Sure, i'll do a trend! This one's been going around this week, though of course on twitter and such there's not much actual long-form discussion of what the inspirations mean so i'm giving that a go.
I feel like i could potentially have picked some more direct lines but i got this thought in my head and it really paints a nice picture of where this game came from.
Bloodborne (and Dark Souls et al.)
A friend of mine dragged me through introduced me to Dark Souls some years ago, and once it clicked i was hooked. The sparse and scattered approach to storytelling appeals to me so very much, and that is something i want to capture in my own creations.
I must confess, though... I haven't been able to play Bloodborne for myself.
I've never owned a playstation of any kind, and i wonder if the moment may have passed to where i'm too used to the polish of newer games.
To be clear, though, Bloodborne has certainly not suffered from this as much as other, older games, but for the time being i don't have a strong enough desire to go digging to see if i can play it myself.
One particular aspect of Bloodborne that i feel i have unintentionally channeled into Riptide Manor is the connections with the sea. The fishing hamlet, the lake, all that imagery is so compelling in a way that fits perfectly with cosmic horror.
Slay the Spire (among other roguelikes)
This one is much more of a direct throughline, and the most recent of the three.
At some point, likely while i was a teen, my older sister introduced me to roguelikes through Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup, which likely fostered my fascination with procedural generation and led me to keep an eye on roguelikes as the genre solidified, but Slay the Spire was a recommendation from that very same friend who pointed me at Dark Souls.
While i haven't made it particularly far in, and i'm not sure i see myself really loving it as a game, the status effect system played a big part in forming my own ideas for Riptide Manor, as well as reactivating my affection for the aesthetics of card games.
The branching-choice dungeon system that has become a staple of many modern roguelikes also lent to some decisions with the region-based structure of my own, though i suspect that owes more back to Stone Soup's dungeon branches and zones.
Twilight Princess (and the Legend of Zelda series in general)
I wasn't really sure what to put for the third inspiration at first.
Something of my own discovery of the furry community, perhaps, and how that has manifested in the game. But that didn't really end up bearing fruit in a concrete way, it was all just collective osmosis and broader design sensibilities.
What the Legend of Zelda, and Twilight Princess in particular brings to the table is the throughline with another worldbuilding project of mine and how Riptide Manor grew out of and influenced that.
I wrote a little bit about this a few times in the past, but these two concepts are likely to remain separate despite influencing other significantly.
Twilight Princess almost feels like me to be a precursor to what eventually became my love of Dark Souls. In the broad strokes, you have a third-person action fantasy game with (somewhat/very) dark themes and a very directed and artistic spin on semi-realism.
In the wake of the 3d Zelda series taking a bit of a back seat after Skyward Sword, Dark Souls filled that gap in my own game preferences wonderfully, and Elden Ring is currently the pinnacle of that (standing as a very interesting mirror to Breath of the Wild, which i enjoyed well enough but ended up losing interest in over time)
Can't think of a particularly satisfying way to wrap this up so that's all folks!
May the Curse leave you untouched.