Planned indie game about psychology and relationships

[gekiganwing]

While trying to catch up with news on Indie Game Festival, I bumped into an interesting article that originated on Joystiq. So there's this person called Benjamin Rivers who made a horror game called Home (that I apparently forgot about or never noticed...), and who's now discussing creating a romance game about "...psychologically influencing the player in subtle ways, though this time the goal will be to induce emotional attachment to a fictional character."

[Sapphi]

Maybe I'm missing something because I'm not familiar with Persona, but how exactly is this different from already-existing games and stories? The good ones ALWAYS pull you in and induce emotional attachment to the characters. Is this like the more specific "caress your heart then yank it out and stomp on it" genre?

[gekiganwing]

That's a good question, Sapphi. In the article that I linked, the creator talks about wanting to reduce "video game-y" elements such as relationship points. But I don't have much more information at this time. It might be a while before the person talks about the setting, premise, art style, whether or not there will be gameplay, etc.

(I tried Persona 3, but it didn't hold my interest. I played and liked Persona 4 despite a lot of complaints. Also, it's easy to forgot that P3 and P4 are rather different from the first two games in the series... and that the Shin Megami Tensei franchise is huge, with dozens of varied games and sub-series.)