- People have been going missing, and it seems like they all have a connection to a company called ManneCorp. You decide to investigate, but you better watch your back.
The New Resident
is a short, two-minute first-person horror game by rabbytt for the Two-Minute Horror Jam. It was followed up with The Lost Residents, which greatly expands on the story.
You play as a police investigator who has decided to look into disappearances of people, all connected to ManneCorp, a mannequin manufacturing company, and the shady CEO. In the first game, he enters a building to find potential evidence on the case, and comes across a list of everyone who has vanished. He decides he needs to take this out... but the mannequins are alive, and won't let him leave. Armed with only a camera, he must escape. In the sequel, after failing to convince his co-workers that ManneCorp is responsible, he decides to enter the house of the CEO to find irrefutable evidence and take down this madman once and for all.
This game contains examples of:
- Big Bad: The CEO of ManneCorp is behind the disappearances that the protagonist is investigating, as he is placing their souls inside mannequins as an experiment to achieve immortality and transcend his human body.
- Corrupt Corporate Executive: The Big Bad is the unnamed CEO of ManneCorp, a mannequin manufacturer, who is kidnapping people to turn them into Murderous Mannequins as part of his immortality experiments.
- Evil, Inc.: ManneCorp is, on the surface, just a manufacturer of mannequins. But they are kidnapping innocent people in order to turn them into mannequins.
- Murderous Mannequin: The games have these as the main enemy, created by ManneCorp. It turns out that the CEO made them as part of his experiments with immortality.
- Story Breadcrumbs: In The Lost Residents, we mainly learn about the backstory through the CEO's recordings that he left around the house where he describes his experiments.
- Til Murder Do Us Part: The CEO used his wife as his first test subject for his mannequin soul-transfer experiments.
- Would Hurt a Child: The CEO, as part of his immortality experiments, used a ritual to trap the souls of orphanage children into toys.
