The Mezzanine

Fair enough! It had that look to it - Powered By The Apocalypse is actually probably something worth looking into - it's a good mental framework for *genre* emulation, among other things, and that's very much what you're doing here. The way it construes player-side mechanical options as a set of "moves", each with it's own context and outcomes, is very good for emulating stories where the PCs are working with a specific toolkit of responses and reactions they want to work with, which can be a good mindset if you're trying to replicate a specific *story* rather than simulate a particular setting.