Innocent Looking Games That Became Dark

Key Takeaways

• Undertale starts innocently but dives into dark experiments and choices.
• Life is Strange investigates murder from a teacher and reveals dark themes.
• Abzu’s beautiful ocean hides a machine-driven plot threatening life.

Have you ever picked up a game with the assumption that it plays a certain way, only to find out partway through that it’s not quite what you were thinking? And did it ever turn out to be a tad more unsettling than you expected?

It’s more likely than you’d think. Plenty of games are designed with twists and turns to catch you by surprise, but some games have such a sudden shift into a story that’s much darker than you’d expect you’d get whiplash. These games are just some of the most iconic to do it.

8 Undertale

It’s hard to divorce Undertale from the reputation it has now. Everyone has seen Sans, heard Megalovania, are aware of the game’s many intentional oddities. But can you imagine picking that game up for the first time having never heard of it?

Undertale starts as a relatively innocent, if a tad unsettling, homage to Earthbound. And then you get deeper, learning the game is painfully aware of your presence. Suddenly, you’re no longer traversing in search of a exit, but learning about the dark experiments that were performed on hearts. You can even commit wipe out every living being there is.

7 Life Is Strange

From the moment you begin Life is Strange, it makes you painfully aware that tragedy awaits you. There is mystery abound from the very beginning, though none that quite indicates to you just how off the deep end the game would later go.

So much of the game revolves around Chloe’s relationship with Amber, and finding out where she is. Until you discover her eventual murder by a teacher that sexually manipulated her, and buried her in Chloe’s favourite getaway.

6 Ecco The Dolphin

What could possibly be odd about a dolphin? What could happen for an dolphin defending its home to become dark? Well, when this dolphin becomes the last bastion against an alien invasion and travels through time to defeat them, well, anything could happen.

A giant waterspout whisks away Ecco’s family, and so he journeys across the ocean to save them, eventually finding his way to Atlantis, and learning there that aliens are harvesting the resources of earth every 500 years to preserve their own species. And Ecco, a Dolphin, is the only one that can save the world.

5 The Stanley Parable

The Stanley Parable is from the get-go an unsettling game. It never hides that. It’s how it unravels that makes it so remarkable. There’s not exactly a sharp turn into that darkness, but rather a slow descent.

The Stanley Parable will at first simply having you wrestling for control of the narrative from the narrator, and as you progress you will start to question the very concepts of autonomy? How much of our actions are our own? Are they all societally informed? Do we really have free will? Or you could just sit at your desk.

4 Majora’s Mask

Really, in and of itself, Majaro’s Mask could be seen as a dark turn from Ocarina of Time. That game already had an unsettling atmosphere, but not an incomprehensible one. You defeated the evil and saved Hyrule. Happily ever after. Not so much in Majora’s Mask.

Arriving in Termina is already an odd experience, and every one there is a bit discomforting to be around. And of course, the moon is literally staring at you as it inches ever closer. But it’s when you near the end of the game and travel to the moon, witnessing the masked children, and battle the mask itself that you realise there are much darker forces at play, ones you will never understand.

3 Abzu

Abzu has often been praised for just how gorgeous it is, a wonderful portrayal of the beauty of the ocean. All the life it contains. Just swimming around the ocean, calming watching the sealife pass you by is a painstakingly detailed process.

Yet as the game progresses, you see that mechanical structures are sucking the life from the ocean, and only you can save it. Yet even later, you learn that the diver you play as is a machine herself, supposedly in service of the machines stealing life from the ocean. In a graciously happy ending, this diver represents a will of its own, saving the ocean’s life.

2 Splatoon

Until the single-player DLC for Splatoon 2, people didn’t question the world of Splatoon all that much. In existed in snippets within the game itself and extended media, though you had to seek it out. The DLC for both Splatoon 2 and 3 made it clear – humanity is extinct, and you are its successors.

It’s less that the games take a dark turn, and more that it’s just constantly laying beneath the surface. These cute little Octolings and Inklings, who love dressing up and engaging in mock battles, are living in the ruins of a humanity that doomed itself to extinction. At least the fish survived.

1 Doki Doki Literature Club

For anyone that played Doki Doki Literature Club before it hit the height of height of its fame, well, it has probably thoroughly scarred you. A free visual novel that is styling itself as a dating sim. Oh sure, it might do some weird things, but that’s just par for the course. Not like this though.

From the narrative warping itself to focus on a single character, to reading your computer’s files to identify you, the player, Doki Doki wants all your attention. Once you’ve played it once, you’ll probably never want to pick it up again.