#heartpunk

[punkeropercyjackson]

@rinverse Come collect your man /lh

[redsixwing]

[dizzyhslightlyvoided]

Concept: a game which starts out looking like this sort of cyberpunk open-world thing with a female protagonist locking horns with an Evil™ Corporation.™ By going through the game's ostensible main missions, you seem to get a complete but somewhat short experience, with a "things return to the status quo" ending; the main villain is a minor flunky who doesn't factor into the company's grand scheme of things, and they don't drop any retribution onto the protagonist for killing him, because he was becoming a liability anyway and she saved them the trouble of making Something Unfortunate happen to him themselves.

However, there's a sequence of hidden and apparently optional missions, which are all accessible the minute you get out of the tutorial; beating each one will not automatically show you how to get the next one, and you need to follow clues from the ending cutscene of the previous ones -- which make it increasingly clear that something weird is going on.

This culminates in an encounter where a brightly-colored talking animal shows up running away from a monster, which oneshots you in gameplay. In the ensuing cutscene, the brightly-colored talking animal gives the protagonist a magical girl transformation wand, and she transforms and defeats the monster with relative ease. This unlocks the real meat of the game, a heartpunk fight against the Evil™ Corporation™ itself, which secretly controls the world through magic in addition to money. You can still go through the mundane missions, but some of them have the option of tackling them magic-ways, which changes things up considerably.

This is all kept completely hidden from the playerbase. All the marketing only shows the mundane missions, and the developers might make offhand comments about "there's a few hidden missions we hope the players will find", but mostly they just won't mention it at all.

Bonus idea: an MMO which does this.

[defectivealtruist]

[dizzyhslightlyvoided]

Last night I dreamed that I was in high school, and that one of my RP characters had been blindfolded by Yukari Yakumo in such a way that I couldn't see the RP's interface. I found a box of macarons on the way to school, and I decided to take it with me. I was late because of a Daylight Savings Time kerfluffle, but this didn't cause any problems as I got escorted over to this government-funded lab -- y'know, in the high school -- which wanted to turn me into a government-controlled magical girl. (I smell a heartpunk story in there somewhere ...)

[dizzyhslightlyvoided]

Me: I’ve decided that this story I want to make is going to be a conventional magical girl story, not heartpunk, which would be too much treading new ground, especially if I’m going to get magical girls right in general. Creativity, what kind of setting should I make?

Creativity: *immediately belts out an entire cyberpunk "not-Earth" setting*

Me: okay first of all, what did I just say

[dizzyhslightlyvoided]

SOMEONE ON TWITTER CAME UP WITH THE TERM “HEARTPUNK” TO DESCIRBE MAGICAL GIRLS DESTROYING THE SYSTEM WITH FEELINGS AND NOW I HAVE A NEW AESTHETIC

EDIT: here’s the source fwiw