Summary
- RPG worlds explore grim realities, challenging players to face brutal and bleak environments.
- Pathologic 2, Darkest Dungeon, and Bloodborne offer relentless despair and futility.
- Games like Dark Souls 3 and Diablo 4 confront players with the inevitability of death and hopelessness.
There’s no doubt that RPG worlds can be a much-needed escape from the grim realities of the world around us, but sometimes, game devs don’t want to provide an escape that’ll fill gamers with happiness. Instead, RPG games can propose worlds so dire that it makes reality seem pretty good in comparison.
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Whether it’s grimdark fantasy worlds consumed by war and violence, apocalyptic hellscapes, or Lovecraftian nightmares, RPGs are uniquely suited to building worlds that explore the very worst of what humanity has to offer.
8
The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt
Between Niflheim and Redania
- Released
-
May 19, 2015
- OpenCritic Rating
-
Mighty
At first glance, The Witcher series doesn’t seem so bad, because it’s usually full of beauty. However, five minutes in any of the Continent’s towns or cities shows just how degraded the nations of the world have become, butchering, slaughtering, and burning innocents, where justice is the exception, vicious villains roam the streets, and no help is coming.
This reaches a particular height in The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt when the war between Niflheim and Redania has reached a grinding stalemate, resulting in battlefields of the dead and monsters thriving in the aftermath. Despite the trademark humanity of CD Projekt Red’s writing, the world itself is brutally depressing.
7
Pathologic 2
Surreal Virality
Survival Horror
RPG
Adventure
- Released
-
May 23, 2019
- Developer(s)
-
Ice-Pick Lodge
- OpenCritic Rating
-
Fair
Games are really good at acting as relief from reality, but what if a game wanted to not only do the opposite but actively point out its own artificiality and how the point of gaming is possibly a selfish pursuit? The result is Pathologic 2.
Building upon the original cult classic Pathologic, Pathologic 2 proposes a world overrun by a terrible virus that is nearly impossible to cure, with characters speaking in circles, dying, and constantly degrading and brutalizing the player throughout the game’s considerable length. It’s a consistently grim atmosphere that actively makes the player think about the futility of being a player in a pre-determined video game.
6
Darkest Dungeon
Dread and Despair
- Released
-
January 19, 2016
- Developer(s)
-
Red Hook Studios
- OpenCritic Rating
-
Mighty
Lovecraftian fiction has always proved tricky to translate to video games because they’re about not being able to do anything to stop the horrors, and video games are all about making a player an active participant. It took some time, but Darkest Dungeon may be the best inheritor of that tradition in gaming.
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Players take control of parties of adventurers who must venture through eldritch dungeons to get ancient relics while trying not to go insane. The world is consistently grim, the player’s favorite characters are bound to perish, and there is no reprieve from the darkness. Death isn’t just present but expected.
5
Dark Souls 3
The End of Everything
- Released
-
March 24, 2016
- OpenCritic Rating
-
Mighty
All FromSoftware Soulslike games explore the futility of fighting against death and the end of the world in one way or another, but Dark Souls 3 is the most pointed rebuke against the concept of immortality and refusing to move on by presenting an utterly exhausted world that shambles on because its fearsome bosses are too scared to die.
In many ways, Dark Souls 3 is an anti-sequel, demonstrating how the fundamental themes of the original game were misrepresented, and that linking the flame, perpetuating the cycle, is the wrong decision. Sometimes, change is scary and depressing, but the world of Dark Souls 3 argues that it needs to be made.
4
Diablo 4
Hell Runneth Over
Action RPG
Hack and Slash
- Released
-
June 6, 2023
- OpenCritic Rating
-
Mighty
Fantasy has come a long way since Tolkien, and many fans have flocked to the Diablo franchise in particular due to its obsession with grimdark fantasy, where the world is beyond help, and humans are destined to be crushed by horrors beyond their comprehension. Death is cheap in these worlds where desperate clinging to religion is no relief from the celestial horrors.
This is developed further in Diablo 4, set in a world where Niflheim itself threatens to be crushed in a cosmic war between Heaven and Hell, where human’s only hope lies in being exploited by a church that considers them expendable cattle or demons that exploit their baser natures. It’s a relentlessly depressing world despite the player’s powerful build, where hope is always seen as an absurd aspiration.
3
Bloodborne
The Yharnam Yips
- Released
-
March 24, 2015
- OpenCritic Rating
-
Mighty
The Victorian age was all about supposed reason, progress, and scientific mastery of the world. However, with scientific mastery came the risk that human beings would destroy themselves with their own genius, and uncover aspects of the world they never should have. So goes the world of Yharnam in Bloodborne that’s filled with all manner of Lovecraftian horrors.
As possibly the best evocation of Lovecraftian fiction ever put to pixels, Bloodborne depicts a city completely destroyed under its exploitation of elder gods beyond their comprehension, where it’s the destiny of ever-conscious beings to succumb to their bestial nature. It’s a dismal gothic world with no happy endings, just different ways of dealing with depressing reality.
2
Metro: Last Light
The World’s Woes Underground
The Metro games have become beloved for their distinctly grim Soviet sensibility to the world, helped along by a totally unique setting in the clammy dingy tunnels of the Moscow subway system. Metro Exodus actually showed some hope for a future, but not so in Metro: Last Light, which shows the very worst post-apocalyptic humanity has to offer.
More than its predecessor, Metro: Last Light delights in the misery of the subway system, showing just how quickly human beings succumb to fascistic tendencies at a moment’s notice, and show no capability of reclaiming the world above. For Metro: Last Light, the only solution is to run.
1
S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Shadow of Chernobyl
The Worst World Struggles On
Anyone who has watched the famous film Threads will know that the nuclear apocalypse is one of the grimmest realities human beings face in modernity, so grim that it sometimes is hard to even consider what it would be like. Luckily (or unluckily) for gamers, S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Shadow of Chernobyl delights in showing just how miserable an existence it would truly be.
The game explores the Zone, a contaminated area around Chernobyl that explorers and scavengers are breaching in the hope of loot and fortune. What they actually find is the horrors of nuclear fallout where human decency breaks down in the face of unabated greed and monstrous creatures. It’s a grim version of what the future might hold, even if it is one of the best RPGs ever made.
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