concept: a disco elysium-esque game (no, i know, but hear me out) where you're a passenger on the titanic. the game starts when the ship strikes the iceberg. it ends when the titanic sinks, two hours and forty minutes later. it is impossible, on the outset, to save everyone or prevent the sinking. however! it is possible to save more people. it is also possible to save fewer.
the titanic's layout is known. there are passenger lists, crew lists, and lists of who did and didn't survive. there is some disagreement over exact numbers, but ultimately simulating the titanic in full along with every person aboard would be extremely possible. the timeline of the disaster is known, and there are plenty of accounts with precise details to build around. i'm sure there are already people out there who have mapped out the whole event start to finish, every detail included.
there would be two primary game settings, which can be mixed up for a total of four different versions of the game. (or, technically, several thousand.) the first setting would determine whether you start as a fictional passenger, with traits and abilities you set, or a completely random, real passenger, different every time. the second would determine whether your character has knowledge of the future (and/or the game itself) and the options they have, or has to figure out everything as it happens and get ideas based on what information they encounter, being fully grounded in the setting. in other words, you could control the captain (if you were very lucky) and be able to give useful orders without any prior information gathering due to effectively being possessed by a time traveler, your position mostly overriding the need to convince anyone. or you could be a child in third class who doesn't speak english and has no idea what is going on. or a literal infant. good luck!
in some runs, it would be a challenge just to survive, though your survival isn't required to "finish" the game. in others, you could get very close to the theoretical maximum people possible to save (1178 by lifeboat capacity, up from the historical ~705). you could maybe even delay the sinking itself, drawing from the couple of halfway-sane theories on how to do so, but it would be equally possible to speed up the sinking. but no matter what you do, hundreds of people will die and the titanic will sink before the carpathia arrives.
does this align precisely with disco elysium's vibes and themes? no. but it definitely intersects, i think. there's a grim humor to be found in the concept of the game itself, trying to "fix" a very real, historical disaster. every character you speak to (or play as!) represents a real person, with better-than-even odds that they died horribly over a century ago. not to mention that all the 1910s class (suite and social) dynamics would be represented as accurately as possible, often serving as a serious impediment to progress. and yet you'd have people restarting the game repeatedly trying to get a "good" starting character, or cheating to make every skill check succeed, or doing what amounts to speedrun tactics to get the numerically best ending, or even sinking the ship as fast as possible.
it would also be self-evidently halfway up its own ass, but so is disco elysium. and metal gear. and deltarune. and ultrakill. and homestuck. and the locked tomb. a lot of good media is halfway up its own ass, in the sense that it unsteadily walks the line between relying on an aggressively nonsensical premise and flaunting how clever it is for managing to do so. it's the line between confidently committing to the bit and showcasing self-satisfied arrogance, you know? i have an old pithy line regarding the creators of such media, who are inevitably contorted in similar positions, and how they thusly have both a pretty good idea what shit is and a vested interest in producing as little of it as possible.
anyway that's the game pitch that came to me all at once in a vision. feel free to add on and/or mock
