Animal Crossing, but Dark Souls
Set in the world of Dark Souls during an unspecified time when the Fire has begun to fade again, you play as the new fire keeper of a bonfire in the middle of procedurally-generated nowhere, with naught else to call yours but a few stone steps near a moldy tree and a large, flat, moderately special-looking rock to sleep on.
If you build it, they will come (and sit)
Sitting on one of those steps, and leaning against that moldy tree, will be the first two of an eventual handful of undead that will call your bonfire home a place to contemplate the futility of their existence. These “firesiders” (called such in UI but not dialog) are the equivalent of Animal Crossing’s villagers, and are generated in Animal Crossing style from a list of unique personalities and nihilistic philosophies. As you slowly build up your isolated bonfire into a full-fledged shrine, new firesiders will arrive when you add new staircases for them to sit on, or sufficiently-tall, moody scenery for them to lean against.
Passed a certain limit you may need to complete quests to add more firesiders. A number of firesiders can be made into merchants, perhaps with some kind of system whereby a portion of their stock is determined by the combination of their merchant type and personality type. That’s not especially funny, though, so I’ll stop talking about it. There are also traveling merchants that you unlock as your shrine grows, one of which is, of course, Patches. Spend too many souls at Patches’ store in a single day and he’ll start following you around, waiting for a chance to kick you off a cliff as punishment for your avarice and materialism.
Other activities
- Keep your bonfire and its surroundings clean of paradimensional bloodstains that accumulate throughout the day
- Catch vagrants with an upgradable vagrant net, using their cores of condensed, tortured humanity as fuel to kindle your bonfire to new heights
- Explore the distant, enemy-infested reaches of your territory with no means of attack whatsoever
- Find something cool? Return with it quickly and conveniently by dying horribly!
- Basically it’s all suicide runs, all the time
- Do whatever it is that you do to acquire souls, since I’ve just ruled out killing anything
- Find random Chosen undead resting at your bonfire on occasion. They don’t speak or do much else to demonstrate a personality, but after you level them up they’ll temporarily reduce the enemies in a random area for you.
- Raise a firesider’s obsession high enough and they might be willing to do the same for an area of your choosing. Just be willing to put up with their increased self-pity and much uglier mug after they get killed in the process.
- Run interference to stop Chosen undead from completing your firesiders’ questlines, inevitably resulting in their doom. Find their quest items before the Chosen can and chuck them off a cliff.
- Or feed them to primordial serpent Monch, once you’ve unlocked him
- Invade other fire keepers’ worlds to…
- Leave messages on the ground of dubious meaning or value
- Be rude to their firesiders
This may make them upset enough to mention you to their fire keeper exactly once, possibly with such descriptors as “uncouth” or “churlish”
- Engage in commerce with their firesiders that are merchants (but only before you’ve been rude to them)
Dialog
Firesiders will take every opportunity to express their intense creeds and/or gloomy manifestos in kitschy medieval sentence structure all while teasing cryptically at a lore-rich past or dropping clues for where to find their latest quest item. All such dialog is “voiced” with procedurally-generated babble like Animal Crossing, except…
- It will not sound like “cute cartoon animal that talks too fast”, but have an identifiably human-adult pitch and cadence.
- It will always end with a recorded laugh from the same actor who did the babble phonemes, with the same pitch shift applied, so you will hear the same voice switch suddenly from generated babble to real laughter.
- This should be disturbing every single time.
Art style
Cute, chibi proportions that plunge deep into the uncanny valley when combined with Dark Souls’ dark fantasy realism. Like Jump Force, but hopefully worse, and entirely on purpose.
Real-Time Mechanics
Like Animal Crossing, the world clock is synced to the system clock, affecting the day/night cycle, Firesider schedules (such as they are), shop schedules, seasons, and construction time. Mostly. The Fire is fading, so time doesn’t always behave as you expect.
Time away
Also like Animal Crossing, the game “continues” while you aren’t playing. Coming back to your shrine after having not played in a while, you will see that bloodstains have accumulated in your absence. Your neglected firesiders may also start looking a bit hollow. Or, if it’s been long enough, a lot hollow. Never so hollow that they attack you, though (unless you count passive aggression). Their morale will likely not improve until you’ve completed whatever tedious activity yields enough humanity sprites to give everyone (including yourself) healthy skin again.
There’s a small, random chance that, after a long time away, you’ll load the game into a scene where the bonfire is cold and your fire keeper is nowhere to be seen. A Chosen undead will appear holding a fire keeper soul, and place it on your sleeping rock (or whatever other fully-stone bed you’ve upgraded to), where your fire keeper’s body will reform and awaken like normal. The Chosen will then wander off before you can talk to them (not that they can speak anyway). It will not be directly explained to you, but you will be able to infer from the others’ indirect references and the absence of one of your firesiders (which one chosen based on how many hidden obsession points you’ve “earned” with them) that you were murdered by the missing firesider and they absconded with your soul for a bit. But then a random Chosen murdered them back and recovered your soul, so everything is fine again. Except that your murderer is gone forever now, already replaced with someone new.
What to call it?
Dark Souls IV, just to fuck with people.
