Excited to share my master’s degree final project, GUTS: Parasite – a captivating second-person game.
Guts: Parasite is a top-down game, with an aesthetic inspired by the work of H.R.Giger and in second person. It is played from the perspective of a single enemy chasing the noise made by the playable character. The enemy is a humanoid creature resulting from an unsuccessful cloning attempt whose internal organs have turned outward and vice-versa. It is a blind creature, but with excellent hearing.
Revealed only by a luminous aura in a dark environment, the enemy pursues the player according to the noise he makes. The player’s actions momentarily reveal their position and surroundings according to the intensity of the resulting noise. Balancing strategy and rhythm between noise and silence is key to successfully completing each level.
Hope you’re well and having a wonderful week so far
Such a genuinely creepy project. The lighting and eerie-animations are done so well. They set the “tone” for horror perfectly. What initially inspired this, if you don’t mind answering?
Hi @PresumptivePanda thank you for your comment, I´m well and hope you are as well
To answer your question, once i watched this this video about second person games:
I found it very interesting, and one problem that seemed to be common to second person games was the confusing/disorienting gameplay and responsivity that came mostly from the camera placements. This video also helped me to understand what a second person game can be in therms of narrative/point o view.
From that I spent some time thinking about this issues, and thought that this problems could be fixed by having a top down camera where the characters orientation was common. For example if you are seeing your charater from the “eyes” of a NPC you might want to go to the NPC´s left and end up going right. Having this top down camera all orientations are the same.
To reinforce the ideia that this was a second person game, I made the npc blind with a very sharp earing and used the lights as representation of the NPC´s auditory sensations.
Then I also found the need to justify the second person aproach with the narrative. so I tough that those 2 characters are both clones of the same person (one of them got mutated) that share a kinda of colective mind, and i think this adds a layer of depth to the experiment.
I tought this subject had a lot of potencial so i decided to experiment on an academic study
First, thanks so much for taking the time to go so in depth and explain your thought process behind it Secondly, I definitely agree that second person is VERY rarely done well so I can understand the curiosity in improving it. And lastly, the “mutated” character idea was brilliant.
