Protagonist has an empty mind with no memories: he spawns and has no idea where he is or what he's doing. He is told by the other entities that they are in a digital world. He decides to escape.

Protagonist has a preconception that he is in some sort of digital world, he has memory of the real world implanted into him. this would be good because it gives a motive to escape while making it realistic enough for the plot to be whole. if it was real, it wouldn't make sense, and if there were no memories, plot development would be difficult and boring to play without motive

Protagonist is a perfectly normal guy in a perfectly normal (could be fantasy!) world, until he stumbles upon some indication (or someone tells him) that everything around him is a living lie and he becomes obsessed with finding out the true nature of his world, and henceforth decides to escape his "digital prison"

Dark, sombre, kind of nihilistic and depressing in some way? Lots of protagonist introspection, monologues, perception-altering revelations. Doesn't have to be present for the entirety of the game! Can be only present towards the end or whenever.

More hopeful? Instead of "is my whole life really a lie? aaaaaa cue depressing spiral into insanity" it's like "I can truly find the power to escape this prison!" Doesn't have to be part of the whole game, can be a thing for maybe the beginning.

A literal comedy but it's a constant (and very quirky) subversion of plot elements, and in some sense plays with the idea of the character trying to escape the world and does a lot of meta backflips. For example, perhaps we can have our protagonist meet a character who's the typical "old man prophet guy" archetype, who's then revealed to be a literal frog. You must be thinking, "oh it's a talking magical frog", but actually...it writes to the protagonist (not a very effective subversion, I know, but I think it can be played well). Then it is revealed it actually can talk (double subversion!) (perhaps once the protagonist is offscreen) but only to the audience, and henceforth the frog also makes a few meta nods to the audience through its writing to the protagonist. Peak comedy is achieved when the protagonist is completely oblivious, but it's an even greater subversion when the protagonist actually figures it out.

Idea 1

Character wakes up in a pixelated world with an implanted memory of the real world, to motivate escape. This could be memories of having a family, a fulfilled life etc. Thus, he soon realizes that he is stuck in a video game of sorts. The player can choose the gender of the character. He meets an old man or some sort of entity that explains his situation and sends him on a quest to find an all-knowing 'oracle' that could aid him in his escape. At this point, the player can choose between three difficulty levels, easy, medium, and hard in basic terminology. Easy mode allows player to have an immortal base copy of the character, which restarts from the last checkpoint, while also fighting only a limited number of your dead copies. In medium, you also fight only a limited number of copies, but if you lose all your copies, then you would have to revert back to 3-4 checkpoints behind. In difficult mode, you would have to fight all copies of every time the character dies, which would come along with the warning for preferred for experts on games. the game would consist of five 'zones', each zone covering a different area and aspect of the game, such as one zone being a dungeon, another a snowy region etc. and each zone would have a boss fight as well. There would also be other random encounters that could lead to special combos and magic attacks as rewards or exp gains. there would also be various traps and puzzles of course. The thread from ART could also be implemented in this. the final boss in the last zone would of course be the copies of yourself, after which you climb the highest peak in the game to encounter the same old man/entity that started the whole quest, and also popped up at select times to guide the player. the reset ending could be implemented in which the character finds out that the player itself is in fact the oracle, and it was just a puppet with no self-control. the game could restart after credits showing easter eggs, that show signs of previous journeys that would add on after every playthrough.

i was thinking about how the protagonist could be a boy like a teenager. he doesn't realise until later on in the game that he's stuck in the digital world. up until that point he just gets these real life inputs in the game- like maybe the sound of the favourite things he used to hear, or images of his favourite things, like all these allusions- which make him think he's trapped in this world and he's unable to get out. so towards this digital world the boy almost creates this feeling of hatred and dread....but he also secretly likes it because it allows him to escape his struggles and problems, which he doesn't want to face irl. for eg anxiety, peer pressure, stress etc like common problems which teenagers go through. so this creates a conflict of emotions inside the character....kind of building up the idk the story/emotional/character part of the game....

Every enemy need not be extremely complicated, but they will unwittingly have to be on some level of depth to have at least a minor change in the character development of our protagonist. The bosses may be more difficult to persuade, and will probably have a much greater impact on the protagonist's development towards their realisation of the true nature of their world; a video game. The risk of boss fights turning stale is very real, I'll acknowledge, but there's far greater potential here for writing. Many players may not enjoy this system since a lot of games involve killing things, though.