guess why I’m listening to the Neotokyo soundtrack at the moment
If they’re into it, this game style has a lot of good narrative potential. I’ve seen games start to build escape room puzzles into them. Threat is manageable but can always be surprising – the ticking timer and the NPC spawns can be reasonably predicted but the roaming players are always a chaotic element. There’s space to hide and plan based on how the game is set up, and a little bit of space for narrative, even slow text dumps.
Puzzle setup is constrained but in a similar space as an MMO raid. You can breadcrumb players through repeated attempts and put dense pieces in there and know that it’ll be communicated. It’s a similar storytelling space as roguelikes have, too - the narrative of archeology.
Unlike a singleplayer game CUBA every match is a game that can be won or lost, it’s not a train track of imminent forward motion, and there’s a type of storytelling and progression that instanced, mission-based, and accretive. The real thing you should be mad at is how slowly studios are digging into the structure potential of Rainbow Six-style co-op mission games with the added surprise of random players. A lot of these games build the cover story but leave the game objectives blank, but you can tell any sort of mission goal inside a game with the real possibility of failure from 5 different axes.
Oh! This touches so close to so many things I’m doing