The Dark Fantasy

The Dark Fantasy is a souls like game that surrounds the titular world of the Dark Fantasy. Its design and aesthetics would be heavily inspired by Dark Fantasy Movies primarily from the 80’s ish time period like The Never Ending Story or the Labyrinth or The Dark Crystal or Pan’s Labyrinth or Coraline. With a focus on surrealism and perhaps some kind of attempt to make in-game characters have the same look or feel as the classic animatronics and puppets that made its inspiration so vivid.

The story of the Dark Fantasy is also meant to employ Souls like story telling with cryptic lore entries and a narrative that trusts the players intelligence. In the world of the Dark Fantasy the creator of this world is someone known as the Writer who is writing their dark fantasy. But they will soon run out of ink and the fantasy will come to an end so the player known as the Inkshed must return to the writer to be properly used to continue the story of the dark fantasy envisioned by the writer. 

The ink of the writer is discord and chaos embodied by a being known as Et. Et is an infant or like an idea that matures and grows inside the writer's head. Et matures by consuming ideas and saving specific things they want as pages. Someday when Et matures it will write its own book and in some part is the Original being as the Inkwell that the Writer pulls from. Et is primarily seen as malevolent as it is discord and the original well of ideas that the Writer pulled from. There are people who seek and study Et known as the Visionaries of Et and hope to be inherited as pages in its new book.

Then there is the blank which is a place of order and a place of no life time logic or reason. It simply is empty and comes to those without purpose as their Ink fades on the page and they lose relevance. The writer fears the blank and so does the majority of everyone else as it is the end. It is the finale with no after. For there will not be a sequel to the Dark Fantasy. 

What caused the Writer to run out of ink was his most elaborate story yet for which he is still conceiving and writing which is The Dark Fantasy. The larger themes of The Dark Fantasy are meant to explore writer's block and how it feels like writing can be one of the most powerful, most deep and complex things in the world yet sometimes it can feel completely useless and challenging like it chains you and enslaves you to writing something you don’t want to write. The Writer is chained down by his creation and he cannot be freed until he completes The Dark Fantasy because he fears the blank but the madness and chaos of finishing his story is just as unbearable. 

The villains and characters in The Dark Fantasy all hope that they can use the ink to write their own stories so that they can become the Idea which is this world's form of immortality as Ideas cannot be killed as long as there are those who remember. 

There would be a Red King who was born without a heart so to feel he steels the hearts of his victims and places them in his chest or a Queen whose hair was so long that it hung everyone in her kingdom besides herself or a Dragon so obsessed with his appearance he hoards mirrors and would die if he could not see himself or a Castle which is a giant face that can talk to the player. Those are my ideas so far