Coppersmog

It's a Coppersmog world. Until it's not.
Somewhere in a brass-and-bronze world that is being destroyed, you run a small laboratory trying to reverse the destruction. To that end you breed blorbs: round, squishy, one-eyed creatures that wander, mutate and fight. One of them holds the key in their DNA. So feed them, mutate them, test them in the Petri dish, send them to battle and dress them in tiny top hats.  If the rent comes due, sell them.
Your buyer is Coppersmog. You sell to them. Everyone does. Coppersmog is the world-swallowing conglomerate that makes every button, every bootlace, and every nutrient your blorbs need to keep breathing.   Coppersmog destroys a little more of the living world every single year. Its founder, Professor Aldous Puddlepot, is a sad unfortunate fool. His lesson has been that the damage can never be undone.  Buy. You can never be clean.  Buy.
Twelve rival research teams think he's lying. So do you. Buried somewhere in the science is the Reversal: a blorb that runs Coppersmog's game backwards.  Find it, and Puddlepot's law breaks in your hands.
To level up and discover knowledge blorbs are sent to the Rivalry. Winners take home prizes and sometimes knowledge. This knowledge leads to the discovery race, where every method you uncover is a quiet moral decision: hoard it, share it with your team, sell it to Coppersmog, or publish it for everyone to use. 
Breed creatures. Run experiments. Pick your way through an economy built from the ground up to make you complicit. And work, one blorb at a time, toward proving the crooked old man wrong.
The Lab:
Breed, mutate and feed blorbs in the Petri dish.

Train blorbs across six tug-of-war stats and twelve star signs.

Subject blorbs to environmental trials in real time to discover new traits.

Dissolve a donor blorb and pour its DNA traits into another using the tinker jar.

The Rivalry:
Twelve rival teams, each a vivid CEO with their own theory of how to save the world.

The purse is paid in loot books and Coppersmog skims its margin off every fallen blorb, win or lose.

The Auction House:
Sell blorbs for Gil to keep your lab running.

Coppersmog owns the floor and skims a tariff off every sale.

Sell to a rival lab to stay a little cleaner, or take Coppersmog's Gil.

Any blorb the market refuses drops to Coppersmog as salvage.

Every deal you strike with Coppersmog fattens your purse and dents your whole team's prestige.

The Library:
Find hidden methods and decide, alone and once, what becomes of each.

Fill the codex page by page toward the one method that matters: the Reversal, a blorb that runs Coppersmog's engine backwards.

The Closet:
Dress your blorbs in hats, masks and charms.

No two blorbs need to look the same.