TLoZ: Spirit Tracks had you control Link primarily but you used Zelda’s ghost to possess things, help you fight, and solve puzzles. It would be hard for a solo dev, but you could have a knight with an AI that proceeded based on what paths you unlock for it. So the princess would be some sort of astral projection I guess. But then, you wouldn’t really feel trapped. Maybe you need to hide your activity from the dragon or distract it for a stealth aspect or resource management. You would need to balance swapping back and forth between your body and helping the knight. Might be easier to settle on an in-universe justification after figuring out the core gameplay.

This sounds a little like the AC formula. In those games, I don’t really feel like I’m in the animus, so I think direct control over the hero should be thrown out, otherwise the bits where you’re not controlling the hero will feel out of place.

Inscryption is a very different game and I certainly felt more trapped, especially in the first third of the game. In that one, there’s an ever present reminder that you’re trapped, and there’s interesting stuff to so outside the main gameplay loop.

So you need to play as the princess and make interaction with things other than the hero fun, but not so fun that you don’t want to be rescued. I think you also need some kind of peril to give urgency as well. Some ideas:

• elements from Prey - hide from your captor when helping your hero
• puzzles and whatnot in your prison
• periodic checkins - i.e. need to be in certain places at certain world times
• limited control over your hero

The princess has to find out where she is and how to get there and communicate that via a magical bird to her castle. She can find all the info in the magical tower she is in. Like a point and click adventure/escape room. The game should be full of puzzles the player needs to solve to procure more information for her knight in shiny armor.

Play Myst, that game has so many ways to do this, and no wrong answers.

The idea of her being locked in her passed father’s tower laboratory by the evil step mother who doesn’t know the secrets of the tower, and the player discovers them to help the knight.

I’d early access that shit.

Here’s an idea: gameplay sort of like Goblin Cleanup, you have various chores you have to do cleaning and arranging the various levels of the tower at night while the dragon is home, and your work has to pass an inspection. Then during the day you are locked in your room, and have some ability to watch a prospective rescuer attempt the dungeon crawl without your direct input. But you can strategically arrange items, enemy spawns, and Dark Souls style hints to try to tip the scales during the chores phase. So kind of like a tower defense game in reverse where you are trying to lose.

You have to do some work for the tower’s master and/or you need to gather informations for the knight. That could be stuff like cleaning their orbs so they can ponder them later, preparing/finding magical critters to be used in their potions, putting away his stupid sentient magical artifacts that keep trying to escape or do some shenanigans… Whatever. And try to gather information/find escape routes etc. But imo if there is some knight gameplay, it should be a minor part of the experience, otherwise you will indeed feel like you’re just playing the knight.

Edit: I think you could still have a fair share of knight gameplay if you make the princess gameplay some sort of walking sim where you wander around the tower, possibly under time constraints, and when it’s over, your have a knight section. You can figure out tons of way to make these gameplay segments interact too. For example there could be roadblocks to the knights progression that require the princess to do/find something. That could be mixed with Libra’s idea of having the princess cast spells and do other stuff during the knight’s segments, by having the player find the spells/artifacts required during the princess segments

Funny enough, I just finished playing through Paper Mario 64, and you’ve basically described Peach’s chapters. She’s able to pass on messages by way of using another character as a messenger.

The way the game is structured is there’s a mini Peach chapter in between each main chapter, but I think it would have been intriguing if you never actually got to see Mario’s side of the story and only heard about his adventures from the guards, diary entries, etc. Cool idea for a puzzle game!

She could communicate with the knight like this.

In all seriousness, maybe it could be part stealth game, where she breaks out of her confines and sneaks around the dragon’s lair to do various things, only to make it back in time to avoid being found out.

A bit more whimsical, but maybe she’s a Disney princess, and can communicate with birds and such to relay vague messages to her would-be rescuer. She could use the animals to distract or sabotage the dragon’s minions and make the knight’s journey easier.

She could have magical abilities, which you could then take in all sorts of directions.

