The theme for PunyJam #4 is: "At the start of the game, or within the first five moves, the player gets an indication that something isn't quite right, or even that something is terribly wrong." Sounds easy enough, doesn't it?

When I stopped and thought about it, I had a complete mind blank. No matter what I thought of, it kept coming back to a disaster setting. So here's a few of the things I was thinking of:

• Earthquake or tsunami (e.g. San Francisco 1906)
• Volcano (e.g. Pompeii, Krakatoa)
• Sinking of a ship (e.g. Titanic)
• Fire in a high-rise building

and so on.

Did you have any ideas that you'd like to share?

You can go horror quite easily with such a premise. Like: you get back home after a "nice" day of work and you find that your family, the kids, other half etc, they do act creepy or (worse still) slightly different from how you are used too. Strange look in their eyes, strange way of speaking, they sit in different positions at the dining table than usual and so on. We could go straightforward (body-snatchers, anyone?) or imagine an unreliable narrator (i.e.: you are the one that has changed instead of the family). Very much Twilight Zonesque, imho.

I didn't know puny inform well enough to enter this year, but I thought my idea would've fit.

 It was going to involve the player being an advance explorer on a derelict starship. Plenty could go wrong there. 

Edit: Not necessarily disasters either, plenty of horror and mind jarring weird things as well.

I'm thinking a lot can be done with subtle things, like you notice a man walking across the street wearing a suit and socks, but no shoes. Follow him to unveil a mystery. Did someone force him to go out without his shoes? Is he acting out of fear? And once you figure out what's wrong, how can you help?

The theme prompt immediately made me think of the “Vl’hurg”/“G’gvunt” interruption from Hitchhiker’s. This event takes place either the first time you make a typo that the parser catches, or some number of turns, whichever comes first.

I first interpreted the theme in that way: some sort of David Lynch-like “uncanny moment” should happen to open up the story. But this is nice and open-ended, so it could be all sorts of things!