Knockoff is a solo journaling game where players cut and paste fabric patterns to create a dress. It's about a desperate fast fashion designer named Marcos, who discovers a cursed dress design from an estate sale.
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It’s 2024. Fashion Week is only a couple of months away in New York City, and your boss is expecting you to come up with a design that will make an impact on the company’s bottom line. You moved to the city thinking you’d be the next Willi Smith or Teflar Clemens, but you ended up at this company, where you scour the internet for other people’s designs to put onto T-shirts to make enough money to pay for rent. Hopefully this opportunity from your boss will finally put your name on the map.
Knockoff is a story of a desperate and burnt out fast fashion designer named Marcos, who discovers a cursed dress design from an estate sale. It is a solo tabletop journaling game where the player (you) will be cutting out fabric textures and gluing them over a croquis (a drawing of a fashion model). The fabrics that you choose determine the outcome of the story.
Knockoff is the second book in the Mephistopheles Trilogy, after Forgery.
Interested in checking out the prequel, Forgery? You can find more information on it here.
Cover by Alex Eckman-Lawn, logo and graphic design for the cover by Herb Ferman.
The player will be inhabiting Marcos’s point of view as you read about his story. It uses two main mechanics:
The player will be asked to journal their character’s thoughts, feelings, and reactions at specific prompts.
There is also a choose-your-own-path style of immersive storytelling using the dress that the player is creating, allowing them to choose the outcome for Marcos.
This story will ask the player to cut out a fabric pattern to glue onto the croquis, so keep a pair of scissors and glue or tape handy. Players do not need to have a background in fashion to create their dress. They just need to follow the directions to create their masterpiece. The tone of this game is dark comedy with horror elements. Some touchstones for the comedic tones could be Search Party (television series, 2016), Ingrid Goes West (movie, 2017) or Not Okay (movie, 2022), while the horror elements could be reminiscent of Channel Zero (television series, 2016) or Archive 81 (television series, 2022).
Other influences include:
Eyes of Laura Mars (movie, 1978)
Stage Fright (movie, 1978)
Amadeus (movie, 1984)
Helter Skelter (movie, 2012)
Neon Demon (movie, 2016)
Phantom Thread (movie, 2017)
In Fabric (movie, 2018)
Specific fashion influences include:
Dapper Dan
Willi Smith
Scott Barrie
Ann Lowe
Stephen Burrows
Arthur McGee
Lex Blank
Asher Levine
Aun Helden
The Chiffon Trenches by André Leon Talley
Anok Yai walking for Thierry Mugler SS24 Collection
Mugler’s Alien Hypersense starring Anok Yai
Alexander Mcqueen’s Dante Fall-Winter collection from 1996
Alexander Mcqueen’s Joan Fall-Winter collection from 1998
Alexander Mcqueen’s Voss Spring-Summer collection from 2001
Not all of these themes will be covered in this crowdfunding campaign (though hints of them might pop up, especially in the video), the game does have the following:
Manipulative romantic relationships
Being involved in a crime
Paranormal horror
Alcohol and drug use
Smoking
Emotionally abusive parents
Self-mutilation
Suicide
Murder
Gore (there is gory imagery and photography)
Self mutilation
Body horror
Sex
Obsessive thoughts towards your character and other forms of parasocial relationships
This game is not for children and is for an audience that is 18 or older.
