In the near future, telekinetic telepathic technology has just been invented, and you are a detective tasked with using said technology to solve crimes. However, the thought processes of each new suspect are wildly different than the last, and so to decipher their thoughts, you have to know them - to understand their skills and weaknesses, their values and doubts, such that you can reverse engineer the meaning of all the words, images, and other far more nebulous things swirling around in their head. But as time goes on you start to notice things - patterns in the nature of these people’s arrest, people who were playing the part of another suspect, and among a few of them, what almost seems like a telekinetic code to be deciphered. But most importantly, the pattern that is the most resounding to you is that so very rarely does the person in front of you feel like they deserve to be there. After all, you’re obligated to know them, and you’ve seen inside their minds - there seems to be a severe lack of truly bad people on your doorstep. Maybe it would be worthwhile to crack open the mind of one of your coworkers…
This is actually pretty similar to a game I wanted to make once, but one I also eventually shelved and then dropped after about four long years of working on it on the side and burning out. I didn't consider representing thoughts in different mediums, but I definitely did play with a few major ideas:
- Knowing someone's thoughts is not the same as knowing the truth, so you might try to get a key piece of evidence but it's not there anymore or it might not have existed to begin with.
- Your idea of what a word means doesn't necessarily align with what a word means for someone else. You won't automatically understand someone by reading their thoughts.
- You might not necessarily know which thoughts came from which person.
You can still get and play the prototype on itch that was the original starting point for the game, but hopefully one day I can revisit this game idea again and make it into a full game. You can definitely make a fun game with these mechanics (I certainly think the gamejam prototype is good, even if rough). The idea of representing thoughts in a different medium is a fun idea that I would like to play with in the future too.
