TALE OF TALES

game demo project

DESCRIPTION OF THE GAME

Beginning of the game
A mother and her daughter are walking in a present-day park. They start playing with a ball. The ball falls in some bushes and the girl runs after it. The girl cannot find the ball and gets stuck in the bushes which appear to be very dense and thorny. They form a wall around her. At one point in the wall, however, the plant starts flowering and opens up as she gets near. She can step through it when this happens. After she has stepped through, the flowers fall off and the wall of thorns closes again.
In the forest she will find bodies of people who failed to get through it. At a certain point she arrives at a clearing. Another body is lying next to what appears to be part of an overgrown ruin. There seems to be a hole in the ruin's wall. As the girl steps towards the hole, the body suddenly starts groaning. He is not dead. He is dressed in 19th century clergy clothing.
The Priest Prince gives the little girl a guilded statue of an Angel, dressed up as some kind of voodoo doll and gesticulates towards the hole in the wall and then dies. With the statue in hand, the girl steps through the hole into a dark narrow space. In the middle of it is a large octagonal monolyth. On each side there is a 3 dimensional scene portraying aspects of the life of a princess. The scenes are in fact Automatons that don't work anymore.
There are stairs that lead up to a similar space. There she sees the body of a young woman in a very bad state. It seems she has been abused and beaten. Her clothes are torn and she is dirty. In fact, the whole Mausoleum is a mess. There is another body in what appears to be the only door in the space, two bodies in fact. It takes a while for the little girl to figure out that these bodies are not dead: they are merely sleeping. She wants to go through the door with the guards but she cannot get past them.
When she puts the Angel statue in the appropriate Automaton, she receives the Telepathy spell in the form of a Diadem on her head, and the windows of the Mausoleum open, letting in some light and air. Now when she goes up to the guard, thanks to her new ability of Telepathy, she will be able to see his dream. As he dreams, he goes to stand in the attention position. This allows the girl to pass through the door and find herself in the Garden of the Palace.

The game
As of here, the game becomes non-linear. The aim of the game is to find the seven remaining missing objects and put them back in the Automatons. Each time the girl does this, she will receive another magical ability and the Palace and Mausoleum will get cleaned up a bit. These abilities, or spells, will allow her to prune the Thorny Forest, repair things, water house plants, light fires and lamps, clean floors, heal and console people and operate mechanical instruments. Her new ability will be signified by a change in appearance. These spells are based on the talents that are given to Sleeping Beauty in the different fairy tales.
Each Automaton Object was taken away by another Prince who broke into the Palace. The quest to find the Object will lead the girl through scenes that narrate parts of the Prince's story and elements from the Sleeping Beauty fairy tales.
Here's a table that shows how Princes, Objects & Spells relate:

PRINCE	OBJECT	TALENT	SPELL	APPEARANCE	RECIPIENT
Poet	Rose	Grace	Pruning	Arm Jewel	Evil branches
Brother	Rattle	Temperament	Fire	Decoration on dress	Lights & hearths
Tailor	Comb	Beauty	Repairing	Wings	Architecture & furniture
Hunter	Shield	Virtue	Water	Bells	Plants & baths
Actor	Nightingale	Singing	Nursing	Cat	Wounded sleepers
Traveler	Seven League boots	Dancing	Cleaning	Shoes	Floors
Engineer	Music box	Playing Music	Instrument operation	Gloves	Machines
Priest	Angel	Wit	Telepathy	Diadem	Restless sleepers

Judging from differences in the styles of the clothes of the Princes, one can tell that the Palace has been asleep for much longer than 100 years. There is something wrong with the spell that the good Fairy had cast. And indeed, the Thorny Forest has broken through the Palace walls, dirt has settled on the shiny floors, the sleepers may have become sick or depressed and the princess herself is in complete disarray. They are all still alive. But probably not for long.
Most of the characters in the game are asleep. Only the Princes are dead. A few of the characters may wake up for a very short time to perform a certain action. Apart from the girl, the only living and waking characters are Sun and Moon (the children of the princess, fathered by two of the Princes, probably the Hunter and the Brother), a cat, a crow and a falcon, and possibly some pigeons and insects.

End of the game & Bonus
The magical abilities that the girl receives can be used when solving puzzles in order to acquire the other objects but they are never necessary. The spells are mostly for pure fun: a means for the player to have a creative effect on the environment as he or she will be able to change it drastically by means of the spells. The only puzzle that does require the spells is the final Eight Caskets Puzzle that needs to be crached in order to finish the game. This puzzle consists of Eight Caskets one within the other. Each Casket can only be opened with the corresponding spell. There is a spell for each Casket. With all eight spells, the girl can open all caskets. Inside of them, she will find the ball that she had lost in the park. She will fall asleep and wake up in the park with the ball. Her mother will act as if no time has passed at all.

When the player has finished the game, a bonus game will become available: Hide & Seek. This will involve playing hide and seek with the main characters in the Palace. Potentially this could also be a networked multiplayer game.