I used to play a lot of video games. These days I settle for some games from my Apple Arcade subscription, but I used to have many mobile consoles, several home consoles, and a gaming PC. I played many titles across a variety of platforms, filling out a list of memorable games that left a permanent impact on my life. In a recent conversation with my coworkers I started listing my favorite games and learned that the games that I have felt the most important in my life were ones that generated a feeling of hopelessness. I certainly enjoy a variety of gaming genres and story types, but the ones I can recall with fondness are the ones that made me feel the most miserable.

Despite these being my favorite games across all consoles, these are not generally the games that I return to in the brief moments where I can find time to play a game. Even when I played games regularly, I rarely replayed any of these games. In many cases I only felt that I could play them once, as going back to them would lessen the original experience.

Shadow of the Colossus

As a child I was an avid reader. I read The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings at a young age, and while I didn’t care much for the meandering nature of the books, I appreciated the world-building and the grounded drama that ran throughout. I later became a regular movie-watcher, where I enjoyed The Never Ending Story’s grim tale about depression and fighting back against a world that wants nothing but to oppress and destroy young spirits.

I’d never experienced a game that got anywhere close to a similar experience until Shadow of the Colossus, the best game that I’ve ever witnessed. I was chilled by the loneliness of the environments; awed by the technological capabilities of the coders building for a weak PlayStation 2 architecture; moved by the love driving the character to sacrifice so much for the princess; and driven to tears by the loss experienced by every character in the game.

The way that the weak gaming hardware was used as a plot device continues to impress me. The game world was barren because the console couldn’t handle anything more, but the plot provided a reason that made the minimal level design feel more acceptable: a dangerous creature was cut off from civilization to keep it chained and hidden. The game world was large and required horseback riding long distances because it was streaming from the disk and loading took a while, but the level design made it feel like a reasonable journey to a remote location that proved the commitment of the character. Having only one enemy at a time helped keep the already-struggling framerate stay at least somewhat playable most of the time, but making the enemies huge really fed into the fantasy story more than if they were merely a few feet taller than the main character. So much of this game was brilliantly executed, to the point that I have little interest in playing the remakes.

Spec Ops: The Line

BioShock may get all the accolades for its plot twist, but I think Spec Ops: The Line handles it twists in a more elegant and less frustrating manner. The concept of mental illness comes up often in games, but it tends to be used more as a gaming mechanic than primarily an element of the plot. I think that Spec Ops: The Line tends to actually focus more on the plot, with some weaker gameplay and average graphics as a potential consequence.

The plot is what makes it so much more interesting than BioShock, even though the latter has more inventive fighting, better voice acting across the cast, and better visual quality. Both games feature forced choices that punish the player for performing them, even though neither have alternatives built into the game, but Spec Ops: The Line has both an omniscient narrator and side characters who cast doubt on the situation to serve as a proxy for the player, whereas BioShock leaves much of that out of the game in the service of its plot twist.

I especially appreciate the end of Spec Ops: The Line, which provides one final choice that has chilling ramifications should one choose one of the options. It is a moment of very limited role-playing, but I appreciate its inclusion.

This game certainly has a lot of flaws and felt constrained by its budget, but the ambitions of the writer seemed to overpower much of the game’s limitations.

Homeworld

This game is unique on the list in that it depicts the actual destruction of the civilization rather than a retrospective of a long-dead culture. I was deeply moved by the experience of watching a nation fall and its survivors escape into the darkness, and it made every character death thereafter more painful.

The plot definitely contains a thread of hope throughout it, but it’s weighed by the tragic loss at the start of the story, leavening everything with desperation and fear of an unknown enemy.

