Erasure - 06. Isabelle's Room, pt. 1
I've been utterly exhausted the past two days, but given I took a pass on Monday, I wanted to at least get started with the next room. Unfortunately, start's all I can do right now, because it's one of the more complex rooms and I need to think through it some more.
Room 06. is the bedroom that the party's friend, Isabelle used when she was younger, and was her mother Celeste's room when Celeste was a kid. The gimmick of the space is it shifts when the party changes their focus, flitting between when the room belonged to Celeste and when the room belonged to Isabelle. Once figured out, they can manipulate the space the room is in to find different items and unlock different hidden paths.
The tricky part is that this room interacts with other spaces in ways I still need to think through. For example, I think a key found in one version of a steamer trunk of a treasure chest has a key, which in-turn opens a treasure chest in room 07. I like that interconnectedness, but need to think through what the treasure in room 07. is and whether it sends the party back to 06. My instinct is to have that treasure be a magic rune that can be used to activate the other feature in the room, a mirror, and turn that into a shortcut to room 24. But that's a kind of backtracking that might not be particularly fun, especially when its both early and the space they would backtrack through isn't dynamic.
The other thing I need to think about is if this gimmick should be more than a one-room trick. I like the shifting image thing and it potentially opens up some interesting puzzles, but I haven't made use of it in other parts of my outline. One possibility is to use it to signal when a space is tuned to Isabelle, since the hidden "win" condition is to find a way to access the trauma stolen from her to make Erasure the magic whip in the first place.
I also need to figure out where to place the key or keys necessary to turn the mirror in Isabelle's version of the room into a portal to that hidden trauma sub-dungeon.
All that's to say, I need to think this one over more, and to do that when I'm not ready to pass-out an hour before my normal bedtime.