Oh, I’m a sucker for the “death game” genre! And while it’s not an uncommon premise in general, I don’t think I’ve seen much of it in IF, and the office setting is also unusual. If you were going for a semi-comedic tone like DR, you could really have some fun with workplace dynamics.
Anyway, some plot bunnies that have been hopping around in my head (some of them for quite a while):
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I do cosplay, and back when I was on a tight budget, I used to buy cheap wigs from a hair salon that was probably a mob front (long story). I’ve always thought you could do a sort of North by Northwest thing in which something important was stashed in the packaging of one of the wigs, which someone then buys, and then the poor bewildered wig-buyer has to deal with a couple of mobsters chasing them through a comic convention. (Possibly the wig they bought isn’t even the one with the McGuffin in it and it’s a total mix-up.)
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On the total opposite end of the tonal spectrum: Years ago, for a game jam, I started a Twine game in which the PC had grown up in a space colony with her mother. The PC was returning to Earth after her mother’s death, and for vaguely handwaved space travel reasons, could bring one and only one memento of her mother with her. So the game was basically just looking at each of the objects and reading through the associated memories, each representing a facet of the PC’s relationship with her mother, and then choosing which facet to emphasize through the choice of which object to bring. Even though this would be a pretty small game, I never got very far into it, and once I’d missed the jam deadline I wandered away and never came back, but I’ve always been fond of the idea.
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I’ve kicked around an idea for a game with two PCs (alternating POVs) in a sort of shared dreamworld where the world would transform based on the player’s choices in the previous segment, but I haven’t yet managed to come up with characters to hang this mechanic on.
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This is the most recent of these ideas and consequently not very thoroughly developed, but: an alien first-contact game where the PC is one of the linguists trying to figure out how to communicate with the aliens. Basically the thing I wanted Arrival to be and was disappointed that it wasn’t (in that the linguistics were [1] less of a focus than the linguist’s personal life and [2] based on a decades-old discredited hypothesis). The gameplay would probably be a bit Heaven’s Vault-like, but I hope the focus/story would be different enough that it wouldn’t feel like a total rip-off.