Doom and Gloom

Sup Holla Forums, I'm looking for depressing games that produce an air of desperation and hopelessness.
I love how they make me feel, but I don't know very many. Examples:
Hollow Knight, Darkest Dungeon, Dark Souls, Gothic
Give me more suggestions.

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Any modern game

They do it by accident though, I want games that set out with this explicit goal. Games that craft it like a piece of art.

I'm not sure we played the same game.

The original X-Com and X-Com: Terror from the Deep cultivate this feeling in me better than any other game. I spent my first 2 hours in X-Com autistically reading through every single item description and choosing the best loadout for each of my 8 soldiers. Then, I cautiously tip-toed towards my first alien craft, careful not to be caught off guard. An alien suddenly exited the craft and killed one of my men in a single shot, setting off a chain reaction of panic among my rookie soldiers that caused the death of 3 more. In the end, the best efforts of humanity resulted in the death or injury of all but one of it's highly trained and well equipped strike team members versus a gaggle of alien non-combatants. India pulled their funding from X-Com and surrendered to the aliens a week later. I knew I was fucked and all of humanity was fucked along with me after only one mission. [spolier] It made my eventual victory that much sweeter. There is no better feeling than turning the tide and watching elite alien Mutons panic and run from my psychic, exosuit-wielding death squads[/spoiler]

SMT Strange Journey is a close second. The first hour of the game hypes you up for a mission where you and your elite team set out to research and destroy a giant portal that's opened up over Antarctica. The following 50 hours of gameplay involve you and your ever dwindling group of survivor's confused and desperate attempt to escape.

Pathologic and Don't Starve are really good as well. Dead by Daylight is the only multiplayer game I've played that's given me this feeling, but obviously not as acutely and not all the time.

That's the theme it has. Everything falling apart. A house in ruin. Every minor village idiot later becomming a paranormal entitiy.

STALKER with Misery.

I already played both X-Coms, but wouldn't put them into this category.
Pathologic and Don't Starve look promising though, definitely checking them out.
I somehow doubt multiplayer games can produce this feeling very well, because I personally just tend to focus on being an efficient player, not contemplating the atmosphere. That's why games like Left4Dead that would technically fit into this category just don't do it for me.


Yeah, if you didn't notice the dev's attempts creating despair, terror and hopeless situations, then we probably didn't play the same game.


Haven't tried STALKER yet at all, completely forgot about that series. It seems to fit perfectly what I'm looking for.

real life

The first STALKER has a bleak atmosphere, but the other two are more relaxed.

...

Too gloomy.

Misery is trying too hard to be edgy, end result is boring MMO tier grinding fest.

Silent Hill 1

Tunnel Runner, nigga.

pathologic
silent hill series

...

Then start with Stalker SOC with The Zone Reclamation Project to fix up somethings: metacognix.com/stlkrsoc/

But how is STALKER gloomy? It's just a game set in an inhospitable shithole. You know the world outside is fine and whatever storm in the teacup you're caught up in is largely irrelevant to the rest of the world.

Grim Dawn, especially in the expansion area where an entire city has been turned into a Cronenberg wet dream. The soundtrack in that area is super somber and solemn too.

Eh ? But you aren't living in the outside world. You are living in exactly that storm in a teacup.

But you can just walk away from the whole clusterfuck. Hell, that's exactly what the protagonist in CoP did.

Well, Strelok stopping the zone from expanding further sure as hell took some of the danger of the zone away. But that's why SoC is the most atmospheric and gloomy stalker.

Yet the characters usually have some reason to be in there.

You have bandits that are a combination of people with nowhere else to go or simply desperate enough to seek richness in a man made hellhole, a shitload of government assets trying to understand and contain the situation, Holla Forums + /k/ trying to exterminate Holla Forums and various subspecies of normalfags LARPing Fallout. It's not really all that grimdark. I mean, no less than going to a war torn shithole would be.

How is wartorn + nuclear waste + the zone + mutants not grimdark ?

What more does it have to be ? Not that I know much about stalker, but the theme is on the grim side from an outsider's perspective.

It may not be the level of doom and gloom you want but Brandish is pretty dreary.

No idea what he wants either, stalker is about as gloomy as you can get and it has one of the best atmospheres in games in general.

Oh shit, I didn't know they remade it for the PSP. I only played the SNES version, that looks pretty good.

Go play Shadow Tower/Kings Field and E.Y.E OP

Maybe it's not grimdark. Because grimdark is supposed to be retardedly bad.
But it's dark for sure.

Fatal frame.

Go play Drakengard.
But don't bother with any of the sequels, they're much lighter and less depressing than the original.

why even live?

It's a 10/10 remake; fixes problems the original had, throws in a new casino game, you can play as Dela in her own compressed but harder story mode and you can use the original PC engine music or new OST.

>STALKER Already been mentioned, but it's got a very nice atmosphere. You should feel it as soon as you get into the menu screen with the SoC music.
>Max Payne 1/2 3 if you want a follow up
>Limbo but it's not really that good unless you like platformers.
>Deadly Premonition Has it's moments, but mostly it plays out like a B Horror movie, and if you like that sort of thing you'll love this.
>Amnesia The Dark Descent If you can get over the fact that you have to run away in confrontations etc
>The Deed and the Deed Dynasty are Cluedo backwards Get away with murder and leave behind as little evidence as possible
>The Hitman franchise is quite dark Blood money being the best
>The Dark Mod/Thief can be pretty dark as in the non literal sense of the word not just dimly lit.
>Binding of Isaac I think?
>Pathologic can be at times
>Postal 2 is pretty much as dark as you want it to be, but obviously still pretty light-hearted. More like Black Comedy.
>Call of Cthulhu, Dark Corners of the Earth Before it turns into a shooter or roughly 2/3rds into the game

There you go user. Some of these are indisputably darker than others, and some are only dark by a small amount. Can't think of many more of the top of my head. Hope you find what you're looking for, I know what it's like when you feel like you can't scratch that itch.. Fortunately I've got pretty much all of these games already.

Happy End