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.
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.