I watched the movie We Are Little Zombies at a film festival last year. The whole thing is filled with video game visuals, references and music from start to end.
https://youtu.be/obstTJVi3cE
The story centers around orphans who start a chiptune band. The main character is an avid RPG player and projects his love for them onto his observation of the world.
Unfortunately I don't think it's available streaming anywhere yet, it seems to be on a second festival tour right now. There's some "[virtual cinemas](https://littlezombies.oscilloscope.net/)" (whatever that means) that are showing it apparently though.
Hmm, I guess this is a bit against the spirit of the prompt but I got extreme game vibes out of the anime Made in Abyss. In this show folks go down to harvest relics from this abyss, which is easy to descend into but difficult to come back out from. You have to get stronger in order to come back from going further, which is such a video gamey idea that I was surprised someone hadn‘t used this exact construct before. It’s close to roguelikes, but not quite. And the environments (inverted forest, etc) give that feeling as well.
But that might be cheating, because it really feels like the creators really thought about games before making this anime... maybe it's too direct of a line?
@exodus#4986 Yeah, maybe, but it‘s cool. One of my favorite manga right now, Delicious in Dungeon, has a similar premise. A group of adventurers in a dungeon get wiped out by a dragon, and the hero’s sister just manages to warp the rest of them out before she was eaten by said dragon. They need to get back to that point and kill the dragon before she‘s digested so they can revive her, but the only way to make that plan economically feasible is to spend absolutely no money on food beforehand and just subsist on what they can forage or hunt in the dungeon itself. So it’s essentially half dungeon crawler, half cooking manga. They kill some crazy rpg monster like slimes or basilisks and then they figure out how to cook their meat or eggs in a way that actually tastes good. I would love to see an anime of that with some lovingly animated, steamy ghibli food.
Also, back on straight-up movies, Inception! The whole movie is about level designers designing the map they will be navigating in order to conduct their own heist. The deepest layer of the dream in which the actual Incepting takes place is just a straight-up First Person Shooter!
the problem with the (now crowded-ish) food adventure genre is you know they‘re gonna lovingly mic a bunch of eating sounds, which triggers an actual rage response in me, so basically all those are off limits for me! I could read it though… maybe I’ll give it a shot.
That Scott Pilgrim movie isn't great, but it intentionally feels like a video game.
The cool thing about it is that it's one of many movies filmed in Toronto, but its story is also actually set in Toronto, which is rare! So you get to see the city as it really is, and that was fun for me when I watched it.
Mamoru Oshii’s Garm Wars: The Last Druid is so video game-like (it’s even produced by Bandai Namco Games!) I sincerely wish it had just been a game. The story, worldbuilding and visual design of the film all seem like foundational materials for a magnificent 50-hour RPG epic, but instead they’re implausibly crammed into a 90-minute feature and it’s just an Attack of the Clones-level clusterfuck of inadequately fleshed out characters and ideas, stilted acting and dubious CGI.
Last night I was rewatching Dune (the lynch one), and was struck by how much this sequence looked like a laserdisc game!!!
https://youtu.be/TvJQ0GTeZgw?t=5
it's really hard to tell here, but in the blu ray you see that the turret operators are looking through this scanlines-looking thing, and the explosions and laser blasts all feel like clear overlays on top. it's extremely laserdisc game... I wish I could find a better clip!
@exodus#4986 I love Made in Abyss, though some scenes can get rough as hell, but when I watched it, I really wanted to explore that inverted forest for myself (same with Delicious in Dungeon as @GigaSlime mentioned). Made in Abyss specifically makes me think of the Etrian Odyssey series, though. But man, I'd love something vast an open like Breath of the Wild with an Abyss-like world.
John Wick: Chapter 2 specifically feels like "Video Game: The Movie," and they sure do keep rolling with that in Chapter 3. He's so mad! How mad can he get?? But in Chapter 2 they open up the world more and introduce a lot of weird new systems that are pretty neat to think about. It makes me think of a Grasshopper game that's maybe less self aware and clever, but still fun.
A movie(s) that makes me think, "Wow, I want to explore something like this as a game," would be Suspiria-- both the 1977 and 2018 versions. I know Clocktower is _kind of_ that, and there are other games that take inspiration from the 1977 film, but I feel like they lack the most appealing thing (to me) about them. The sets! The set designs in both movies are spectacular, with the 1977 one being the most outrageous and gorgeous one, especially with light direction. Gimme that with a horror game! Enough run down haunted manors, give me a stylish cerulean colored, opulent banquet hall, or flashy emerald green ball rooms. Flash red lighting with silhouettes to emphasize something.
I occasionally think about Tokyo Drifter, but Grasshopper kind of has me covered on those in some ways, but I feel like the style of Tokyo Drifter (and the previously mentioned in this thread, Branded to Kill) could be pushed even further in a really slick action game. Give the main character a mustard yellow suit jacket and a weird quirk like Hanada's affinity for smelling freshly cooked rice.
Oh man, John Wick is actually a great example, because the action scenes all have such rock-solid geography that makes it easy to follow what‘s going on, and they usually lay the foundation for those scenes before the action ever starts in a way that reminds me of every cover shooter I’ve ever played. Like, every one of those games has a dialogue scene where you‘re walking through a friendly base or whatever, but you can tell from the very level-designy arrangement of waist-high desks or couches that you’re totally gonna have to fight your way back out of this place in a couple of minutes. That was all I could think about during Wick's infiltration through and subsequent escape from the catacombs in John Wick 2, and when he and Sofia are led through and then fight their way out of the coin minting place in John Wick 3. But man, I could apply this to almost every action scene in the series. They really let you get to know each location before the first shot is fired.
And god, I didn't even really think about how video game-y the entire setting is. It has its own collectible currency!
I watched The Mask of Zorro (1998) and realized that most Assassin's Creed games are basically Zorro games (and recalled that I had an odd love of Zorro when I was a little kid somehow). Would also highly recommend watching The Mask of Zorro.
Quite a bit of the reaction to the Shape of Water trailer was about how much it felt like Bioshock.
edit: whoops, I initially typed Lady in the Water instead of Shape of Water, different sea creature movie. Is it evident I haven't watched either yet? :p
@2501 garm wars is an excellent shout. so many video games have that total fog of malaise that oshii‘s stuff does, i’m thinking of stuff like fromsoft as well as yoko taro.
I was watching the cliff scene from Lost World: Jurassic Park earlier today, and that ridiculous sequence of far-fetched tasks sure felt like one long QTE, never mind the dated CGI on the trailer. Nothing like the PSX/Saturn game they actually made, sadly.
edit because I didn‘t explain this at all for those who haven’t seen the film:
- it‘s like if Tim & Eric made a Twin Peaks comedy, but with more sincerity than any of their work ever had. So that’s already video gamey
- the Eureka Inn where it takes place is very video gamey, the Inn is very easily adaptable to a game, very similar vibe to the Inn on the lake at the third act of Silent Hill 2.
- The small town is similar to anything like Mizzurna falls
You may be interested to know that being able to move relatively freely along a timeline and explore alternate outcomes to the story from major narrative crossroads is the overall format of the post-game mode of the PSP Remake of Tactics Ogre: Let Us Cling Together, which will also be incorporated into the just announced, uh, Re-Remake? Remaster of a Remake?
The narrative is also interesting and heavy hitting enough that the diverging narrative paths are pretty far from being just different flavors of the same rough story.
When I watched Jurassic World Fallen Kingdom, it reminded me of the original Resident Evil. Bunch of people in a mansion fighting/running away from bio weapons with a really hokey script. It really feels like a PS1 survival horror, before the genre got too serious.