What qualifies a video game as “depressing?” The most obvious answer is that game you simply cannot beat no matter how hard you try, but that’s not what we’re talking about here. Instead, we’re looking at games that just have a pall over them, whether it’s directly from story beats or a more subtle vibe given off by the visuals, music or activities the player has to participate in.
The games on this list don’t have a lot in common on the surface — there are big-budget action thrillers, smaller independent titles and at least one visual novel / deck-building game. But they can all put you in a somber mood, if that’s what you’re looking for. Next time the rain is pouring down and you’re feeling a bit of melancholy, we have options to keep you company.
At the end of the world clinging to life in a frozen waste, a tiny band of survivors are trying to prevent humanity from going extinct. And it’s your job as the Captain to manage the remaining citizens and build a city – possibly the last one on Earth – before volcanic winter silences civilization forever. All you have is one remaining generator to keep the heat on and whatever you can salvage from the frozen tundra. In this situation, you might think people would want to band together for their mutual benefit, but just like real life, Frostpunk isn’t that simple.
The game often forces you to choose between the lesser of two evils while trying to balance resources and still giving the townsfolk a semblance of hope. If you run out of either, that’s it, game over. And yet, even after making countless difficult choices, there’s always a tiny bit of optimism that your city will make it, so when you’re finally able to expand your heat zone or raise your population, every little win feels like a triumph — even when sometimes you have to become the bad guy to make it happen. Then you toss in a unique art style and the sound of ice whispering out of your speakers and you get a hauntingly beautiful game. – Sam Rutherford, Senior Reporter
Whenever you hear the words “coming of age story,” you know you are in for some really sad stuff. The very concept of growing up, after all, involves the loss of innocence. This holds true with the fantastically depressing (and fun) I Was a Teenage Exocolonist. It’s basically a mashup of a visual novel with a deck-building puzzle game, all set in a budding colony on a recently-discovered planet. The events play out over ten years and, unless you are the luckiest person of all time, you’ll experience serious loss during the journey. This gives the game fantastic replay value, as each run offers an opportunity to save people and alter disastrous events before they happen. — Lawrence Bonk, Contributing Reporter
INDIKA is a visceral game. It’s a (mostly) third-person narrative adventure set in an alternative 19th century Russia, and it stars an ostracized nun, Indika, who has the devil’s voice in her head. From this foundation, the game offers a flurry of whimsical absurdity, religious criticism and raw human suffering, always with a wink and a nod.
The entire game is underpinned by a delirious tension between levity and agony, and the developers at Odd Meter got the balance just right. Indika’s reality is a frozen hellscape filled with pain and isolation, but she also encounters laugh-out-loud moments that make the experience feel more like a rom-com than a psychodrama about a sad nun. The game also slips into a lighter visual style as it delves into Indika’s past, mining memories out of pixelated platformers in sun-drenched environments.
INDIKA is a masterful example of maturity in video games. That said, it includes scenes of sexual violence — though they’re handled delicately and don’t feel exploitative. INDIKA thrives in the messy area between pleasure and discomfort, and it’s worth a play for anyone seeking something completely original. — Jessica Conditt, Senior Reporter
Read our full Phoenix Springs review
Playing Phoenix Springs feels like being trapped in a gorgeous dream that’s steadily becoming a nightmare. It’s a point-and-click mystery set in a bleak futuristic world of dramatic shadows and muted hues, its scenes connected by streams of anxious static. The game stars Iris Dormer, a technology reporter who’s searching for her estranged brother, Leo. Her hunt takes her from the abandoned buildings of a rundown city, to a rich suburb and finally to Phoenix Springs, a desert oasis bathed in golden light and occupied by a handful of odd, disconnected people.
There’s nothing rushed about Phoenix Springs. Iris walks leisurely across expansive wide shots, her light blue silhouette cutting across high grasses and cold concrete at the same unhurried pace. When she speaks, she sounds like a jaded detective lost in time, her sentences stark and powerful. Haunting choir chords and droning bass lines share screen time with pristine silence and birdsong. Where the environments aren’t blanketed in shadow, their colors constantly shift like there’s a stop-motion river flowing just beneath the screen. Phoenix Springs excels as both a piece of art and a detective game, and it’s the perfect escape for anyone who wants to slow down and get lost in the grit of a neo-noir world. — J.C.
Kentucky Route Zero is a game vaguely about a road trip through the heart of Americana — not America, but the very idea of the United States. It’s more of an interactive art installment than a familiar adventure or exploration game, with slender characters traveling through a shadowy world of magical realism. It’s mysterious and slightly dangerous, and it rewards gentle curiosity with heartfelt human stories. It’s odd. Mostly, though, it’s beautiful.
Kentucky Route Zero was once a game trapped in purgatory. Created by members of an art collective, it rolled out over the course of nine years, revealed in 2011 and its final installment landing in 2020. The original release cadence was fitting for the game itself — disjointed yet perfectly seamless — but players today have the unique pleasure of being able to devour it all at once, closing the loop in one fell swoop. The thing is, Kentucky Route Zero is the kind of game that never really ends. It lives on in the subconscious in little snippets of music, monochromatic vignettes and haunting dialogue, and a feeling of bittersweet nostalgia that never truly dissipates once you’ve hit play. — J.C.
In the 11 years since it was first released, The Last of Us and its 2020 sequel have made the series one of the PlayStation’s flagship franchises. It’s not often you see a story this bleak get quite so popular — The Last of Us starts off with a harrowing death about 15 minutes in, and doesn’t let up from there. In the style of Game of Thrones, no one is safe, and many characters that you become attached to aren’t going to make it.
