- more under cut -
Little Red Riding Hood x Transistor Story
The game is set in the early 1800s, during the industrial revolution.
Red is a delivery girl for her mother (who is purveyor of mysterious goods for eccentric socialites), and tasked with carrying a comically large package to the great city of Grandmere, to be delivered to a man named Lou Garou. She travels through train to the outskirts of the city, though an issue at the receiving station forces her to travel by foot the rest of the way. The trees surrounding the city are blackened by the coal used to power the trains. The soot forest thins out slowly as Red gets closer to the city, to be replaced with young white saplings, some forcing their way through cracked concrete to spread their roots.
The city is empty when she arrives.
When she tries to make the delivery, no one answers the door. Knocking on the door causes it to push open to reveal a destroyed interior and a man lying, shaking on the floor. With his last breath he warns her to run, and to take the package with her. White trees sprout from his body, which collapses before taking the form of a ghostly spirit wolf. The package Red is delivering catches on some splintered wood panel and tears open to reveal a giant pair of scissors engraved with “Huntsman”. She makes a grab for them and fights the spirit wolf, which runs away after she wounds it with the scissors.
When Red walks outside again, the white trees have grown in more densely. Some of the roads are completely blocked off by the trees, making it impossible to return the way she came.
Red encounters more spirit animals while navigating the broken roads -- some are aggressive while others leave her alone or ran away. Though she tries to leave the city, the trees block off most of the paths. She fights a stag and then a bear before making her way into the depths of the city, the trees growing thicker and taller the closer she gets to the center. Any creatures she defeats fade away into nothing.
After fighting through the sprawling mess of trees, Red finds herself in a clearing with green grass and a small lake, all hidden in the shadow of a tree of monstrous proportions. When she gets closer to the tree, the wolf sprints at her from the shadows and attacks. After the fight, as Red is about to strike the final blow, the spirit tears itself from the body of the man she was originally supposed to deliver the Huntsman to and pours into her own consciousness, filling her mind with visuals of what the forest used to be, green and healthy and teeming with life. Then a gradual shift as people came to live there and build their pollutants, then trains coming through and the animals inside the old forest choking on the soot released by the engines. “Give me the Huntsman and you can leave our forest -- we want nothing from you but the safety of our home.”
The story then splits into two possible endings for the player to choose from. Red can kill the wolf and dispel the spirit forest, or leave the Huntsman in the clearing and let the forest reclaim the city.
I want to keep the same art style and color palette as Transistor for the “monsters”. (White with red and black accents.) The setting / style for Transistor is art deco with organic shape influences, rounded geometric designs for the Process, and a society vs technology theme. I want to set my story in the early 1800s, near the end of the Industrial revolution. The style of the environment would be Victorian with organic shape influences and organic designs for the spirits and a theme centered around the effects of the Industrial revolution on nature.
As for Little Red Riding Hood: The "grandmother" in the original story is adapted to be the city she travels to. The "wolf" is the first spirit she fights, and the huntsman will be the pair of scissors (which in the original story were used to cut open the wolf's stomach). It feels appropriate thematically because the Huntsman is being used to free humans from the insides of animal spirits.
No comments:
Post a Comment