Umney's Last Case
Umney's Last Case is a short story by Stephen King that focuses on a private detective called Clyde Umney in 1930's Los Angeles. What starts out for the detective as a seemingly normal day at the office, suddenly takes a turn for the worst, as his life quickly begins to fall apart around him,as his friends and colleagues all abruptly leave his life for various and seemingly random reasons.
His day takes an even stranger turn, when he meets a character called Landry, who looks just like him. It turns out that Landry is an author and Umney is just a fictional character in one of Landry's detective books.
The author Landry is intending to switch places with the detective to live a life of adventure -- thereby casting Umney's mind into an oblivion. Instead, the detective Umney awakes occupying Landry's body in 1994.
Unhappy with the real world and hell bent on revenge, Umney learns to write with the intention of ending Landry's life within the book.
How this would work in a videogame could be a difficult task, but I see the player taking on the role of the cowardly author Landry, instead of the proposed hero.
I think the randomized, procedurally generated mechanics of a game like Layers Of Fear could work well with the world being manipulated by an author instead of an artist as seen in Layers.
The world that Landry occupies is changing and working against him as the author tries to find various ways to kill the player, this could be an interesting premise on both the horror genre and a 1930's style Noir detective game.
Published Mar. 8th 2017