That’s the nature of the game’s world, set 20 years after a pandemic ravages the world, killing or turning millions into the vicious Infected who roam the US. Regular humans are perhaps even worse, with little morals to be found; every survivor might be trying to kill you for a few scraps of your food or your bullets or for no reason at all. But amidst this bleak backdrop is the story of the seemingly-stereotypical surly survivor Joel and the infection-immune Ellie.
Pushed together by circumstance, Joel and Ellie’s relationship hits all kinds of highs and lows throughout the course of these games and provides occasional sparks of hope and brightness in contrast to all the darkness. There’s a way to be better in this world, the game shows us, but the chances of it all working out are still extremely slim. As I usually say when people ask me about The Last of Us, it’s an exhausting and grim trek, but one worth taking. — Nathan Ingraham, Deputy Editor
The Longest Road on Earth is a quartet of contemplative short stories, each of which portrays a slice of life in a world of anthropomorphic animals. The vignettes are underlined by breathy, intimate folk music, and the game is deliberately limited in interactivity and explicit sign-posting. You see a mouse woman sipping coffee and smoking alone on her porch, a fox man waiting in line to enter his job at a bottling plant, a moose kid sledding on the first day of winter. Who are they? What’s their deal? There’s no dialogue or quest markers to tell you, just visions of ordinary people living their lives, and room for interpretation.
A certain type of gamer would call all of this self-indulgent, and they wouldn’t necessarily be wrong: This is a game with a three-minute unbroken stretch in which you do nothing but sit on a train. You hardly do anything at all. There’s no power to gain — but that’s the idea, I think. All game long you see unremarkable people bound to routine jobs in a black-and-white world, occasionally interrupted by moments of freedom; one character daydreams of making music, another rides a bike in an open field, another stares out the window. They could be anyone. The backing music swells, yet you can do little. What’s the longest road on Earth? I think you already know. It all makes for a game that’s “depressing,” sure, but unusually bold and honest. — Jeff Dunn, Senior Reporter
“Papers, please” is a phrase associated with oppressive regimes randomly checking identification — the perfect subject for a video game. Papers, Please, the 2013 game created by Lucas Pope, used that as inspiration to put the player behind the desk at a checkpoint in the fictional communist country of Arstotzka. Your job is to review travelers’ papers and either let them through or send them packing. Of course, things get more complicated every day. Sometimes, a bomb goes off and shuts the checkpoint down, which means you make less money; that means you end up choosing between getting your son medicine or getting food for the rest of the family.
It also gets harder every day to decide if someone should pass the checkpoint, as the game adds more and more things you need to be on the lookout for. This slows you down, so you make less money — but if you get careless and start letting in people you shouldn’t your pay gets docked as well. It’s not a “fun” game at all, but it’s definitely satisfying to get through a day without making any mistakes (though you probably still won’t have nearly enough money).
There’s a surprising amount of complexity in Papers, Please, as making the “right” decisions becomes ever more challenging. Oh yeah, you also have to deal with bribes, a cult recruiting members, weirdos with fake documents and much more. In fact, the game has 20 different endings depending on how you play. I haven’t seen them all yet, but I’m guessing that none of them qualify as a happy ending. — N.I.
Rain is often identified with depression, so based on title alone, Rain World figures to be a gloomy time. It’s an abstract, Metroidvania-esque game where you control a little creature trying to find safety in a ruined world, full of creatures trying to eat you. And there’s a time limit, because periodic downpours will flood the city and drown you. It’s rough out there.
It’s also a game that provides very little in the way of guidance. All you really know at first is you need to find shelter and food before the rain comes. As you progress, more areas become available to you, but they’re naturally populated with even more vicious creatures. This, of course, is by design — developer Joar Jakobsson compared the “slugcat” you control to a rat in the Manhattan subway system. It knows to look for shelter and food and hide from predators, but doesn’t know anything about the environment it lives in or where it came from. That lonely sense of mystery pervades Rain World — it’s not easy being this low on the food chain. — N.I.
Plenty of war games focus on the horrors of combat, but This War of Mine takes a different approach. It’s a survival simulator that tells stories about the civilians trapped in a city under siege, forcing players to make impossible, life-or-death decisions about food, shelter and supplies for the entire group. Set in a multi-story hideout that’s surrounded by snipers, players spend the daylight hours crafting new materials, bolstering their defenses, trading with survivors and keeping everyone as healthy as possible. When night falls, players and a companion head out on scavenging runs in a variety of locations. Every decision in this game is a difficult one, and there are often no correct actions — only necessary ones. This War of Mine is an acclaimed game that highlights the harsh inhumanities of war, in a way that only a video game can. — J.C.
This one’s a classic. To the Moon is a 2011 narrative adventure game with an enduring story about memory and loss, and it’s all presented in a friendly 16-bit style. In To the Moon, players take on the role of two scientists as they attempt to fulfill a dying man’s wish with their special brand of reality manipulation: They’re able to implant memories and create a new life story in someone’s head, but the procedure is so intense that it’s only performed on people who are about to draw their final breath.
Their elderly client, Johnny, wants to go to the moon, but his reasons are tangled up in decades of family trauma and a touching love story. As the scientists travel through his memories, changing the things they need to change, they grapple with the fact that they have to remove pivotal people — and maybe even rabbits — from his life. It’s a heartbreaking game that’ll make you think about the past and the future in a new light. — J.C.
Check out our entire Best Games series including the best Nintendo Switch games, the best PS5 games, the best Xbox games, the best PC games and the best free games you can play today.
