GAME: Line of Sight

Game about an assassin trying to make a hit on a target. You control everyone else in the area, finding creative ways of keeping them apart

— petermolydeux (@PeterMolydeux) March 5, 2013

I'm reminded, funnily enough, of Ghost Trick: Phantom Detective, where the player is able to possess objects in order to create changes in the environment. Supposing, say, that the player can suddenly cause the toilets of the house to flood, thus forcing someone to leave the room to go deal with them – there's one way the player can manipulate the environs in order to control the flow of people. But there, you're only indirectly "controlling" the people, and although one certainly requires creativity to do so, while this is a handy idea to keep in mind, it won't be the whole picture.

What about issuing direct commands to the people, but limiting commands to those that seem reasonable? They will only eat when hungry, and only talk to people that they know and like, and so on. Picture a building full of people with various goals, fears, and other traits: Move the repugnant person into room A and the sensitive person automatically decides to leave it, and their friend opts to leave with them. Once separated into another room, you can have the sensitive person obsess over a cute animal, leaving the friend bored enough to wander off toward the cafeteria, giving the assassin the opportunity to kill that target while they are travelling through the hall. Combine this with the previous idea to create more varied challenges, and we have a nice puzzle game working, but let's do even more.

Enter the "herd control" mechanic, based on games like Patapon or Pikmin, wherein the player can't send specific orders, but can deploy area-effect directives like "attract" to make nearby people congregate at a particular location, and "repel" to force them away from a single point, "hasten" to make them move faster, "slow" to make them become sluggish. By default, the people behave according to some regular rules: stopping to chat with other people they approach, engaging in interactions with usable objects, and otherwise milling around in fairly random fashion, but follow the area-effect orders if they are in range of the origin point where one was given. Now you have to repel the repugnant person into the room, then hasten the sensitive person out and attract them to the cute animal, and so forth.

As for the story and theme, I'm thinking a science fiction setting, where the player is the assassin's hacker teammate who cracks into the environmental controls of the buildings the assassin infiltrates. He or she is remotely controlling all of the appliances (although security guards become suspicious if too many machines are malfunctioning) and venting mood-altering chemicals into the air to direct the flow of people. The hacker can also access personnel files for tips on how to best manipulate specific individuals in the area.