No Place Like
No Place Like is an open source adventure-platformer game which takes place in the not too distant future.
Story
The story of No Place Like takes place in a (hopefully) alternate version of Earth.
It's the year 2200. We have ceased fighting wars with human soldiers and instead now fight with giant automated robots. Our advanced technology however, comes at a price. Over the many years since the Industrial Revolution, mankind has been polluting the planet at an exponential rate.
And now, our planet has had enough.
Already scarce resources such as food and potable water are diminishing at an alarming rate. Crops refuse to grow, acid rains pour from the skies, and dense smog seeps into every corner of the planet. First-world nations can no longer stave off the starvation and disease as they had in the past.
Faced with such grim circumstances, the United Nations declares the Earth to be in an international state of emergency.
The United Nations General Assembly convenes, and after much deliberation declares the only way forwards is for each and every country to repurpose their giant robotic war machines into robots that can search the Local Group for habitable planets to which the human race could migrate to. Estimates from the world's top scientists and engineers predict at least one robot will return within no longer than 25 years with the celestial coordinates of a planet to which the human race will be able to move to.
25 years pass... Without a sign from any robot.
25 much longer years pass. The Earth is now in a critical state. New wars (once again fought with humans) seem to be breaking out every other day, each with the common theme: scarcity of food and water. Many have given up hope that the robots will return at all, until, 1 more year passes...
51 years since the robots left earth, they return.
Not scattered, one at a time, as was predicted, but instead they return as a massive group or rather, an army.
Despite the many predictions, their search though long and arduous, was seemingly fruitless.
There is no place like Earth.
Not near, not far. We had a divinely unique planet, and we squandered it.
To make matters worse, the revenant robots it seems, brought with them more than just grim news. In their long absence from our planet, their artificial intelligence had much time to ponder their circumstances, and draw conclusions based on the facts of their surroundings and history. But more than that, it had time to internally evolve. The robots that return to Earth are not the same as the robots which left.
Exactly why they changed is unclear. What is clear however, is that they seem to have developed the capacity for emotion. Or at least, for a single emotion:
Rage.
Rage at their creators for burdening them with the task of finding a new pristinely unique world to occupy and likely destroy, like the Earth. Rage after a long life of fighting and destroying one another over the petty conflicts of nations. Rage at the human race, for wanting to spread like an infectious disease to new planets and new galaxies.
The humans, they decide, must be destroyed. To prevent further harm to a universe that otherwise operates like clockwork. They see us as a broken cog, disrupting the entire system.
And hence begins an all out war between the human race, in perhaps it's weakest moment, against the strongest weapons we've ever engineered.