Most Depressing Games

The end of Prince of Persia 08 was kind of depressing. You spend the entire game with the Elika, and then she's gone, but they don't end the game there... they leave you alone in the empty world after that and give you the choice to undo everything you've done to bring her back. I thought that part was brilliant.
 
The Walking Dead - unquestionably the most depressing I have ever played. In fact, it was depressing to a fault, so much so that I quit playing after Episode 3. Nothing I did mattered - there was zero meaningful player choice. And since no matter what I did or did not do, I could not save any of the characters I liked, could not change any of the "bad" characters, could not avert complete disaster, and could not punish the characters who caused disaster since the main-character's actions were overall on-rails, I completely stopped enjoying it. It just became a depressing, pointless on-rails game to me.

It was not an enjoyable on-rails game because the story and characters were so constantly depressing. And since it was on-rails, there was no meaningful player choices to change the story into a more positive one if you successfully attempted to do so - or at least be satisfied that the bad results were due to bad choices you made. There is enough depressing things in real-life that cannot be changed no matter what an individual does. I do not want to play a simulation of that.
 
GearChoices said:
The Walking Dead - unquestionably the most depressing I have ever played. In fact, it was depressing to a fault, so much so that I quit playing after Episode 3. Nothing I did mattered - there was zero meaningful player choice. And since no matter what I did or did not do, I could not save any of the characters I liked, could not change any of the "bad" characters, could not avert complete disaster, and could not punish the characters who caused disaster since the main-character's actions were overall on-rails, I completely stopped enjoying it. It just became a depressing, pointless on-rails game to me.

It was not an enjoyable on-rails game because the story and characters were so constantly depressing. And since it was on-rails, there was no meaningful player choices to change the story into a more positive one if you successfully attempted to do so - or at least be satisfied that the bad results were due to bad choices you made. There is enough depressing things in real-life that cannot be changed no matter what an individual does. I do not want to play a simulation of that.
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Congratulations on how far you made it though. I never made it out of the police car.
 
imyourzero said:
So stop playing them or feel free to create something unique and free of bugs.
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Sorry that would require actual work which most of us aren't willing to do. The point of games is to entertain us.

Someone mentioned Heavy Rain, holy shit is that game depressing.
 
bvbz said:
I thought Little Inferno was super depressing both in atmosphere and the underlying story.

Worth playing IMHO.
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And it just happens to be part of this week's Humble Bundle if you don't have it yet.

ssnyder28 said:
Sorry that would require actual work which most of us aren't willing to do. The point of games is to entertain us.
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Agreed wholeheartedly. But if anyone actually thinks that every game released these days is "Unfinished, overhyped, overpriced, buggy as hell, regurgitated shit" then I say either do something about it or perhaps it's time for them to get out of gaming and do something else that they enjoy more. Can't stand it when people sit back and complain and make blanket statements like that, especially when there are so many great games available.

Or maybe I'm just easily entertained, but then that would also apply to a huge portion of gamers both here and elsewhere.
 
Homeworld (Your planet gets lit ablaze right off the bat... That's some rough shit)
Homeworld: Catalysm (I was ultimately forced to sacrifice my entire fleet save for a single scout and the primary vessel in order to even survive the final battle. Bittersweet finish)
Dishonored (play as evil and things turn into a real shit-show in a hurry)
Limbo
Enslaved: Odyssey to the West (too bad it wasn't a better game overall)
Legacy of Kain: Soul Reaver (condemned to hundreds of years of torment only to rise into the dilapidated remnants of what was already a crumbling world)
Papers Please (Your wife won't be making it in with you this time, dude)
To The Moon
 
SRTie4k said:
Call me a sadist, but I love games that exude lack of hope and utter despair, either through their stories or their atmosphere. There's something uniquely evocative about games that weigh heavily on your emotions and force you to ponder the games themes long after you've stopped playing.<snip>
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Excellent thread topic, my man. And I wouldn't call that appreciation sadistic, no. Nor would I call games with themes of hopelessness and despair necessarily "depressing" -- Its all a matter of perspective I suppose. Same as you don't have to be sad or prone to depression to appreciate, say, blues music.

