This idea was part of the 2025 game jam ideas project.
One of us!
One Liner: Hive mind assimilating earth
You're a hive mind, you have recently been introduced to earth, your goal is to assimilate the world's population and add them to your hive mind collective. If people figure out you are assimilating other citizens then they fight back. You're not alone, there are other hive minds here trying to assimilate people too.
If your hive mind touches other people you can add them to your collective, and assimilate their knowledge and experience. The more chiefs that you collect the better you are at cooking as a group. The more military people the better your group is at shooting, etc…
Other hive minds can take people that you have assimilated from your collective. Normal people eventually find ways to rescue their fellow man and remove them from your hive mind. You can lose parts of you if you are not careful.
The game is played in two parts (Similar to XCom)
Mission:
The missions are to take over cities. The cities have an isometric top down view with NPCs going about their day. Your goal is to assimilate all the citizens of the city. But if the population detects you, they will set off alarms and set up differences. You will need to pick off people that are alone or far away from the group, and add them to your hive mind. Then use their skills and knowledge to help assimilate others. Most missions are part stealth, part puzzles, or part frantic dash to touch everyone if the alarm goes off.
Every mission starts out with a small group (<4) from your hive mind, and you need to assimilate dozens to hundreds of people in the city.
The game should have a feel of a zombie game, but you are an intelligent zombie.
At any point you can trigger a "frantic assimilation" action. This sends all of your hive mind out in all directions and tries to assimilate everyone it can automatically. This isn't useful for more missions, but if you have already got most of the population and don't want to do the mop up of the remaining people. You can use this action. Reduces the tedium of the end of the mission.
Logistics:
Between each mission, you use the new skills captured from assimilating the population to build out your logistics network, and home base… This is the economy and logistics simulation section of the game. The resources from this section of the game allows you to gain more benefits and equipment, and skills for the next mission.
Later missions:
In later missions, humans are on high alert and will shoot people that act oddly. They will begin starting to make defences, and we can have a NPC hero squad that keeps stopping you (Think traditional heroes of a zombie movie)
We could also introduce other hive minds that are also on this planet, you need to starve them out and take over their citizens.
Prior Art
Syndicate (1993 video game) - This was a fun game where you played a Syndicate/mega corporation fighting other Syndicates for control of a futuristic city. One of the weapons that you could get in the game was called PERSUADERTRON. This weapon allows you to take over others and they would act the same way you would. Shoot at the same things, move in the same direction. Most of the game for me is to get this weapon and use it to solve all missions. I loved this weapon.