MOONRIDER

A meditative game about ferrying digital spirits across a barren planet and occasionally fleeing from a giant sandworm.
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We're trapped here. All of our satellites smashed each other to pieces. Our navigation, communications, entertainment... cascading collisions became millions of tiny 2,000km/h daggers, a ripping cloud of orbital debris, a spider web that encircles our Earth, woven by plutocratic madmen. It wasn't an accident, in the end. We're trapped here.

You might assume those that kept their bodies were the lucky ones. The Sublunary, who hadn't yet transitioned to software, still unshorn, flesh and blood. Better than being trapped on a drive somewhere when the internet died. The Discarnate, the heavenly billions, the cloud compute spirits, who had their senses severed, their consciousness cut down to LAN — surely, they are the ones to be pitied?

But someone must keep the fans whirring and the chips singing.

The fail safes were not safe. The automatons lost their minds when we lost the networks. The mannequin climate was switched off, its false life mercifully ended, the foretold mass extinction. Sounding of trumpets, fire and brimstone. Scorched Earth.

But in the holes, the dark places that were not made for humans... someone must maintain it all. Billions of souls depend on the labour of a few thousand technicians. The Sublunary, who survived, who are left, must oil the machine. Below the heavens.