I had a thought about the game last night while I was sleeping. What if your main character is actually dead. Let's say you are a ghost wondering around trying to figure out why you are stuck in this place and how you died. You start off waking up, however a ghost would do that, and you see another ghost who basically takes you in and helps you understand how to get around in your new form (tutorial mode, anyone?). You remember bits and pieces of your life before death but you really don't have clue how you died. Your interaction with your environment is done in special ways. When you get within touching distance of a living being, you lose health (which could regenerate over time). You could have a mischief level where if you bring it too high by moving things around within sight range of shoppers then the store sends in some paranormal team that you will have to run from. Some intermediate levels of the mischief meter could just increase the number of people wondering around which in turn makes it harder to avoid getting too close to the living. A few people can see you (psychics or something) and they may be able to help you or hinder you on your quest. Maybe there would also be other ghosts besides the one who helped you in the beginning that you could interact with. So let's say there is a hallway you need to get through, but the people are too closely packed into that hallway so you have to do some tasks for the ghost that taunts people with the remote controlled car so that he/she will lend you the remote so you can drive the car around in the crowd to scatter them out and make room to squeeze through without getting too close to anybody. Some of the bosses in the game might have special goggles that make it so they can see you. Your self-proclaimed mission at the start is to find out what happened to you and how you get out of this limbo you are stuck in. As the story unfolds, you become sort of a Byronic hero among the other trapped spirits. There could be all sorts of conspiracies to choose from. Maybe the Every-Mart chain has found a way to use human spirits to power their facilities. Maybe a main baddy made a pact with some demon to have the most powerful shopping chain in the world and the demon requires human sacrifice. Maybe they use the bodies of their victims to produce some item. The story is still up in the air. Maybe you could later learn how to mimic the look of other people and briefly show yourself. Maybe you have to build up your skills for moving objects around. The story could get pretty deep. Let's say you keep having flashbacks of some person who you later realize was your spouse who had died in some freak accident. You remember that there was some confusion as to how he/she died and you find out through your investigations that he/she shared the same fate as you. It's got love. It's got reluctant heroics. It's got evil lurking about. It's got mystery. It's even got annoying puzzles to solve. What do you guys think?
A wondering spirit