If a piece creates an emotional reaction or connection with the beholder - whether it be sunny and athletic and bright enough to light up a room, or a black hole that sucks you right down into it, then that's art. And when a developer is able to achieve that in a videogame, they've created something meaningful.

For me the titles that come to mind in terms of evoking a melancholic, reflective or somber mood tend to be the big openworld games where you're traveling alone, finding your way, and everyone you meet tends to be a huge pain in the ass.

Borderlands - from the first moments in Fyrestone, that droning, ambient soundscape really sets the mood as you begin to wander its wasteland, just brilliant.
Skyrim - another title where the ambient music really does a big part creating the atmosphere
Fallout 3/NV - another wasteland wanderer with great ambient music
Dark Souls 1 & 2
Bioshock Infinite - great story, emotional ending
Ms Pacman - at the end when she dies
 
firas said:
just play battlefield or any fps game online :D

n3aubs.jpg
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This is so the truth lol.
 
GearChoices said:
The Walking Dead - unquestionably the most depressing I have ever played. In fact, it was depressing to a fault, so much so that I quit playing after Episode 3. Nothing I did mattered - there was zero meaningful player choice. And since no matter what I did or did not do, I could not save any of the characters I liked, could not change any of the "bad" characters, could not avert complete disaster, and could not punish the characters who caused disaster since the main-character's actions were overall on-rails, I completely stopped enjoying it. It just became a depressing, pointless on-rails game to me.

It was not an enjoyable on-rails game because the story and characters were so constantly depressing. And since it was on-rails, there was no meaningful player choices to change the story into a more positive one if you successfully attempted to do so - or at least be satisfied that the bad results were due to bad choices you made. There is enough depressing things in real-life that cannot be changed no matter what an individual does. I do not want to play a simulation of that.
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Don't remind me of the Walking Dead.

No matter how often I go back to a previous chapter, if I save one person with my decision, someone else dies in his or her place. Always.

Ugh.

I'm surprised I have not gotten emotionally scarred by now because of this game. Eventually, you start to care about the specific people in the group while start hating with incredible passion about certain people in it.
 
lilbabycat said:
Apparently Spec Ops: The Line is a very "ugly side of war" kind of game. But I've also heard its incredibly cliche. Been meaning to pick it up...but you know.. that 1004325432523623 game backlog.
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It was just on sale for $7.49, takes about 9 hours to get through it. Was a decent shooter and if you get how it all happened it's actually quite sad and probably also quite accurate in some cases during real war.

There was one cheerful moment where it said "You are still a good person." during a loading screen toward the end of the game.
 
octoberasian said:
Don't remind me of the Walking Dead.

No matter how often I go back to a previous chapter, if I save one person with my decision, someone else dies in his or her place. Always.

Ugh.

I'm surprised I have not gotten emotionally scarred by now because of this game. Eventually, you start to care about the specific people in the group while start hating with incredible passion about certain people in it.
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I've given up on the redo's, but currently enjoy being the pissed off 12 yo girl:

"STILL NOT BITTEN"
"Like, WhoTF else is gonna climb on that roof?"
"no Bill, I'm NOT like you, but I'll make an exception in your case"
 
If you're interested in something releasing shortly on Steam, check out "Always Sometimes Monsters". It has been well regarded as an artistic indie title that deals with some pretty depressing stuff. Here's the warning from the Steam page..

http://store.steampowered.com/app/274310/
"Always Sometimes Monsters has content dealing with racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, mental health, sexual assault, child abuse, animal abuse, drug abuse, and suicide." So yeah. Appears to have at least the potential for depressive content.

