The setting is earth some year wayyyy in the future.
Because of runaway global warming caused by green house gas emissions planet earth became essentially uninhabitable; a giant ball of hot gas clouds. Everybody died.
Some alien race comes exploring for resources or whatever, but when they get here they find the planet is actually inhabited by the ghosts of all the angry souls that tried to warn people about our impending doom, along with some weirdly evolved flora and fauna maybe idk.
Obviously I haven’t fleshed out all the details, but it sounded like the seed of a cool idea so I wanted to share it and see what people thought before I forget I ever had it.
I like this idea a lot.
The thing with the ghosts, reminds me a little of Horizon Zero Dawn - there it’s not literal ghosts but recordings/writings of people from around the time of the calamity which befell earth. Some of them involved in the events, some of them just passive observers of what was happening. I found it a very evocative way to flesh out the backstory as the game went along.
Good luck! 👍
You might be interested in Apocalypse Hotel. Humanity has to evacuate Earth due to an environmental crisis. A hotel run by robots keeps running because that’s what the robots are programmed to do, and ends up becoming a hotspot for alien tourists. No ghosts though, the big mystery is what happened to the humans who left and whether they might someday return.
If I was you I’d make the aliens archeologists and get rid of the ghosts have the aliens have a goal and have the downfall of humanity discoverable through exploration but generally I like the setting.
You can probably find a way to make it work as a setting, but you should try to come up with a plot if you want to tell a story. Who are your characters? What do they want? What’s stopping them from getting what they want, and how do they deal with that? What will make the reader/player care about what happens to your characters in this post-apocalyptic setting?
Yeah I need to do this. This is my third idea of a story but they never get anywhere because I can’t sit down to plan it out.
Be great if the twist of aliens isn’t revealed until the end.
“Icelet groaned, we need somebody to resample site 42. The elemental spectrum readings are off”
Closest game I can think of would be Dead Space 3 I think.
You need to Planet of the Apes that…
Humans left Earth in the present day and through some wibbley wobbley timey wimey stuff end up flung into the future and don’t realize it.
They aren’t aliens discovering the husk of Earth, they’re us.
Bonus if some of the angry ghosts are friends/family of some of the crew members.
This is not exactly far away from what Scientologists believe about Thetans.
I’m not really familiar with what they believe, but this is second mention of them in this thread so I should probably look into that a bit.
The South Park episode about it is really all you need to see.
Less global warming more genocidal megalomaniacal space dictator whose favorite manor of execution is sending boeing aircrafts full of political dissidents into volcanoes.
Some suggestions:
Really hammer in on the feeling of the world being inhospitable. Give the player some starting resources – food, energy, complex materials – and have the first section of the game constantly force them to chip away at those. Make the player worry about whether they’ll be able to get some sustainable system set up before they run out of their supposedly-generous starting supplies.
Have abandoned structures, perhaps with some security measures, that contain loot far better than anything the player can find at that state in the game. Make those central to progression. If you want inspiration, the “Better Than Wolves” Minecraft mod has some really good environmental story-telling in its design.
Also, IMO scrap the ghost enemies. Environmental storytelling will be the ghosts. These aspects will make the punchline that much more impactful.
You have a really good idea for a game here. I think it would be incredibly popular.
There’s definitely potential here. What genre are you thinking? I can see a coop horror game here similar to lethal company or a survival game with horror elements like subnautica.
Also, you could lean into the strength of game story telling and use pieces of recordings scattered around the world instead of necessarily ghosts. Imagine if you act like it’s an alien planet in all the previews, then drop hints throughout the game to show the planet is actually earth.
Definitely in the realm of sci-fi/ horror. I love the scattered recordings idea too, that’s good. Love when games do that.
Have you played raft? It’s a similar post apocalyptic setting with a bunch of scattered recordings. Probably much more survival, less sci-fi horror than you’re wanting though
Yeah the story setting is intriguing. Nkw what type of game will be? But again this opening is intriguing
I’m imagining SubNautica with airships
Forever Skies is kind of like that.
I thought it was just “okay”, but if you have interest in the setting, it might be worth checking out.
So Ghosts of Mars, but on Earth and the ghosts are humans instead of martians?
Yeah basically, haha. I almost put this in the description.
It’s not perfect 1:1 but you might find inspiration in some of the environmental storytelling of the game Sable.
Maybe a tiny subset of the human population survived and evolved too? I could see a combination of that going somewhere.
New Sims sequel!?!
Are you L Ron Hubbard?
… No… Definitely not. Definitely. 🤫
