Check it: you play a Confed military engineer, dispatched in a shuttle to go respond to a request for service at a sensor/defense autonomous station. You get there and your shuttle gets hit by something and can't sub-dive out. But! The station has oxygen, food, water, heat, etc, as well as a small 3D printer (upgradable, of course) and you can use your standard issue multitool as a fusion cutter to chop some materials from a few near by asteroids
Eventually, you'll make or find a gun, you'll be able to repair a wrecked fighter in the asteroid field and turn it into a mining ship, and the big goal is fix the shuttle and get home. Or maybe if you want some horror element, there's a Grey somewhere that you have to avoid
Or, if we wanted more of a trial to overcome than just "survive and fix the shuttle", could always throw some "ancient tech from a dead race" in there, too.
Inspirations:
Set immediately before the Juno Disaster. The player is a Confederacy military engineer dispatched to repair a sensor/defense station at the edge of the Legendarium System. On arrival, a Grey frigate destroying a nearby comm array clips the shuttle. The pilot is killed, the shuttle can't dive, and the last message the Engineer catches is that Juno Station is under attack.
The station sits at the edge of a space junkyard: debris, broken ships, cargo containers, asteroids, and Grey probes scanning for something. Over the course of the game, the Engineer discovers a sealed pod of unknown origin (Grey/Sooni) that the probes are looking for. After repairing the comm array, they're told no rescue is coming. The goal becomes: repair the shuttle, grab the pod, and get back to Juno before it's too late.
When the shuttle is finally repaired, the Engineer returns to the Legendarium System to find Juno destroyed, the Rokkr surfacing with the Archigos after Tel'Erani. The pod is delivered to the Rokkr.
The player character: ENG-D11411 "Ash Carson". Gender neutral by default. The player picks pronouns (he/she/they) and a vaguely femme or masc model, but you only ever see your character inside a H.A.Z.E. suit. Canon is the fully gender-unspecified version. The game mostly uses the nickname; some data entries give the full name. Revan-style ambiguity. Empty vessel, let players fill in the rest.
A capable engineer who ends up having to turn into a spec ops guy out of necessity. Gordon Freeman energy.
Other characters:
Days are loose. You wake up, have infinite time, finish your goals, get a prompt to "end your day." Progression is Subnautica-style: triggered by completing objectives and receiving signals, not real-time clocks. It should feel like time pressure without actually being timed.
The design doc breaks the game into roughly 6+ days with escalating zones, tools, and threats. See the Design Document for the full day-by-day breakdown.
Three tiers plus uniques:
Not freeform. Each zone has a set location where you can build. The surface/exterior is static prefab; the player-built part is inside the asteroid the station sits on.
The stations are robotic seeds. A prefab plus basics get loaded onto a construction robot, it burrows into the asteroid, leaves the prefab on top, and hollows out tunnels and rooms inside. When the Engineer arrives, part of Day 1 is getting the old construction bot running again.
Once it's working, you assign tasks: rooms, halls, expansions. There's a build time. The game pulls the "watched pot never boils" trick: construction speeds up when you're not looking. Leave the zone, come back, and most of it's done. "Construction takes time in this gritty world, but also this is a game, and no one wants to wait ten hours for a robot to build a hallway."
Little 1ft x 1ft spider things with lasers. They feed material into one large fabricator bot. Get a swarm going and it looks creepy as hell, all of them swarming at the tunnel face building whatever you told them to. In lore, these get left where they stop. They're supposed to be reusable but most get scrapped or abandoned. Half are sitting at the end of the last tunnel they dug. Could be a "scan enough broken ones, 3D print new ones" mechanic.
Default mode. Accelerated build times. The game as designed.
Option on the new game screen. Disables accelerated build times (construction closer to real time). Removes some dialogue options in certain situations, locking the player into the choices the Engineer canonically made. The game tells you up front you're opting in: "lore is protected here because we made your ass click a button that says you ain't got time for that shit."
For players who want to experience the events as they happened according to the world lore.
Canon mode disabled, realistic difficulty toggle. The Grey become the terrifying versions of themselves. Every Grey Probe is a set-number boss fight (not infinitely spawned, all extremely dangerous). This is the mode that unlocks the secret ending.
The Engineer gets the Haven black box data, the Grey POD, and all shuttle upgrades. The shuttle + info + pod makes it back to Juno before McKenzie and the Rokkr arrive at Prometheus, giving McKenzie fresh Grey intel and a bargaining chip for when Rhea pulls some shit.
The twist (if the tone leans horror): the shuttle escapes, but the Engineer doesn't make it. Cutscene: Glyse and David investigate the comms station. Signs someone lived here, worked out all of it. Plasma burns on the walls. No sign of the Engineer. Or the Grey.
Hardcore mode only. Kill every Grey Probe, find a secret comm channel code (extremely missable). The Engineer wakes up in a cryo facility, Grey standing guard. In walks Rhea: "I've got big plans for this shockingly capable ape."
The implication: the Grey preserve races and store genetic material as potential weapons against the Sooni/Overseers. The Engineer proved worthy of preservation.
The Engineer loses their mind. Everyone is the enemy. Builds a giant space nuke, lures McKenzie in, detonates. Turns Juno into Charlemagne Part 2.
The joke ending. Full absurdist. The Grey are just GikDaa in organic mech suits. Silent Hill dog ending energy.
Inside an asteroid that the Grey were using as a supply depot. When you go to retrieve it, you're in truly alien, organic space.
Campaign beats are delivered through audio logs and milestone triggers. Six log chains run through the game:
See the Design Document for zone-by-zone log distribution.
Stretch goal. Two-player co-op that feels meaningfully different from single player.
The horror works with two players. "Death" means getting knocked unconscious; your partner has to collect your body, can't shoot while carrying. In-game voice gets cut for the downed player. Enemies use divide-and-conquer. Could get wild.
Narratively, multiplayer could be the "free play" mode. Leading ideas: David and Glyse investigating post-canon ending, or a team hired to set up a mining station that stumbles into an operational Grey base. Two unnamed LNI operatives who arrived with actual kit (not a stranded engineer with a multitool). One sneaky spy, one basically Kratos. Different combat styles, unique abilities. Would need Focus in the game. Portal 2-style separate story not off the table.