Miserable games to help you gaze deeper into the abyss
Last week we shared our favourite positive games to distract you from this cruel, random orb of spinning rock we live on, with its politics, wars, famine, and misery. But sometimes it can be cathartic to wallow in the mire and gaze even deeper into the abyss, and the following games should help you in that grim endeavour. They’re the darkest, dingiest, most depressing games on PC, where any glimmer of sunlight is immediately doused in shadowy gloom, and the glass is always, inevitably, half empty.
DEFCON
A Cold War nightmare in which warring superpowers hurl nuclear missiles at each other until absolutely everyone is dead.
Silent Hill 2
A depressed widower runs around an abandoned town hitting monstrous manifestations of his own guilt with a bit of old pipe.
The Walking Dead
A terrified orphan is cruelly stripped of her innocence in a zombie apocalypse while her friends die gruesomely around her.
Darkest Dungeon
Sacrifice adventurers with the blank-eyed detachment of a butcher carving up a pig to reveal the secrets of a wretched dungeon.
Spec Ops: The Line
A jaded soldier witnesses, and eventually commits, harrowing war crimes in the shattered, sand-blasted ruins of Dubai.
Kane & Lynch 2: Dog Days
A pair of utterly hateful, immoral criminals stampede through the streets of Shanghai in an ultimately pointless killing spree.
Max Payne
A cop returns home to find his wife and infant daughter murdered by a junkie and embarks on a quest of bloody vengeance.
Amnesia: The Dark Descent
A man skulks around a dark castle by lamplight going quietly insane as an unknowable evil stalks him through the halls.
Limbo
A tiny child leaps around a series of grim, monochrome platforming challenges as dead bodies swing eerily from trees.
Manhunt
A convict gruesomely murders people with knives, chainsaws, and plastic bags at the sick behest of a cackling CCTV voyeur.
Danganronpa: Trigger Happy Havoc
A twisted mechanical bear blackmails a group of promising high school students into killing each other.
Dark Souls
Slog through a bleak, eerie fantasy realm filled with deadly traps, murderous knights, and other horrors that want you dead.
This War of Mine
Experience a brutal war as a cowering civilian, struggling to survive as the city around you is shelled to bits.
Papers, Please
Work thankless shifts at a grim border crossing to feed your family, ruining lives and getting people killed in the process.
STALKER: Shadow of Chernobyl
Mercenaries and scavengers roam the overcast, rain-soaked Chernobyl exclusion zone fighting monsters and each other.
Half-Life 2
Gordon Freeman wakes up after an epic nap to find himself in a dystopian Eastern European city ruled by evil alien overlords.
Banished
You spend the summer building a village and planting crops, only for winter to roll in and mercilessly fuck it all up.
Metro 2033
A cataclysmic event forces the beleaguered survivors to live in dark, dingy subway tunnels alongside foul mutants and Nazis.
If it’s set in space, Andy will probably write about it. He loves sci-fi, adventure games, taking screenshots, Twin Peaks, weird sims, Alien: Isolation, and anything with a good story.
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