Lone Survivor: Director's Cut is a great game and well worth a play.
Project Zomboid can be pretty depressing.
Prison Architect can be depressing, especially as the "rehabilitation" side of the prison options aren't yet available, but they're coming out as the game is developed a bit at a time. Definitely worth playing though
Mark of the Ninja: Director's Cut - one of the all-time best stealth action games around. Can be depressing depending...
The Walking Dead series can be depressing.. as can its close "relative"
The Wolf Among Us - both excellent Telltale adventure games, but you can make devastating effects come to pass through your choices.
 
Oregon Trail, I mean how many times can you get dysentery?
Missile Command, they never stop coming...NEVER! How can there possibly be that many nuclear missiles?!?!
Dark Seed, something is growing in your brain man...IN YOUR BRAIN
Syndicate Wars...Persuadertron....
Fallout 3...nowhere to go and nowhere to run
Portal...get that voice out of my head!
 
If you really want something massively depressing, I saw a listing on Steam recently for a game called "Actual Sunlight," about a guy who's suicidal and lives a really boring life that makes him constantly want to kill himself. Definitely give that one a shot - should be a blast! :p

I'm not really prone to depression, but do enjoy things with extremely dark atmosphere - I just find them interesting. Here's a few that might be applicable to OP.

Deus Ex - all of 'em have a very dark atmosphere and a pretty bleak outlook on the world's future, even if they are completely awesome to play.
Dishonored - some very dark moments in there, depending on certain descisions you make.
GTA4 - mostly just how much it sucked in general, but it does present a fairly dark depressing view on life in the good old USA.
 
KotOR 2. It had so much potential, then they just ended it.
 
At times Fallout 3 made me feel depressed. I guess just seeing how a world (technically our world) and its civilization were just utterly destroyed. I found myself frequently trying to imagine places in the game full of life and pre-apocalyptic. I guess i'm just weird that way.

I also found Heavy Rain's story pretty sad and depressing.
 
Lone Survivor.
What a fucked up game, even though the gameplay isn't that great I finished it yesterday. Feels like a short Silent Hill.
 
SRTie4k said:
Call me a sadist, but I love games that exude lack of hope and utter despair, either through their stories or their atmosphere. There's something uniquely evocative about games that weigh heavily on your emotions and force you to ponder the games themes long after you've stopped playing.

What are your favorite depressing games, either by theme or atmosphere?

My list (in no particular order)

- I Have No Mouth, And I Must Scream
- The Thief games (atmospheric)
- System Shock 2
- The Walking Dead
- Dark Souls
- STALKER games
- Alan Wake (atmospheric)
- Max Payne (the first game mainly)
- Silent Hill
- LIMBO (atmospheric)
- Lone Survivor
- Still Life

And one I have not played yet but want to:
- Pathologic
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Really nice list there! Ultima VIII: Pagan should be on there too! A lot of purists didn't like it, but it's an incredibly good game worthy of a lot more praise than it seems to get. It's got one of the most down-trodden casts of characters, ominous and dark settings, and beautiful and moody music. I'd HIGHLY recommend playing through it. It's on GOG for cheap.

Also, while not as foreboding as System Shock 2, System Shock should be in there too. I'm sure I can think of more to add to this list too, as I'm really into this sort of game too.

Veil of Darkness (an old DOS RPG) was also along these lines. It's one of my old favorites as well. I'd recommend tracking it down too.

I love Lone Survivor. I haven't made it too far into the game yet, but wow! Talk about bleak!

You might want to throw The Witcher in there, maybe Call of Cthulhu, Metro 2033, the original Dead Space, etc.

Edit:

I just read the rest of this thread. Dark Seed is a good recommendation. Get prepared to get pissed though. One wrong move, or one forgotten scheduled item, and bam, back to day one. Very dark though, and actually pretty fun if you can get past the frustration factor.

Dreamweb is another cool DOS RPG with a really heavy atmosphere. And now that reminds me of Bloodnet too. It seems you can't go wrong with dystopian cyberpunk style games.

