Techno Wreckage

It's been a loooooong time.

A high-tech area that is abandoned and in disrepair. Expect to see exposed and damaged wires that screw with the power, bad lighting that is most likely powered through the damaged wiring or a failing power source, and at least one puzzle devoted to restoring power. Don't expect to see sentient Mooks here; you may find rats or some fantastic vermin that have been chewing the wiring, various mutant monsters, and security drones (that will only turn on after the above mentioned "restore the power" puzzle), but expect your biggest foe to be the environment. Scary all around (or at least it keeps you on edge). This one is rarely found in linear titles, because a key factor in these levels is exploration.

Sub-Trope of Scenery Gorn.

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Examples:

Comic Strips

• In Dick Tracy, while reports of Moon Maid sightings are circulating, Dick, his granddaughter Honeymoon, and their Gadgeteer Genius friend Diet Smith secretly return to Moon Valley for the first time since The '60s, only to find it completely abandoned, in ruins and lacking oxygen. Diet explains that when the Moon Governor banished the Earthlings, he had many Space Coups in production. With the Space Coups on the moon missing as well, Diet assumes the Moon People left for another place, with no way to track them.

Film — Live-Action

• These sorts of wreckages are strewn about The Quiet Earth in its visual composition, and also affect the plot... or action, however little there is.
• Star Trek: Generations: The Amargosa observatory is Techno Wreckage after the Romulans get through with it.
• Star Wars:
  • Coruscant is essentially a pristine ultra-high-tech city standing on a layer of decaying buildings and destroyed electrical conduits. Nar Shaddaa is even more so, in that even its highest levels aren't pristine at all, and the decay starts from the second level downwards — the lowest levels are filled with sewage, destroyed pipework and mutant abominations.
  • Also the Scavenger World of Jakku, with the destroyed and partially salvaged Star Destroyers and AT-AT walkers that litter the landscape.

Literature

• The Norby Chronicles: In Norby and the Invaders, the titular robot and his companion end up prisoners in an Underwater City belonging to the enigmatic Invaders. After a few adventures they end up accessing the deeper, forbidden levels of the city, where they find that not only is the whole area long abandoned, in severe disrepair and leaking all over the place, but the survival of the newer side of the city is entirely dependent on the progressively failing machinery housed in the old area. The Invaders go "uh-oh".
• The Secret Of The Nautilus, a sequel to 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, is set in the abandoned Nautilus, the only humans being the player and a madman trying to bring it down.

Tabletop Games

• The Morrow Project: In the adventure Prime Base, the Player Characters must enter and restore the title base to working order.
• The 1st Edition Traveller adventures Annic Nova and Death Ship, with the title derelict ships which the Player Characters explore.
• Warhammer 40,000:
  • Space Hulks are Techno Wreckage Ghost Ships, formed from countless vessels and asteroids that have been crunched together in an amorphous mass by the currents of the warp. They're usually filled with hostile creatures like orks and genestealers, so their appearance in realspace is always cause for great concern. Unfortunately, because they often contain Lost Technology, their appearance causes salvagers, pirates and the Adeptus Mechanicus to try to loot the hulks, inevitably clashing with whatever horrible things are present on the hulk.
  • Hive cities are continent-sprawling Mega Cities that are built up on the wreckage and detritus of previous infrastructure. This creates vast "underhives" in the lowermost reaches of the city — networks of caverns and tunnels formed by dilapidated machinery and architecture, which are populated by the poor and outcast of common hive society.

Video Games

• The Derelict Ship in The Adventures of Rad Gravity.
• The space station you enter in Alien: Isolation is in really bad shape because it is in the process of being decommissioned. Sections of it are disabled or missing, broken panels and exposed cables are all around.
• The Tower of Geddon from Chrono Cross.
• 2300 AD in Chrono Trigger has pretty much everything listed above, combined with Ruins of the Modern Age.
• Deus Ex has the Ocean Lab, where after Illuminati sabotage half the place is submerged, turrets automatically fire at anything and can't be turned off (in the rest of the game they only attack after an alarm activates) and MJ-12 experiments have been released from their cages. Walton Simons who follows you here, is the only human (at least, living human) other than JC Denton in the whole underwater segment.
• In Crash Bandicoot (1996), the entire first half of the third and final world counts as this, especially Generator Room.
• Most of Dead Space 3 is set in environments like these, with the first chapters playing out aboard a fleet of derelict spaceships in orbit of a planet called Tau Volantis, followed by much of the rest of the game taking place in the ruins of the military expedition that explored the planet centuries before Isaac and his team made planetfall there. Considering that the Dead Space franchise is firmly rooted in Survival Horror, it shouldn't come as a surprise that just about everything in the trope description is played straight to the hilt.

