The Garbage of the Future by AM Ruf
Horror • Half an hour • Web-based
The game might be set in the future, in which case the “garbage” would be secondary to an analysis of the “future”. Perhaps everything has gone to waste—the streets, the buildings, the transport, the people—and so there isn’t really “garbage”, just a dystopia. The game would be about the horrors of living in such a place, secondhand smoke swirling through the streets, unsavory people lurking around every corner, just waiting to get the jump on you, knife glinting in hand…
Or maybe the garbage is the only thing futuristic about it, so the game revolves around discovering what the garbage is and why it is there. It could be something mundane (imagine someone from, say, the 1800s finds a dead smartphone and spends their life’s work trying to figure out what to do with that box with buttons on it that don’t do anything). It could be something dangerous, life-threatening, world-threatening even. What it did to end up in a garbage bin, and then in a garbage truck and a landfill is anyone’s guess.
TLDR: desolate dystopia || dead phone || dangerous artifact