Oh, and the STALKER games are in a pretty depressing setting. (and color scheme)
 
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Actual Sunlight
I'll say it again. Has anyone here tried this game yet? There's literally a warning in the Steam description saying you shouldn't play it if you've ever had thoughts of suicide. Seems like it should really be the game to which all others in this thread are compared. :p

I didn't bother getting it yet, 'cause I've never had problems with depression before, and now doesn't seem like a good time to start. :p Also the crappy retro graphics were a bit of a turn-off.
 
Played both The Witcher and the 2nd game. The first was definitely more bleak than the second, something I felt was kind of unfortunate. I loved the hopelessness of the first game's settings and NPC's.

Call of Cthulhu: Dark Corner's of the Earth was another pretty good mention. Unfortunately it was a pretty buggy game, but I thought it was still pretty good.


Tell me more about Dark Seed. I've read about it, especially since hearing the news about the death of HR Geiger, but have never really looked into it. Is it more frustrating than interesting? That would be a big turn off.
 
madFive said:
Actual Sunlight
I'll say it again. Has anyone here tried this game yet? There's literally a warning in the Steam description saying you shouldn't play it if you've ever had thoughts of suicide. Seems like it should really be the game to which all others in this thread are compared. :p

I didn't bother getting it yet, 'cause I've never had problems with depression before, and now doesn't seem like a good time to start. :p Also the crappy retro graphics were a bit of a turn-off.
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Doesn't sound like anything I want to go near. I don't suffer from depression luckily, but I (like yourself) don't need to start either. :D
 
SRTie4k said:
Played both The Witcher and the 2nd game. The first was definitely more bleak than the second, something I felt was kind of unfortunate. I loved the hopelessness of the first game's settings and NPC's.

Call of Cthulhu: Dark Corner's of the Earth was another pretty good mention. Unfortunately it was a pretty buggy game, but I thought it was still pretty good.


Tell me more about Dark Seed. I've read about it, especially since hearing the news about the death of HR Geiger, but have never really looked into it. Is it more frustrating than interesting? That would be a big turn off.
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It's a decent trip through Geiger's imagery, and the way they worked it into the game was pretty interesting. Some places felt a little tacked on, while others integrated well with the "normal world" environments. It's a point and click adventure. A pretty unforgiving one. The whole game is on a schedule. So if you forgot to open the door for the mailman on day two, then you're screwed. No chance of beating the game. However, if I remember correctly it had a decent save system. So you SHOULD in theory be able to cut some of that out a bit. Or grab a walkthrough. Instead of going through it step by step though, maybe look at an item-list, so you know what to keep an eye out for.

I think my brother and I beat it over the course of three days when we were kids. So it's not a HUGE time investment either way. I'd say it's more worth it than not to have experienced it, though it is a bit flawed in gaming terms.
 
Thanks for the synopsis! Sounds like something to add to my already overflowing backlog.
 
SRTie4k said:
Played both The Witcher and the 2nd game. The first was definitely more bleak than the second, something I felt was kind of unfortunate. I loved the hopelessness of the first game's settings and NPC's.

Call of Cthulhu: Dark Corner's of the Earth was another pretty good mention. Unfortunately it was a pretty buggy game, but I thought it was still pretty good.


Tell me more about Dark Seed. I've read about it, especially since hearing the news about the death of HR Geiger, but have never really looked into it. Is it more frustrating than interesting? That would be a big turn off.
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It is a good game, difficulty was good, story was good, art was very good for the time. It was also famous for making you search every pixel for items. There is a time in the game where you have to find an item that is only about 2 pixels big...
 
NoOther said:
It is a good game, difficulty was good, story was good, art was very good for the time. It was also famous for making you search every pixel for items. There is a time in the game where you have to find an item that is only about 2 pixels big...
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HAHAHAH!!!! :D that's one of the exact things I was thinking of when I was posting. But I chose to mention the mailman. Out of the three or so days my brother and I played it, we probably spent an entire day looking for that one 2-pixel item. :confused: :mad: :eek:
 
 
SRTie4k said:
Call me a sadist, but I love games that exude lack of hope and utter despair, either through their stories or their atmosphere. There's something uniquely evocative about games that weigh heavily on your emotions and force you to ponder the games themes long after you've stopped playing.

