Games where you find obscure and dark subjects

[Lotus Victoria]

Greetings and salutations my dear champions!


So, I've been reading Berserk lately, and suddenly I got a question:


Do you know any games where you can find obscure/dark subjects, like religion, torture, death, sacrifice, genocide, etc, used in an interesting concept, to provoke/encourage the player to do something about it?


For example:


Final Fantasy Tactics: The Church and the Kings are basically the source of all evil in that game. FFT does a great job in showing us how "convenient' was for them in the middle-ages to remove someone who "knew" too much from the society.


Ragnarök Online: Happy and colorful at first, but later you would face gruesome places like the famous "Regenschrim Laboratory", a place where scientists made controversial research using real people.


Breath of Fire IV: Using the life force of the Princess of Wyndia, the Carronade is a weapon of mass destruction used for genocide and war. Also, as Fou-Lu, you see how merciless the troops and the government are, as they SPOILER kill the girl who was making Fou-Lu a more "human" being .


So, I love this kind of thing, where at first you think that the game is cute and charming, and later you discover that that's not all.


Do you know more games of this kind?




See you soon!

[TheCount]

FF10 uses the same thing as tactics. Religion to keep the population suppressed and the religious officials basically doing whatever they want. Yevon was also basically a religion based on deal dying with no hope of making the future better.

[Doctor]

Xenogears for sure

[Csnyder]

yes, i know of many more games like that.

[Scyclone]

yes, i know of many more games like that.

List em foo!

Also, adding to the list

Xenosaga

Mass Effect (To a much more limited degree, mostly due to morality choices large and small)

Chrono Trigger and Chrono Cross (While they don't do it overtly, genocide/slavery/torture and a few other things are hinted at all throughout the game. First, due to Lavos and the denial or acceptance of its presence. And later on, the whole concept of time distortions causing more problems each time they try to rewind. Theres a lot about Serge and Lynx for Chrono Cross, that is just horribly depressing... but I can't say much without spoiling a lot of it.)

My own game... (cough, shameless plug) once I ever complete it, will have a lot of it as well. I was quite heavily inspired by FFT and Breath of Fire 4. But also had several great novels that inspired some ideas as well.

[Cattleya]

the church/holy officials/religious folk being evil or the bad guys is a pretty common thing in JRPGs. If a JRPG has a religion in it, it's fairly safe to say you're going to be fighting it at some point.

[Shynra]

WoW, up to a point. I remember playing Alliance during vanilla, starting out in wonderfully colorful areas and then slowly uncovering grimdark stuff like the Scourge, Old Gods, etc.

God I miss those times.

[Scyclone]

the church/holy officials/religious folk being evil or the bad guys is a pretty common thing in JRPGs. If a JRPG has a religion in it, it's fairly safe to say you're going to be fighting it at some point.

True, though FFT had handled it fairly differently from most. The entire overarching game was manipulated and carefully shifted around by such things. The politics behind the assassinations, giving certain people power because they knew they would do things in a certain way, it was like a carefully orchestrated chess game in which the main character was the real victim, as he was nothing more than a pawn the entire time designed the end a rebellion, segregate a power structure, allow for proper infiltration and replacement of those in charge, create a symbol and then to bear witness to everything in motion, often in the worst ways possible. To this day, I am still awestruck by how flawless Delita was as a character in terms of design and development. And by the time, everything had been resolved and handled, the last final step was the cumulative results of every change that took place on Delita up until the end. It was essentially the tale as old as time, replace one evil for one even worse...

[Tidezen]

Not a game (yet?) but the anime Madoka Magica...holy yikes. Also, From the New World, also...actually a ton of anime do this. Those Japanese, they sure like happy-->depressing stuff.

I think a lot of games do too, maybe not to such extremes. But, for instance, Legend of Zelda, both Ocarina of Time and Link to the Past start off very light-hearted. In Link to the Past, the first time you hit the dark world can be quite jarring.

That reminds me of a little game called Eversion, which gets really weird really quickly, despite starting off as an upbeat 8-bit Mario-type platformer.

Fallout 3, the intro/tutorial, heh. If you didn't already know what the Fallout series was about, it would be pretty shocking when first leaving the shelter.

Also agee with what Shynra said about WoW...if you start off as Human or Nelf, it's pretty idyllic the first few levels, then starts getting bleaker really fast.

[WarpedAcorn]

If you're okay with playing indie games, you could try Tormentum.

Also, if you're okay with playing older games then Planescape: Torment.

[Shinzai]

Greetings and salutations my dear champions!


So, I've been reading Berserk lately, and suddenly I got a question:


Do you know any games where you can find obscure/dark subjects, like religion, torture, death, sacrifice, genocide, etc, used in an interesting concept, to provoke/encourage the player to do something about it?

Dark Souls. Not only because of the bleak way it deals with the notions of becoming a martyr, religious motivations, the founding of mythology and more, but also because it owes a lot to Berserk, from its design ethic to its characters and creatures. It's about corruption of the soul, ones ideals becoming twisted and sometimes finding that the one thing you have searched for your entire life will be the thing that destroys you.

[dwightyo39]

Dante's Inferno

[Remilia]

Half Life 2 / Left 4 Dead.

[smackyslap]

If you're okay with playing indie games, you could try Tormentum.

Ahhh yes metal album cover the game.

It is a great game if a bit simple in it's moral choices.

[Fencers]

The Secret World.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Secret_World

http://www.thesecretworld.com/

[Arrashi]

Go for tormentum - it's polish level brutal. The only sad thing about this game is when you see all amazing screens that weren't used in game.

[8bithamster]

1.) Dark Souls 1
2.) Dark Souls 2
3.) Bloodborne

[May90]

Witcher series, definitely. Where else can you sleep with a vampire and a succubus, see a man cut off his ear to give it to the witches as a gift, cure a man of lycanthropy by asking his girlfriend to have sex with him, see a man have his former advisor's eyes pulled out with a spoon, see a girl being spanked by her mistress in a foreplay and sleep with multiple prostitutes over the course of 3 games?

[TheCount]

Most of the God of War series, aside from the occasional nude love scenes it does get pretty dark.

[Luipet]

How about the Bioshock trilogy or the Fallout games? Beyond their all too simple (at first) respective lore, there is a load of subjects brought up that can make you question yourself.