Hey, nice question and great point !
I actually thought of this from the part of the definition "a departure from what is normal, usual, or expected, typically one that is unwelcome.".
I am rather not keen on doing stuff that are unwelcome to a player, though, and am not much into horror games and the like.
I spent one or two hour twisting the idea in my head and went "What if I could try to ""subvert"" the player's expectations by hijacking an existing game and trying to get something else out of it ? It's not a clever idea, it's not something that hasn't been done already it's like all the "What if x but instead it's y" stuff.
But I still wanted to have something that stayed true to the core game's principle. This is why at the base it's a chess game, and it's trying to stay as true as possible to the core loop "turn based strategy with planning"!
Also at the start it was more meant to be a Chess X hotline miami game but I'm not good at graphics so the only thing left from that idea is the blood splatters.
Thanks for replying - I see the rational, it's tricky one isn't it? It's hard to come up with an entertaining fun game which is actually unwelcoming to the player... I see the thought process of taking an existing game and then making it different enough that it's unexpected, I get that :) For me, I went full-on with the theme. in a (hopefully) comedy way so there was no question it was driven by the theme for the Jam...
Like I say, the game is awesome - I love it, it's a great achievement! However, I'm sure you can also see how the end result can be viewed as being outside of the theme completely, and could've been implemented separately... I don't think it has been, but you did such a good job on the polish and presentation of the game it's kind of sparked that kind of cynicism.