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.