Shirone: The Dragon Girl a puzzle-platforming video game developed by Oimoland in 2022. The game was released on Steam
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The story follows a cute dragon girl named Shirone, who wakes up in a bed inside a mysterious castle, with no idea of why she is here or what is this castle. The door is unlocked however, and Shirone starts exploring the castle.
During her exploration, Shirone meets various strange creatures who are also trapped inside the castle: ghosts of various colors who suffer from amnesia, a demon, a bipedal lizard, weird one-eyed creatures, and slimes (which, unlike the other creatures, are aggressive). None of them knows what this place is.
On several occasions during her exploration, she falls asleep and wakes up in the same bed where she started, however the configuration of the castle changes each time she wakes up...
The player must guide Shirone through her exploration of the strange castle, solving puzzles using her abilities (smashing things with her tail and double-jumping with her wings), as well as magic spells progressively collected.
Shirone The Dragon Girl contains examples of:
- Bizarrchitecture: The castle is weird, impractical, and barely makes sense spatially. Additionally, the layout of the castle changes each time someone walks through the "exit" door or destroys a big orb, creating new paths and removing some existing paths. Justified because the castle is an illusion created from the memories of the people who lived here.
- Bottomless Pits: The main hazard of the game.
- Cute Monster: From the ghosts to the lizard knight and the demon, all of the characters met by Shirone are monsters. Their design is not really scary however, and they turn out to be very friendly.
- Cute Monster Girl: Shirone is a dragon girl (a silver one to be exact).
- Final Boss: Averted. The game has an enemy that acts as a boss (fittingly called "boss slime"), but it does not appear in the final challenge, which consists only of a puzzle section devoid of enemies. This is probably because the boss slime is an illusory memory, and thus must have disappeared when the memory orbs where broken).
- Foreshadowing: Next to the room where Shirone wakes up, there is a room that is inaccessible. Inside the room is a strange glyph on the wall and a ghost Shirone can't talk to. Later in the game, Shirone obtains the teleportation rune stone, and she is able to teleport in the room thanks to the glyph. Talking to the ghost earns the player an achievement.
- Functional Magic: Most of the mechanisms encountered by the player are magic (magic barriers, moving platforms, hard light bridges, all powered by magic orbs that seem to act as a power source). There are also magic rune stones with special properties and a device tat stores objects into small crystals.
- Great Offscreen War: This is the central cause of everything that happens in the story. The war happened between the different races populating the world. The dragonkins' castle fell and everyone in it was slaughtered, including the royal family. The Dragonkin king, in an attempt to protect his daughter, used memory orbs to create an illusion of the castle, where his daughter would be safe. Centuries later, Shirone is mistaken for the king's daughter. She and all neighboring visitors end up trapped in the illusion. As Shirone grew up in a world of peace, she has no trouble teaming up with the other prisoners (all from a different race), and after witnessing their teamwork, the king's ghost finally realizes that the times have changed and the war is no more. He dismantles the illusion after asking Shirone to cherish this peace.
- The Ground Is Lava: Some rooms are flooded with poisonous slime (often paired with slime enemies), so the player has to platform above the slime to progress. The trope is downplayed a bit, since Shirone can walk in the slime for a few seconds, although at a lower speed and being unable to jump.
- Hub Level: After breaking the first memory orb, Shirone finds herself in the Archives, a group of islands floating in the middle of a purple void, furnished with bookshelves and chairs. On some islands, there is a golden magic singularity that teleports Shirone elsewhere in the castle. This hub level is accessed pretty late in the game (around one third), which is unusual for this trope.
- Hyperspace Arsenal: Both averted and justified. Averted because Shirone can only carry one energy orb at once, and her inventory is a normal bag that can only contain a small number of small items. Justified because, in universe, there is a magical device able to "store" large objects inside small crystals that can then be stored inside a normal bag (storing and releasing the object can only be done with the device so the stored objects are not immediately usable).
- Identity Amnesia: Inverted at the very start of the game. Shirone wakes up fully aware of who she is, but the ghosts she meets in the castle's hallway are all amnesiac, knowing nothing of who they are or what is their past. As Shirone destroys the big orbs, the ghosts slowly get their memories back the ghosts are former employees and soldiers of the castle, who died in the war and got their memories absorbed by memory orbs, devices designed to absorb all the memories from the dead. The other creatures Shirone meets are not amnesiac either.
- Pickup Hierarchy: This game only features optional collectibles, that come in two variants:
- Puzzle pieces: these are the standard collectibles, found in hidden locations or as a reward for solving extra puzzles. They don't have a purpose in story, but they can be used to buy new outfits for Shirone and unlock an achievement when all are collected.
- Royal jewelry: three jewels each belonging to a member of the royal family who once inhabited the castle. The player gets a better ending (and a Steam achievement) if they have all three.
- Power-Up: The player gets two of them. They come in the form of small rune stones able table to remotely interact with the corresponding glyph. the first stone teleports Shirone the glyph, the other charges the glyph in energy to activate the mechanism it is linked to.
- Waking Up Elsewhere: The game starts with Shirone waking up in a bed, in a room of the mysterious castle (in an instance of You Wake Up in a Room). When she walks through the supposed exit door of the castle, she instead wakes up in the same bed. When she breaks the first memory orb, she wakes up in the same bed again, and very shortly after, she falls into a trap door only to wake up in the Archives. After that, each time she destroys a memory orb, she wakes up in the Archives.