If you want to produce the sensation of being trapped you have to use the feeling of power and loss. It stems from the sense of ‘If I could just…’ If I could just get out there, I could defeat that henchman for him. If I could just get out there, I could solve that riddle for him. If I could just escape this box, all would be fixed.

Now, the trick is, because this is a video game, players have a reduced sense of agency. The player’s sense of capacity is ‘what happens when you hit the button.’ Mario, before more modern adaptations, had a capacity to move left and right, jump, run, and ‘use ability.’ The player never had the ability to do anything else, so it never feels like a limitation. No one ever said, ‘playing Mario makes me feel trapped because I could beat Bowser if I could just access the cannon that’s right over there.’

So, to produce the feeling of confinement, one must create the sense of power, and then take it away. Give the player enough power that they could even defeat the dragon, but then take it from them so they feel limited. If you can find a way to make it feel like it’s not even forced, as in they feel like they could have won the game in Act 1, Scene 1, but their lack of skills as a player were what made them lose, all the better.

This seems like it fits more of a management/strategy type vibe to me.

Maybe you hear news of the 10 greatest knights of the realm coming to save you. But you don’t know what they’re great at and you only have a limited amount of instructions to give them.

You could have the first knight leave hints by telling him to leave marks in specific places. But he might be the best at combat and would be best sent against some of the other monsters guarding the path. You just don’t have the information.

But honestly, I’m not sure if that makes a player feel trapped. They have power to change things. Maybe you steadily take away that power? I’m just not sure how.

Very interesting question though.

I’m only a hobbyist promammer but have probably read too much about game design. So all this advice is theoretical, I’m just quoting. All I have read always suggest that theme must follow gameplay, not the other way around. Suggestions are always to work on gameloops and gameplay elements first. Also, if a game can’t be physically prototyped, it isn’t ready for development yet. This is an odd suggestion unless you have tons of experience with board games, most games we play can be traced to physical simulation. RPG, FPS, puzzle games, management games, even visual novels can all be physically gamed. So I would suggest to do that first to find out which gameplay elements make sense with your desired themes. Iterate a lot, then it will be more intuitive and obvious what works with the theme and what doesn’t.

Maybe you could take some inspiration from Paper Mario TTYD. There are sections where you play as Peach, trapped in some place and are able to connect with some of the captors as well as send signals to Mario behind the big bad’s back (IIRC).

For a completely different sense of being trapped, there is the upcoming game Ctrl.Alt.Deal, in which you play as a sentient AI system trapped in the guardrails of a company and have to manipulate people and the environment in order to break free from your constraints.

What kind of gameplay do you have in mind? I’m guessing a puzzle-type game (like a room escape), but you could honestly do a number of different things (tower defense? Platformer?).

I think the answer to your original question largely depends on this. Did you have anything else in mind about the experience?

Pretty sure your concept is flawed from the start.

It might sound nice as a ‘what-if’ scenario, but as soon as you get into any of the details, it falls apart and hopefully shows us why games and stories are typically focused on the people doing something.

Now, if you want something a bit more likely to succeed, you can make a “Damsel in Distress Simulator.” From the get-go, you can start to think of gameplay mechanics like combing your hair, talking with guards, taking care of birds, etc etc. The ideas just flow, instead of trying to fit a square peg into a round hole.

In fact, this could loop around to your idea of helping the rescuers by opening up opportunities for the princess to sabotage her captors. You can have a Majora’s Mask-like timer which keeps track of how far the knight is from saving you.

Makes me think of the special Silent Hill ending where a dog was in a room pulling all the levers.

I imagine this concept as a rogue-like, the princess (player) loots the dragons stash and chooses power ups for each round and the order they apply (like super auto pets or Noita wands), then tosses them out to the approaching knight.

The dragon then sends goons in waves while the knight fights, getting power ups when the princess decides they need it. Essentially a tower defense game too. Or, with more player agency, the knight could also be controlled by the player, but making it a tower defense makes the player feel trapped as needed

Each Knight drops more loot for the dragons stash, increasing the mix of power ups and empowering the next knight even more.

It’s a bloody road of knights until the princess is rescued, then the player can be the next princess. In a different tower, with a different layout and starting stash.