A metroidvania where your main character deals with a manifestation of burnout, depression, anxiety and imposter syndrome.
You’re a spirit from a family entrusted with making sure the forest enjoys a perpetual summer. Marked by an infection called “the rot” creeping into the forest signaling the end of the eternal summer is approaching it is now your turn to be entrusted with the task of bringing the spark of life to the summit of the mountain so that the forest can enjoy another era of summer as it has unbroken for eons.
With your family’s mantle of summer on your back allowing you to draw on the powers of the spark of life to push back the rot you set out on this adventure, but you find that the rot has come back different, no longer just an infectious growth it now manifests as monstrous beings endangering the lives of the people around you. You help your fellow spirits on your adventure until you ultimately fail in your quest, bringing an end to summer.
The rest of the game you must learn to deal with your inner demons as you grapple with depression, anxiety and self-sabotage in order to fix what you broke.
Movement is a big one with a tight flow of combat.
Terms and titles such as the Spark of Life, The Weight of Winter and the Mantle of Summer are placeholder and should be treated as such.
The story is divided up into three acts, each taking place in different seasons as the eternal summer is coming to an end. Each season brings with it changes as a new act begins, making sure that backtracking in the game allows you to explore old areas again in a different light. Each act also comes with a time skip of a few weeks and changes in how the protagonist acts and behaves towards other characters.
| Act/Season | World State | Protagonist Behavior | NPC Dynamic |
| Act 1: Summer | More linear, lush, vibrant | Confident facade, hiding anxiety | Hero helps the locals |
| Act 2: Autumn | Non-linear, decaying, foggy | Avoiding people, doesn’t wanna stay around people long | Rejects help out of shame |
| Act 3: Winter | Expanded world, non-linear/open, frozen over, extra hostile | Facing their demons | Asks for, and accepts help |
For generations, a forest kingdom has thrived in a perpetual summer, sustained by a relic called the Spark of Life. Guardianship of this eternal cycle belongs to a single lineage, passed down through the Mantle of Summer; a majestic cape that channels the Spark's power.
The game begins as the Rot (a primordial infectious and corrupting force) creeps back into the grove. Forced by family duty to inherit a mantle that physically and emotionally feels too large, a young, anxious spirit is tasked with carrying the Spark to the mountain summit to renew the summer.
As the protagonist climbs, they find the Rot has mutated into aggressive, monstrous forms. Unprepared and drowning in self-doubt, they must learn to wield the cape's unfamiliar magic on the fly. Along the way, they aid local townspeople, desperately hiding their panic behind a fragile facade of heroic confidence.
At the summit, the pressure triggers a severe psychological spiral. In a horrifying twist, the primordial Rot further latches onto the protagonist’s intense imposter syndrome, using their own insecurities to manifest stronger and bigger monsters ravaging the forest. Paralyzed by the realization that they are feeding the corruption, the hero chokes, dropping the Spark of Life and plunging the world into dark defeat.
The forest is decaying and shrouded in mist, summer is clearly over and some time has passed; everything is starting to get choked and trapped by overgrown vines. The world is now theoretically completely open, but you cannot visit all zones until Act 3 due to key upgrades.
Because of his failure, the protagonist isolates himself. He only camps outside towns and outposts, if there are any (with camping serving as the bench mechanic). The NPCs he helped in Act 1 try to help him and seek him out, but the protagonist lies and pushes them away.
The Rot truly feeds on these emotions. When he rests, he releases his bottled-up anxiety, which serves as the enemy respawn mechanic. So, The Rot doesn't really have a goal because it is a force, and that force is actually made dangerous by the protagonist. He also sees that the Rot he failed to stop is actively impacting people's lives.
Believing he can brute-force a solution entirely on his own to prove his worth, the protagonist fights his way back up to the mountain summit.
Along the journey, his anxiety builds to a suffocating mental state. He pins all his hopes on this moment, viewing it as his absolute path to redemption, and the psychological pressure becomes too much to bear.