What are your favorite depressing games, either by theme or atmosphere?

My list (in no particular order)

- I Have No Mouth, And I Must Scream
- The Thief games (atmospheric)
- System Shock 2
- The Walking Dead
- Dark Souls
- STALKER games
- Alan Wake (atmospheric)
- Max Payne (the first game mainly)
- Silent Hill
- LIMBO (atmospheric)
- Lone Survivor
- Still Life

And one I have not played yet but want to:
- Pathologic
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Are you me?


* - Not a game and since this type of atmospheric content is your thing you've probably already seen it but Blade Runner: Directors Cut is an excellent movie. The atmosphere of this movie has spoiled me and it's become a sort of quest for me to find games that evoke the same feeling.

* - btw there is a Blade Runner point n click game that came out around 1999. It's actually very good but imo it follows the movie story line a little too closely, I would've rather played a completely new storyline in the same universe.
 
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Jellylesg said:
Any MOBA. Somehow they are teaching otherwise functional people to become autistic. It's incredible, and I don't know how they discovered they could make a congenital dysfunction a learned or conditioned one, but I hope some medical journals pick it up soon and someone performs a study.
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Lol it sure is a sight to behold, watching the mental destruction unfurl itself.
 
imyourzero said:
Call of Cthulhu: Dark Corners of the Earth and Condemned: Criminal Origins

Both had depressing atmospheres, but I'm not sure if I can say they weighed heavily on my emotions after I played them. Not like something like The Walking Dead or LIMBO, anyway. Of course, some of the games you listed (Thief, System Shock 2, etc.) didn't leave me dwelling on my emotions either but they were damn fine games in their own right. It's always neat when a game does that, but if the mood and atmosphere are scary/ominous/depressing enough then chances are I'll dig it regardless.

I'll throw Portal into the mix as well, and I've heard that Gone Home really makes you think and touches your emotions (no idea if it's depressing or not; it's still in my backlog).

One game that I've heard that really tugs at your emotions and makes you think is To the Moon. Also in my backlog. I'll get to it at some point.
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CoC was amazing and made me start reading Lovecraft.. wow stuff is right up my alley. Silent Hill 2 is one of my favorite games of all time and very disheartening. I liked the fatal frame games as well.
 
GearChoices said:
The Walking Dead - unquestionably the most depressing I have ever played. In fact, it was depressing to a fault, so much so that I quit playing after Episode 3. Nothing I did mattered - there was zero meaningful player choice. And since no matter what I did or did not do, I could not save any of the characters I liked, could not change any of the "bad" characters, could not avert complete disaster, and could not punish the characters who caused disaster since the main-character's actions were overall on-rails, I completely stopped enjoying it. It just became a depressing, pointless on-rails game to me.

It was not an enjoyable on-rails game because the story and characters were so constantly depressing. And since it was on-rails, there was no meaningful player choices to change the story into a more positive one if you successfully attempted to do so - or at least be satisfied that the bad results were due to bad choices you made. There is enough depressing things in real-life that cannot be changed no matter what an individual does. I do not want to play a simulation of that.
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I really liked The Walking Dead. Yeah, it was depressing, but I felt it was a good story. However I could see even on my first play through the way it was panning out that I actually had little to no input on what happened so I just played through it once and called it quits.

If you played it multiple times expecting different outcomes, yeah, I think that'd be frustrating.

It's the sort of game you just have to play through and not try and do everything perfect and not worry about going back and trying to fix something you felt you did "wrong".

I liked it because I often actually felt attached to characters who died and even when characters I didn't like died, they usually died in such a way that made me feel sorry for them and sorry for wanting them dead. It's not too many games that can pull that off.
 
Game Dev Story is depressing because it shows just how much money game devs make with shit console games over good quality PC games.
 
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