Today’s game is a third-person hero action game set in an open city world. Think your Infamouses or Prototypes, which I think were probably recent and relevant at the time I first wrote this.
The game’s gimmick is that at the very beginning/after the tutorial, your character becomes mostly invulnerable. Punches, melee attacks, and gunshots can no longer kill you. You can’t be totally reckless though, because your hero still feels pain. Get hit too much in too short a time span, and they’ll go down for a moment in shock while their body heals, before getting back up. So the beginning chapter of the game is just you wrecking through the antagonist organization. Nobody knows how to deal with you so as the bad guys shoot you and the city cops open fire, you can handle all of it.
In the second chapter, the antagonists start to experiment, trying to figure out what your deal is. Cops call in more advanced teams so they’re just using heavier guns, but the villains are trying gas and electricity and nets to bring you down. The heavier stuff stuns you a bit faster, but the real threat is that if you go down, they’ll try to swarm and rush you to hold you down. You can shake them off as long as you don’t go down right in front of them, but if they’re close enough, they’ll use handcuffs or chains. If you get captured, you lose. Through upgrades and such, you eventually become more resilient and can withstand the heavier fire and won’t go down as easily. The idea of being worried about capture instead of being killed is what makes the character different.
In the remaining chapters, law enforcement and the evil organization start using bigger and more experimental tech on you. No longer just throwing out electric grenades, they’re using devices to try to shut down and numb specific limbs, so if you get zapped long enough in the arm, you can’t punch until you escape and shake it off. Or they might get a specific leg and you have to drag that as you try to find cover. Eventually, they’re using expanding foam globs to try to lock you in place, tethers that attach you to the environment that you need to destroy to free yourself, ice beams, hallucinogenic gas to screw with your vision or make you see things that aren’t there, and all kinds of super science that have their own effects and impacts on movement or how you attack. And their weapons would affect the environment too. They could tether a car at you to slam you back. Or if they miss you with the freeze ray, the ground is now slippery, so if you jump down on it, you’ll slide around and fall to the ground.
This could be a fun way to handle comic book characters that are too strong to balance a normal game around. Now that the Netflix shows reintroduced Luke Cage to the general population, systems like this would be a neat way to handle characters with that kind of power/invulnerability. So, you know, give me a ring, companies.
An engineer I worked with was really shitty about this idea when I was talking about the concept over lunch and that really bummed me out and I never ended up pitching the idea to the company. Now many years later and with the wisdom of time, man, fuck that guy.