While the majority of video games are designed to provide entertainment and escape from reality, some games seek to achieve a more ambitious and unexpected goal: making the player feel extremely bad. Not all games aim to offer a happy and bright experience, but quite the opposite: there are developers who want to immerse their clients in a bleak world where hope is just a faint glimmer.
This is often achieved by making the player control a bad or despicable character. While many games like Grand Theft Auto celebrate their villains, there are games that dare to make the player feel the terrible consequences of their character’s actions.
Then there are games that make the player feel bad through a dark social commentary, whether by highlighting the futility of existence or the hardship of living in an unfair and often indifferent world.
These top ten games are bleak experiences in themselves, and certainly not recommended for anyone in need of laughter or fun. However, their emotional complexity is highly valuable in a world still struggling to be dealt with seriously…
10. Silent Hill 2
The game Silent Hill 2 is a continuous and exhausting exercise in horror, as it exhausts the player through its relentless bleak atmosphere. This is not just a horror game full of monsters for the “hero” to kill, but a great and expansive metaphor that embodies the depression and sorrow that the protagonist James Sunderland suffers from as a result of killing his terminally ill wife Mary (spoiler alert!).
Although the game leaves the details of Mary’s death unclear whether it was murder or an act of mercy (euthanasia), playing as a depressed and suicidal character burdens the player heavily. The game’s side characters and subplots cannot be ignored, as they often address issues like sexual assault and drug addiction.
To make matters worse, the majority of the game’s endings are extremely dark, and even if you manage to reach the “happier endings,” they are actually just the least sad. Simply put, Silent Hill 2, or any game in the series for that matter, is not one to play if you are feeling frustrated or down.
9. Life Is Strange
While the majority of the first season of Life Is Strange focuses on the impactful relationship between the teenagers Max and Chloe, the game steers towards a dark and inevitable ending.
Throughout the game, Max has the ability to rewind time, but in the final episode, she finds herself unable to stop the storm hitting Arcadia Bay. Thus, she is forced to make a binary decision: either save the town or save Chloe.
Both endings carry painful consequences: either allow the storm to destroy the town and harm many people, or leave Max’s best friend and perhaps love to die. Whichever choice you make, there will be no happy ending, leaving the player with a definite sense of guilt.
8. Papers, Please
The game Papers, Please is creatively designed to make you feel bad, as the player portrays the role of an immigration officer in a fictional Eastern Bloc-like country called Arstotzka.
As a tool of the state, you are tasked with cold duties like stamping passports, inspecting other documents, and denying entry to anyone who looks “suspicious.” The result is a chilling portrayal of the tyranny of routine, where the player finds themselves trapped in a repetitive circle of bureaucratic work that reflects entirely how oppressive systems can thrive.
And worst of all, the player themselves are not immune to danger; if you make many mistakes or are caught helping the oppressed or those trying to resist the system, your family’s and your own life will be in jeopardy.
Regardless of the ending you get in the game, it is hard to come out of it feeling good about yourself or humanity in general.
7. Shadow Of The Colossus
The game Shadow of the Colossus is one of the most artistic and inspiring video games of all time, but it hides a dark secret beneath all that mysterious beauty.
Playing as the character Wander, you spend the entire game chasing and killing sixteen massive giants, with the knowledge that killing them will give Wander the power to revive his deceased love Mono. But of course, at the end of the game comes the famous surprising moment where it becomes clear that you fell for a huge deception.
It turns out that killing the giants, who lived in peace and did not harm you, was aimed at freeing the soul of the evil entity Dormin, as parts of its essence were trapped within each giant.
In other words, everything you did throughout the game was just a killing mission, where you killed innocent creatures just to revive one person. And while Wander achieves his goal in the end, the price he paid was extremely high, making you wonder if the sacrifice was worth all this trouble in the end.
6. Brothers: A Tale Of Two Sons
The game Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons is one of the most distinctive adventure games of the past decade, where the player controls two brothers, each using one controller, working together to reach the “Tree of Life” to save their dying father.
Although the game is short and only takes a few hours, Brothers’ experience has a deep impact, using its central plot cleverly to enhance the player’s emotional investment.
But at the end of the game, the events collide with a painful wall when the older brother suffers a fatal injury from a giant spider and dies. As if this wasn’t painful enough, the younger brother, and thus the player, is asked to bury his brother on his own before completing the journey alone.
And while their father survives in the end, the emotional cost was undoubtedly great and extremely painful. Despite the game’s beauty and creativity, Brothers is a game that leaves a deep sad impact.