Our game today involves an adventurous lady that travels the world, explores caves and temples and let’s say tombs, and interacts with supernatural relics. Sounds pretty familiar? But BAM! You don’t play as her. You play as the producer/assistant/camera person to a tomb raiding explorer.
Her deal is that she runs a reality show and instead of taking the artifacts, she just documents them and shares their stories with the people of the show watching world. She's cartoonishly attractive and wears your classic lady explorer tight tops, half vests, short shorts, and high boots. She knows she has fans that are just into her looks but she doesn't vamp it up. She's hot, she knows it, but she doesn't go out of her way to exploit it other than getting people to watch her show so she can share exciting stories and educate people.
But as is the way of the explorer, her finds are frequently threatened by mercenaries, evil researchers, and all kinds of people that want to exploit these artifacts for their own gains. Which is bad, but definitely makes the show that much more watchable.
Since you play as her assistant, the host is the one doing all the exciting action, but you're a helper and resupplier (short shorts don’t hold a lot of ammo). You're tasked with keeping her action in frame of the camera, pointing out clues, tossing her health packs or ammo, and generally being useful in puzzles like letting her climb you as a step stool to reach something, her using you to weigh down a pressure plate, or you holding something open for her. At the same time, you have to make sure you're dodging traps, enemies, or gunshots that were aimed at her but she dodged.
At the end of your first mission, you find the magical artifact, document it for the show, and then turn around and start to leave. You question what she's doing just leaving it there and she responds that it's not hers, she's not a thief. Our explorer is in it for the love of the raid, not profit. Since you documented the journey and broadcast it to the world, isn't she worried that other people will copy her journey? She says if somebody else can actually survive all she did, then they could steal it. But nothing stops her from stealing it from them...
Which will be a mission you have later on. You have to infiltrate a secret society and take back an artifact they lifted.
Getting better ratings leads to more money to buy supplies and upgrades (for your explorer, yourself, and the channel), and unlocking side missions where viewers write in with tips to finds she hadn’t heard about. Maybe a viewer’s grandma even has some fancy relic up in her attic that’s been in the family for generations, but the viewer just wants to get rid of it? Once the people of an area know that she’s in it for education and not to loot their cultural finds, the people that rightfully are in charge of these artifacts would be willing to point her in the direction of other relics that need care and protection.
I think playing the sidekick would be a fun way to lighten the load of how tedious combat, crate puzzles, and lining up jumping become in these type of games while still giving the player plenty of action and things to do.