst forth from it to find a new one, causing a tremendous sanity drain when witnessed. Oh, and the Xel'lotath ones don't have a weakspot because they don't fucking have a head. Thankfully they're low health, low defense.

NO, YOU ARE THE DEMON

Only one I can remember doing this in recent memory is Uchikoshi(?) with Zero Escape and his other games.

I still lost that round but it was fun as fuck

In Baten Kaitos, you technically play as the main character's guardian spirit or something to that effect.

Ar Nosurge had the player be an actual character with a robot body acting as your avatar and your console as the control panel.

It's really well written too, the heroes and villains call you out on sitting safely on your couch while everyone risks their lives and there's a lot of emotional tension stemming from the characters relying and being forced to trust on an outside entity

best chapter, rats.wav

For your sake, there had better be another Ar Nosurge you're referring to, because this one was NOT well written.

The plot was decent and serviceable, nothing fantastic. Was mostly referring to the characters and their genometrics. That was the shit right there, quality was vastly superior to the actual story.

I love how afterward, if you go to check the autopsy logs, you can actually hear Max describing them. Always made be think it was some sort of remnant of when Max was on trial, as if he was presenting his sketches and descriptions as evidence that he was telling the truth. Which of course just makes him look like even more of a nutcase.

His voice actor did a really good job (he also voiced Dingodile in Crash 3). Shame he died a few years after Eternal Darkness.

...

Thats technically half of the plot of bloodborne and the other half is dagon/shadow over innsmouth.

It really isn't though. The Dreamland is strange, almost psychedelic, a Dunsanian fantasy world. Bloodborne is grey, gothic, not at all as I imagine the cities of Sarnath or Celephais to look.