treasure shrine
wander about the neighborhood of your strange city. visit different places at different times of day. collect weird objects. share them with the shrine in the forest.
i was thinking about taipei when i made this game. garbage trucks playing fur elise will be familiar to anyone else who has visited that city and wandered its streets just before evening.
a lot of objects you can collect are based on things i found or collected in the month i was there. at the time, either family mart or seven-eleven (i don’t remember which) was running a promotion where every purchase got you snoopy stickers. the idea i think was to collect enough to redeem them for prizes, but i just stuck them in my sketchbooks and journals and over everything else i owned.
the streets and places of interest are half taipei, half nowhere. the treasure shrine is purely imaginary. even though i saw lots of shrines and temples while i was there, i didn’t come across any tiny rooms in the woods.
i’ve always wanted to explore further this mechanic of relinquishing your items to a shrine, or down a well, or to someone, and having it alter the world in subtle or just outright obscure ways. night garden is another version of this.
spoiler alert, in this game leaving things in the shrine does nothing. but i like that too, though.