Immortal
In madness you dwell"
Metallica - The Thing That Should Not Be
Among its multitudinous benefits, a sturdy stock of biological trivia can let you guess exactly what critter's photos a visual artist was using as reference when designing this or that monster. Take the kraken's tentacles from D:OS2 for instance:
If that's not based on Schistosoma, I'll be a roundworm's uncle. But of course schistosomes aren't actually split; those two bodies really are two bodies... copulating. Which can only mean one thing for Original Carnal Sin's kraken: those aren't tentacles. They're gentacles!
It sets me a-thinkerin' as to why we don't see any Yivo-like invasions in computer games. Think of it as the logical extreme of Shadow of the Colossus: an entire game fought against a single contiguous entity. No separate kaiju, no heralds of its coming, no autonomous parasites or babies sloughing off it like in Cloverfield, no armies of mooks. Just a single physical being capable of eventually consuming the planet (in a literal sense) or mating with its tectonic plates, unless you, brave and handsome customer, can push back its incursion.
It need not be tentacular either. Tentacle monsters have been done to death. Amorphous blobs more so. I'm thinking something with a sea urchin aesthetic, skewering the landscape with its perfectly radiating rectilinearity, each spine upon contacting a surface setting off an entire new radial burst of spines which consume any matter at the point of impact to grow. Don't make it a standard evil black and red either, too cliche. Give it a soothing soft-toned aesthetic. You can even pad its spines with soft, fuzzy, felt-like surface textures.
As for what kind of game this would be, probably not an FPS or RTS given the absence of enemies to shoot. I'm thinking city simulator or base-building game. Let the player try to adapt to having the entire environment subsumed into the alien's body, struggling to dodge or divert new spines. Or maybe harvest the matter in front of the growing spines before they can contact and consume it? In fact, make it very slow-motion. Have entire generations of humans growing in the shadow of ever-encroaching alien metabolic takeover, until humanity itself ends up living atop a new planet consisting of a single alien space-urchin. In fact, make that the over-arching plot: technological advancement should eventually switch from harvesting ever-dwindling traditional resources like lumber, stone, petroleum, crops, etc. - to learning how to live off of the alien's metabolic waste or squamous sheddings.
No comments:
Post a Comment