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Oct. 9th, 2016 01:48 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
ysobelInteresting dream last night -- kind of bits and pieces of a video game, similar in genre and style to Vagrant Story.
So it started with a semi-blocked-off stairway leading down into darkness; it was too blocked off to descend, but crossing the threshold is what triggered everything. There was something about "the diamonds are behind the pictures".
Anyway, at some point later you fall through the floor into the lower levels, and there's no way to get back up, so you have to find one of the proper exits. (Kind of like how in Minecraft you can dig down and fall into a cave complex that you can then explore, only without the option of building a column to get back up.)
For a while you're on your own, and you have a flashlight but there's sometimes different stuff depending on how much light there is -- at one point there was a room full of bees, but in the previous room there was glow in the dark writing on the wall about how to get through the room of bees safely, except you only could see the writing if you turned the flashlight off. (There was also a similar thing with a room full of snakes, which you could get through as long as you moved slowly.)
Anyway, at some point -- I didn't experience the whole thing; it was more like skipping to the next cut scene, and in fact in the dream I had to look up the Wikipedia article summarizing the storyline so I could figure out what I missed -- you end up partying with two other people, I think NPCs, a white guy named Simon and a black woman named Sarah, and you make a pact to get all three of you out alive. Except then you see ghost-writing appearing on a wall (you see it, the others don't) saying "... she's not coming back".
At this point it became this odd combination of time travel and ghost story. It's disjointed because I was skipping around -- the in-dream Wikipedia lookup happened because I wanted to know how we'd gotten to where we were -- but there was one thing that we were told about how someone had locked her adult son in his room and then destroyed the stairs leading up (with the implication that this had been several hundred years ago).
And then there was a climax sort of thing where we'd found fancy dress outfits that let us travel back in time to deal with the situation as it happened rather than just dealing with the ghosts. There was some sort of thing that we needed to get in order to change history, and I had some sort of glass-ish thing over one eye that let me see the thing and also let me see which people were ghosts and which were real.
The game actually had two possible endings. The main one involved Sarah deciding to stay behind because there was this thing where a black activist guy in the past timeline had killed a bunch of slaves to "free" them, and it was known as the African Killing Fields, and said activist guy was around at the past-timeline event, and Sarah wanted to persuade him to do non-violent education-type stuff, I think primarily aimed at white kids, so that race relations would be better in the future.
I think, actually, that the trigger for the different endings was that it turned out that someone had to stay in the past in order for things to work correctly, and the default was Sarah volunteering to stay behind, hence the earlier ghost-writing, but you as the player character could talk her out of it and volunteer to stay yourself.
And if you chose the alternate ending, there was a postscript cut scene where Simon and Sarah were meeting at a coffee shop and discussing how modern food tasted like dust (because they had eaten food at the event in the past), and when they realized it was true for both of them, they went back and put on the time-travel-y clothes so they could eat ghost food.
So it started with a semi-blocked-off stairway leading down into darkness; it was too blocked off to descend, but crossing the threshold is what triggered everything. There was something about "the diamonds are behind the pictures".
Anyway, at some point later you fall through the floor into the lower levels, and there's no way to get back up, so you have to find one of the proper exits. (Kind of like how in Minecraft you can dig down and fall into a cave complex that you can then explore, only without the option of building a column to get back up.)
For a while you're on your own, and you have a flashlight but there's sometimes different stuff depending on how much light there is -- at one point there was a room full of bees, but in the previous room there was glow in the dark writing on the wall about how to get through the room of bees safely, except you only could see the writing if you turned the flashlight off. (There was also a similar thing with a room full of snakes, which you could get through as long as you moved slowly.)
Anyway, at some point -- I didn't experience the whole thing; it was more like skipping to the next cut scene, and in fact in the dream I had to look up the Wikipedia article summarizing the storyline so I could figure out what I missed -- you end up partying with two other people, I think NPCs, a white guy named Simon and a black woman named Sarah, and you make a pact to get all three of you out alive. Except then you see ghost-writing appearing on a wall (you see it, the others don't) saying "... she's not coming back".
At this point it became this odd combination of time travel and ghost story. It's disjointed because I was skipping around -- the in-dream Wikipedia lookup happened because I wanted to know how we'd gotten to where we were -- but there was one thing that we were told about how someone had locked her adult son in his room and then destroyed the stairs leading up (with the implication that this had been several hundred years ago).
And then there was a climax sort of thing where we'd found fancy dress outfits that let us travel back in time to deal with the situation as it happened rather than just dealing with the ghosts. There was some sort of thing that we needed to get in order to change history, and I had some sort of glass-ish thing over one eye that let me see the thing and also let me see which people were ghosts and which were real.
The game actually had two possible endings. The main one involved Sarah deciding to stay behind because there was this thing where a black activist guy in the past timeline had killed a bunch of slaves to "free" them, and it was known as the African Killing Fields, and said activist guy was around at the past-timeline event, and Sarah wanted to persuade him to do non-violent education-type stuff, I think primarily aimed at white kids, so that race relations would be better in the future.
I think, actually, that the trigger for the different endings was that it turned out that someone had to stay in the past in order for things to work correctly, and the default was Sarah volunteering to stay behind, hence the earlier ghost-writing, but you as the player character could talk her out of it and volunteer to stay yourself.
And if you chose the alternate ending, there was a postscript cut scene where Simon and Sarah were meeting at a coffee shop and discussing how modern food tasted like dust (because they had eaten food at the event in the past), and when they realized it was true for both of them, they went back and put on the time-travel-y clothes so they could eat ghost food.