Hello everybody and welcome to another showcase!
This one's a big one, so I'll save the word salad for the references.
·Niapparition: these are manifestations of the souls of those who died waiting for someone. They torment their victims for all eternity by reminding them of all the things they never did.
·Baghoul: notorious for stealing kids in the middle of the night to make lard with them, these demons resemble humans only in shape, as their intentions are far too wicked for the minds of men.
·Fleshco: resurrected bodies of tortured victims, they wander the Earth seeking a new skin to cover what's left of their bodies.
·Nerreida: usually found around bodies of water, they lure fishermen and sailors only to burn them with their corrosive spit.
Well those were quite a few for sure! Some need more explanation than others, so bear with me with some of them. First one is your basic floating ghost, but the main twist is that the face features a facial gesture a friend of mine baptized as the "Ñard (pronounced as /Nyard/) Face". It's a face he made for the anniversary of Scalebound's cancellation and has followed him since then. I always try to feature it in one way or another in the games I make (only exception so far being PLOMO).
Next one might be well known if you are into Spanish or South American folk tales. The Baghoul is the Sack Man, a creature used by parents to terrify kids who didn't behave well/ as part of a lullaby in which he's addressed as "El Coco" (I don't know what's wrong with Europe and not letting kids grow up without traumatic monsters crawling at night). Oh and he was rumored to be an actual person who inspired the legend, soooo there's that too. Fun!
Moving on we face Fleshco, which I think it's pretty straightforward: just a body without skin. I was going to make a skeleton like in Castlevania but then I thought "well I don't want to make a zombie, and you can do so much with a skeleton without going for an overkill, so what's the middle road between those two things?". The name is a portmanteau of the words "Flesh" and "Fresco", which is Spanish for "Fresh". Hey, 12 years of teaching and studying English allows me to do bad puns fusing languages, I don't make the rules.
Human muscle system, Britannica
Last but certainly not least, Nerreida! I love fish creatures, specially the ones featured in Castlevania. But since I didn't want to straight up copy a Fisherman, I opted to browse paintings depicting demons with scales or features present in fish like fins and the likes of it. And then I found this amazing oil painting called The Many Temptations of St. Anthony the Great, which depicts this wonderful creature in the upper left corner:
Il Tormento di Sant'Antonio, Linusfrontodona
It's funny because at first I thought it was a picture made by Hyeronimus Bosch, a great artist known for his weird paintings of hellish and chaotic landscapes, but turns out it was made by Martin Schöngauer and later reproduced in a bigger scale by Michelangelo Buonarroti. Who says you can't learn things making video games?
And those are a few more enemies! I still want to add a couple more to the game just to cover all the possible variables for a fair challenge, but if you want to share some ideas about interesting or not so well known creatures feel free to share it in the comments below.
Thanks for reading and have a nice one!
-Ray