Upon arriving at the peak (again), he finds the heart of the Rot has become completely inaccessible to him, as he is defeated by his worst fears made manifest as he fought everything he was scared of.
He fundamentally fails to save the world on his own.
The world has plunged into a harsh, unyielding winter. Everything is frozen solid, and the forest spirits face extreme hardship due to a total lack of reliable sources of food. Mechanically, the environment shifts: previously impassable rivers and lakes are now frozen over, allowing the player to walk across the ice to access the final zones.
At first, the protagonist tries to ignore the disaster entirely, desperately hoping that if he pretends his failures don't exist, he can just move on with his life. Naturally, this avoidance fails completely.
He finally accepts that he cannot brute-force this alone and must do the hardest thing possible: voice his failure and ask for help. It is an immense psychological hurdle, forcing him to confront his deepest, rawest shame.
The protagonist must explore the frozen world to locate the scattered NPCs he aided back in Act 1 and offered him their help in Act 2. Most are fiercely willing to support him, offering powerful upgrades and working together to mend his tattered cape.
However, one specific NPC refuses to help, harboring deep resentment: "If you had just accepted our help in the beginning, none of this would have happened." Convincing them is impossible; the relationship is permanently fractured. This confrontation is the manifestation of the protagonist's absolute worst nightmare: facing someone who is genuinely angry with him without influence of the Rot.
During the final boss fight against the core of the Rot, the primordial force weaponizes this lingering guilt, taking the physical shape of the unforgiving NPC. But this time, the protagonist prevails, not through solo strength, but because he is finally sustained by the tools, warmth, and collective support of the community that stood by him.
Moving Beyond Self-Punishment
The protagonist finally overcomes his profound self-hatred. Instead of staying paralyzed in passive despair or continuing to punish himself for his mistakes, he actively learns how to adapt and navigate the winter. He refuses to give up.
Lost Summer
the Spark of Life is never recovered. It still exists somewhere in the world, evidenced by the lingering energy powering his winter cape, but the era of an artificial, perpetual summer is gone forever.
In its place, a normal climate returns to the forest. The kingdom will now experience the natural cycle of changing seasons, complete with its own highs and lows. Life goes on, permanently altered but resilient.
The fact that you can’t restore the endless summer is meant to show that healing from mental illness isn’t about returning to exactly who you were before, because you can never truly go back. It is about accepting the change, healing your scars and moving forward into a new season.
Spring has arrived, and we have dialogue and some moments showing that mental health isn’t a problem to be permanently “solved” but an ongoing and lifelong process. Overcoming the crisis of an eternal winter doesn’t mean the protagonist is suddenly “cured” or fixed. It simply means he has acquired the tools and support to go on.
If the game does well, I’d like to add a boss rush mode that has narrative ties and takes place during the spring. The protagonist discovers a hidden cave warped by a strange, reality-bending time anomaly, allowing him to challenge and defeat past bosses over and over again. At first glance, this loop appears therapeutic, a healthy way for the protagonist to "face his fears" and conquer his past traumas.
But we will drive certain behavior by having an achievement and a new final boss after the player executes a perfect, deathless run of the boss rush. We tease that because of the time anomaly we might get the spark of life back and bring back the endless summer after all if they achieve this feat.
But then we add a twist that the final boss doen’t bring back the spark of life but instead is the confrontation that our protagonist has become obsessed with achieving this perfect run. And this is actually a regression instead of progress because he so desperately tried to get back to how it was before.
And if we ever do a sequel I want our protagonist to become the antagonist.
The cape serves as the surface for upgrades in our game through two main pathways: pins & patches
These upgrades change how you play the game based on your own choices. So new attacks for example could be pins because you can change them out. Maybe have fixed positions for ranged, heavy and light attack pins. (Maybe they’re different shapes?)
