I once started a Star Wars campaign with the players meeting in prison. Most arrested by the Empire for things they didn’t do. A couple for things they did.
First episode was breaking out. I planned out a few options and dropped hints. They of course chose brute force. At the end was a choice between a few different ships to steal and get off the planet and use for the rest of the campaign.
MechWarrior: Destiny
BattleTech is originally a tabletop game, but MW: Destiny is their latest PRG ruleset and is designed to play like a narrative driven game like FATE system. No need for maps, minis, or anthing like that. The rules can also be blended with the various systems, Classic BattleTech tabletop, AlphaStike quick miniatures rules, and the various other MechWarrior RPG editions, to find a balance you & your players are looking for.
More importantly, the BattleTech universe has decades of lore development with hundreds of sourcebooks and novels spanning many, many, many different major eras of the universe.
One of the genius things the original authors did was write in many different mysteries into the lore. Many of those have been answered over the years of development, but some still remain and if you’re players are not familiar with the universe, you can just utilize any of them as the center of a campaign.
And of course it has Giant Stompy Robots.
Off the top of my head I’d think a campaign where your players are MechJocks/Mercenaries for an Interstellar Expeditions team trying to track down the origins of the Minnesota Tribe in the deep Periphery would a good possibility.
The game also has ties art-wise back to the Macross/Robotech transformable Valkyries. They literally exist in BattleTech as the Phoenix Hawk, Wasp, & Stinger Land-Air-Mechs. They’re not popular in universe, and generally poor units for tabletop, but there’s nothing really holding them back in the MW: Destiny rules and I could see the flexibility they offer would make sense for an Interstellar Expeditions team.
“Scream loudly. Something will surely hear.” This could be epic while the players are trying to take a desperately needed long rest in a dangerous location. They encounter an otherwise harmless gnome or fey or kobold, that makes an outrageous demand. Like the players handing over one of their most valuable magic items. Otherwise they’ll scream.
Play Battlestaions This was my last group’s actual fallback… that started to become our main game because it was more interesting than my campaign O.o