• Dogyuun has stage 8, complete with robot flies, half-destroyed mecha, and a large undead mecha boss.
• Almost every region in Earthlock has some kind of ruins with advanced technology, though unlike normal examples of this trope, most cases have a Schizo Tech look, with ancient-looking architecture and building materials but futuristic layouts and defense systems. Only the ruins in Burning Desert and Anu actually look as advanced as they are.
• Techno Wreckage has become increasingly prominent in the Fallout series. In the first game, only a couple of areas (a nuked military research complex, and the defunct Vaults) appear — most of the action is out in the Scavenger World beyond. Fallout 2 revisits those zones as well as adding another subterranean military compound, the wreckage of an Air Force base, and a dilapidated oil tanker. The more recent games visit formerly-high-tech areas much more often, in part because the advances in graphics make them sadder and creepier. Probably the best spot in any of the games to find an Apocalyptic Log.
• Final Fantasy VIII: The Deep Sea Research Center. The scientists wanted to create the strongest GF in the world, but wisely decided to tap out of there when they realized that they wouldn't be able to control it. Said GF, Eden, looks like something out of cyberpunk movie and can naturally go beyond the damage cap of the game.
• Ghostbusters: The Video Game has Shandor Island. Granted, it's not high-tech by our 21st-century standards, but Egon notes that Ivo Shandor was considered the paranormal expert of his time. There's a lot of fun stuff to look out for here, like open vats of highly toxic black slime (with ghosts and other assorted beasties emerging from the Black Slime portals), cosmic machinery powered by said slime, loads of Iron Maidens, and an astral orrery with a Juvenile Giant Sloar imprisoned underneath. If that's a Juvenile Sloar, you'd hate to see how big they get when fully grown...
• One level of Gradius Gaiden takes place in a wrecked Bacterian Mothership.
• Many of the places you visit in Horizon Zero Dawn are like this. The game takes place in the distant future and the decaying wreckage of places like Norad and Denver and US Robot Command are visited and are the wreckage of the Old Ones.
• The Space Station from Jet Force Gemini. This wrecked station perpetually orbits Goldwood, the tribal's homeworld, and feels like a hybrid between Aliens and Super Metroid. The music sets the mood perfectly.
• Possibly averted in La-Mulana. Most of the ruins are... well, in ruins, but one of the few areas not in ruins — the Tower of the Goddess — appears to be a high-tech area in pristine condition, with futuristic interior lighting and even monitor screens still running. The Tower of Ruin fits this trope better.
• The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword has Lanayru Desert, which had been a bustling center of technology in the past. Now the robot NPCs are nonfunctioning, the advanced tech doesn't work, and sand is everywhere. The repowering puzzles consist of turning back time to when the machinery was working.
• Many of the levels in Mega Man Zero.
• Metroid:
  • The abandoned ship in Super Metroid is a typical example, with everything listed above. It even lives up to its title of "the ghost ship" by having an actual ghost living in it as the area boss!
  • The crashed Space Pirate frigate in Metroid Prime, and the GFS Valhalla in Metroid Prime 3: Corruption. The Valhalla probably takes the cake among the three as far as scariness goes, what with freaktastic music, corpses everywhere (with scans revealing how they died), dreadful Phazon monsters in every room, and more Metroids in this one area than has been seen in the entire franchise except possibly Tourian in the original game.
  • The B.S.L of Metroid Fusion starts becoming Techno Wreckage the longer Samus is there, culminating in her ramming it into a planet. Worse, the WHOLE game takes place inside it.
• The Nameless Mod has both Shadowcode's level and Deus Ex Incarnate. The first is one that you are actually trying to shut it down completely. The 2nd also contains lava and is underground.
• One of the early dungeons of Opoona is the destroyed wreckage of a dome that's been overrun with monsters.
• Perfect Dark has the Battle Shrine, which has inconsistent lighting and exposed wires inside. You have to reactive the generator in order to progress through a door.
• Play The Persistence if you love the sight of derelict spaceships filled with scattered wiring and misplaced floorboards!
• Portal 2 starts with the first game's Enrichment Center in this state (thanks to the Chell and the player last time round, and an indefinite period of neglect), though GLaDOS clears up a lot of it during Act One.
• World 7 of The Second Reality Project 2 has become this as of the remake. The premise behind it is that it's Bowser's base from The Second Reality Project Reloaded (as seen in the levels "The Launch Base" and "Docking Bay"), decayed and infested with Boos.
• Shantae and the Pirate's Curse has the Abandoned Factory found in Frostbite Island, which has rusted and frozen over machinery, various kinds of robots, and Inconveniently Placed Conveyor Belts.
• Skies of Arcadia has a very light version of this in the early areas of the final dungeon. As these outer areas have been exposed to the elements for centuries, they have decayed dramatically. the deeper you go, the more clean and pristine the tech becomes.
• Sonic the Hedgehog:
  • All of the Bad Future stages in Sonic the Hedgehog CD are a result of Dr. Robotnik taking over the Little Planet.
  • The Lost Colony stage in Sonic Adventure 2 is the first stage in the Dark storyline to take place aboard the derelict ARK station.
• The abandoned gas mines on Ord Ibanna in Star Wars Episode I: Racer, which also qualify as a World in the Sky.
• The Space Junk Galaxy in Super Mario Galaxy is a subversion. It's a deep-space debris field that feels peaceful and idyllic, having its own Unkempt Beauty.
• Both System Shock and System Shock 2 consist entirely of Techno Wreckage, except for when you enter a Womb Level inside a Techno Wreckage, and when you hack in cyberspace, from an interface in the Techno Wreckage.
• Warframe: Earth is covered in ancient pipes and fallen cities, which are in turn covered in a massive forest. During the Orokin Empire, Earth was so choked with pollution that it was mostly uninhabitable. The Orokin scientist who designed the Titania warframe created the forest not only to make it livable again, but to make it basically impossible to use for industrial purposes.
• The Witness: All those wires and discarded panels scattered around the island definitely give this vibe, which only increases when you enter inside the mountain.
• Several environments in Xenosaga probably qualify, as well, including every time you visit Militia.

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