These are the large unlocks, think things like new movement abilities and once unlocked they stay unlocked. These are all based on story progress. Some might be optional quests but you cannot swap them out.
| Act/Season | Pins | Patches |
| Act 1: Summer | Limitedly available (to show the player you will have upgrades) mostly given to the player, some are found. | Not available |
| Act 2: Autumn | Broadly available from vendors, hidden areas and achievements | Based on story progression |
| Act 3: Winter | Broadly available from vendors, hidden areas and achievements | Based on story progression |
The cape is an heirloom passed down the generations of your family. And represents the expectation for everything to stay the same and parental expectations from a narrative perspective. You are told to take care of it above all else, and to change nothing about it. Basically keep everything exactly as it is.
You start the game with certain pins already on there, and the first time you get a new pin there’s maybe dialogue about “Oh god if my dad found out I’m changing things he’ll lose his shit”.
When you first wear the cape, it’s too big, it’s heavy and it really doesn’t fit you. You feel uncomfortable in it. It should visually be a bit too long too as it drags over the floor.
After Act 1 the cape is heavily damaged; it’s shorter and you at first want to fix it to be like it was before. But over Act 2 and Act 3 we learn that we don’t need to really abide by the expectations placed on us, and we can change it however we like.
We eventually end up repairing it but we also made it our own. Becoming our own person as opposed to being the person people wanted us to be.
Totally different from the modifiers system found in “Mina the Hollower”, shut up…
The game features a system to make the game more punishing or forgiving allowing for changes to the gameplay to be made by the user as opposed to difficulty settings.
We could even have burdens that swap out bosses for more difficult versions of that boss.
And we lock out certain achievements for specific graces and award achievements of using certain burdens.
Examples of burdens and graces:
Fast-paced combat with movement that has momentum.
Different attacks that the player can find in the world and slot in and out via the cape’s “pins”.
Our bench mechanic is camps, our protagonist sets up camps in certain spots to go to bed and rest. It is when he rests that he lets go of some anxiety which causes the enemies to respawn.
When you rest at a camp, you check one lantern charge, you can have only one charge at any given time. This allows you to make a checkpoint. This checkpoint is removed when you rest again at a camp. To allow people to have a checkpoint at a boss fight if they need it. They need to decide when to use it. Maybe we offer an achievement for never using it?
The player can save at any point, but when he dies he respawns at the last checkpoint and not the location of the last save.
Most zones will have a summer, autumn and winter variant, others only an autumn and winter variant and then some only a winter variant. If we’re smart in how we build this we can make base assets and then overlay the seasonal changes on top of it, so they don’t need to be redrawn completely. Think how snow on a barrel could be its own layer.
World collision and geometry doesn’t change drastically further reducing the scope.
The nature of the acts you can’t really go back endlessly so Act 3 must represent the final state of the game. But I think that if we develop the burdens and graces system correctly we might introduce a lot of replayability. (Speedrun.com integration for faux-leaderboards and seasonal challenges that cost us next to nothing?)
Some things we need to be aware of
We need to make sure people don’t look at him as lazy but mor as desperate. They need to see that he’s doing his best but that he’s being held back by his own self-image.
We must work with world states rather than a linear narrative. So basically have bubbles of story that are playable in different orders. Otherwise we lose what is interesting in a metroidvania.
A world state could be that they unlocked a certain zone, defeated a certain boss, or finished a piece of the story. Progress is measured by having done the prerequisite stuff.
We’re telling a dark story, and that will be depressing but we need to also keep people in it so I want there to be a lot of contrast with NPCs, they should offer relief, warmth, love and charm. They’re not passive actors that are waiting.
We’re basically asking for help after we’ve lost twice. This could be interpreted as defeat but we need to make it appear that it is actually a power-up
We discussed in the past that we want the story of the world to be told in a way that you’re not entirely certain what the truth is. And there’s a lot to explore right, where does the spark come from, how long has the eternal summer been going on, what’s out there, why did the eternal summer come to be anyway? And just exploration of side characters.