Okay but imagine. An open world game where whole thing is based on Catholicism
(Yes, @balderisdead I am literally making a whole entire tumblr post because this is too long to send you in text form and I need to babble about it to you.)
What I decidedly do not mean: The Bible in rpg form.
The underlying time mechanics operate on a liturgical calendar. The rules and gameplay mechanics vary slightly from season to season. During lent, no meat every 7 days, but fish is okay. On Pentecost, the likelihood that things will spontaneously burst into flame goes absolutely through the roof, etc.
Eating certain dishes on certain days or in certain seasons has a multiplier effect. (Like if you eat corned beef or drink beer on st paddy’s day, or anything purple on whatever st Lydia’s feast day is, you get extra of whatever benefits you were getting from that food anyways)
There are churches everywhere. Each church has a priest. Some priests are genuinely good and can help you out a lot. Some are unspeakably evil. There is no way to tell the difference until you interact with them, sometimes many times.
There are also bishops, archbishops, cardinals, and a pope. Each of them is slightly harder to find, and each of them has slightly more power according to their rank. Bishops, arch-bishops, and cardinals are confined to certain areas (except when they all randomly convene in The Papal City at various points) and can help with certain things within their domain.
Each parish also has a built in church lady, who operates the parish according to arbitrary rules. The rules vary from church to church and are never explained. You just either luck into following them or you take damage. You never find out why, which creates a lot of very odd gameplay strategies and dynamics among people who have been playing long enough, because people share things online like “okay if you hug the wall and jump every 12th step, you seem to avoid taking damage at Our Lady of the Moon in the ocean region” and someone else is like didn’t work for me and 8 other people are like “that’s because you forgot to change out of your red shirt before you entered the parish perimeter”
You “acquire” a saint or Angel mostly by accident, unless you somehow know what to do. You wander into a church on their feast day, you do some sort of act they have patronage over, you stumble upon a book with their story, or a statue or stained glass window of their image in some ruins.
Once you have acquired a particular Saint, you can ge closer to them by lighting candles for them in a church/chapel, honoring their feast day, or doing whatever their thing is.
The closer you get to various saints/angels, the more protection from or power over their thing you have. But also everyone else also has equal access to the saints and angels, so a lot of times your increased power evens out with other peoples increased power
Some saints have actions they are associated with (Michael helps you in battle, Anthony makes you really good at finding items, etc.); some saints are associated with places or regions (like patron saints of regions or local areas, or of seas but not oceans etc.)
When you find a church, you have the option to attend a mass, adoration, or to pray. Benefits of these vary, from time to time and location to location, and you never know what it’s going to be. Sometimes it heals all of your afflictions. Sometimes it increases your power a little. Sometimes it does nothing. Sometimes it decreases your contentment.
Receiving the Eucharist always results in increased protection for the next 24 hours, but you are only permitted that option once in a 24 hour window, and you have to be eligible to receive it (cannot have committed a mortal sin since your last reconciliation, cannot have consumed food in the last hour, must have unlocked the ability to receive Eucharist via the sacrament of first communion)
You can receive other sacraments as well, and each sacrament has its own benefits, but each also has its own requirements (like baptism requires nothing and gives you a small boost of generally increased protection; reconciliation requires you to already be baptized and also maybe to have taken a certain amount of damage, but it fully revives your vital stats each time you go; confirmation it significantly boosts your understanding, bravery, whatever other relevant stats there are, but requires a certain relationship level with a certain number of saints as well as having found certain books that contain specific teachings/information before you can unlock it, plus it obligates you to receive reconciliation, attend mass, etc. a certain number of times in a given time frame, or you risk becoming a lapsed Catholic, which leaves all sacraments unlocked but makes all the benefits slowly fade the longer you are lapsed). Some sacraments can only be conferred by certain clergy members.
Whether a priest is good or evil doesn’t change the affects of a sacrament, but it might make them harder to find or unwilling to bestow sacraments for various reasons
Exclusively high church aesthetic in my made up Catholicism video game. All the bells and smells. None of the church-in-the-round-with-nothing-but-an-acoustic-guitar stuff.
There’s definitely more but that’s all I got right now.
