>>51605419base it on yume nikki, exploring dream environments and making friends with dream creatures. middle floors are pleasantly normal dreams depicting fantastic but conventional environments, upper floors become increasingly bright and symbolic like a william blake print and lower floors become nightmarish but more surreal and whimsical than grimdark, like a bosch triptych. do the meta gimmick like OFF where the MC and a few others are aware that there's a player and that they're in a game but their world is still real and important to them so it doesn't devolve into deadpool-esque lolsorandum 4th wall breaking. visualwise 2D sprites are best of course but for the world use prerendered backgrounds a la Star Ocean 2. gameplay similar to pokemon where you have a team of creatures but you have to convince creatures to follow you by talking to them and giving them presents. they understand your words and intentions even if theyre creatures who are themselves incapable of speech. dream creatures can be fused but what you get is semi-random. fusing a man+horse might get you a centaur but maybe you'll get a horse-face man instead. when you make a dream friend you can send them back to the memory palace which is the home base that you can customize by bringing bits and pieces of dream worlds back with you using a machine that lets you copy pieces of the background. if you have the right combination of background pieces and dream creatures they can interact which can give you benefits, like a cow creature eating grass from a field background to make milk which can then be used as an item or give to a creature that likes milk to make it friendly towards you.
for the plot don't even bother, just make it all about exploration and interaction with characters. maybe some of them are fellow dream travelers and some of them are native dream entities. when you reach the topmost floor you encounter a mass of rainbows swirling around a single point of light and the game ends.
