2D Side Scroller Ideas : Girls Night!: Catacombs of Paris

As their baleful chittering echoed ceaselessly along the walls of the catacombs, I thought "Pity the dead for they do not know to what they awaken".

This game idea came to me as a platformer like 'Hollow Knight' or 'Blasphemous' with the twist that you play as something you wouldn't expect to find in a game like that like a clown or something. Then I saw this Tumblr post.

This solidified the idea into a dungeon crawler in which you control night out gone wrong. The concept of controlling a group as one entity lead to some interesting ideas such as player health being displayed as the number of members in the group à la 'Pikmin' or 'Carrion'. it also made me think about what if the enemies were scared of the player and run away and your job was to catch them rather than avoid them.

I would attempt to make this concept work in three levels with the first being a short series of encounters designed to show the player the controls, methods of movement etc. and the second and third would be puzzle-like for the player to solve.

The mechanics would be platforming plus some sort of attack like throwing bottles to hit the enemies creating simple combat encounters. This would escalate into having to escape the level while chasing down enemies to get through doors using this simple combat mechanics.

The end would be escaping the catacombs and the fail states would be loss of hp or failing to complete a challenge in a time.