Uru: Ages Beyond Myst

I didn’t play much of the Myst series before Uru: Ages Beyond Myst, but we often as a family watched my father play the game to help come up with solutions for the complicated puzzles. I was fascinated by the world of Myst more than I was the puzzles, and I thought Uru: Ages Beyond Myst did a better job of building a world than any of the previous games. Better still are the novelizations of the Myst universe. An abandoned world from a dead civilization is always deeply interesting to me. I always wanted to know more about what caused the culture to collapse and the cities to empty, and Uru helped explain a little more of that than the other games in the series. I especially liked the added realism of a three-dimensional game over the slideshows of some of the previous games.

Iron Helix

To continue on the “abandoned world by a dead civilization” theme, Iron Helix was one of the first games that I played that had me solving puzzles related to the death of a crew on a spaceship protected by a drone that was going to attack any presence it detected. I liked finding the solution, but what intrigued me more was the logs of the crew uncovering some of the problems going on around the ship. I felt like I was involved in a world rather than solving a series of riddles.

Bastion / Transistor

I grouped these two games together because they almost feel like they come from a shared universe, but that’s probably more due to them sharing so many talented crew and cast between them, as they came from the same developer, one soon after the other. My preference is for Bastion, as I think it had the more fulfilling plot of the two, but I do really appreciate the dying worlds of both. There is a mourning for what is lost in Transistor that is missing somewhat in Bastion, primarily because Bastion’s world is so stylized that it doesn’t correlate well with reality; however, Bastion has the more compelling resolution to its plot, in my opinion. I think I liked Transistor more for the way the world was written out, the shadows of what once was being referenced in odd corners of the levels.

Halo 3: ODST

This one may seem like an odd addition to the list, but I was surprised by the loneliness and despair of this noir-like game. The audio vignettes from the other characters were quite a contrast from the destroyed city abandoned by its fleeing population, desperately seeking safety from an invading army. Being a secondary character to a much bigger story helped the war feel more comprehensive and somewhat distant, perhaps even unredeemable.

Anarchy Online

I played Anarchy Online when they switched to a free-to-play model for players who were interested in playing the levels that had been left empty by players who had moved on to newer and costly expansions. The game felt like a dead mall as a result of this separation. I walked the wide and barren streets of many sections of the free levels, noticing different areas where the level designers had expected crowds to form, and wondered what the city must have been like back when it was attractive to visitors.

Journey / Sky: Children of the Light

The story for these two games are extremely similar: a long-dead city is visited by a quiet explorer, who finds token of the people who once lived there; after some time, tragedy occurs and the explorer follows the people to a new life. Journey aims for a single, simple story on that shared premises, and it concludes without answering much of the questions raised by the lore. Sky: Children of the Light continues with that theme and adds more backstory to some success, though I find the level design ultimately more fulfilling than the developer’s attempts at building a cohesive world. Either way, there is something very poignant about the warm loneliness that the games elicit from me during my various visits to their worlds. Whenever I play them I long for more explanation for what was lost in time.

Dear Esther / Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture

Reading or hearing the stories of long-dead characters is apparently pretty captivating to me, because both of these games continue to haunt me years after seeing them. Especially captivating is the potentially repetitious pattern of existence subtly referenced in Dear Esther, where characters seem to inhabit the same patterns of life throughout history, unknowingly repeating the mistakes of previous generations and ending up at the same island.

My experience with Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture is more limited as I’ve only watched the gameplay through videos, but it follows a similar theme of observing someone else’s loss while also processing one’s own in a way. It feels more like a radio play than Dear Esther, but it’s still captivating to me.

Watching someone else play wasn’t unique to Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture: as I have grown older, I have had less time to play any games of substance and have turned to Twitch and YouTube videos to keep up with the community that provided so much to me in my youth. The following games were consumed entirely through videos.

Scorn

I think the H.R. Giger / Zdzisław Beksiński designs and fascination with the viscera of every creature in the game is taken to an uncomfortable extreme, but the depth of detail in building a ruined world is incredible and the skill in level and creature design is superb. I am repulsed by this game as much as I am in awe of it, so I tend to have to push aside all the awful elements to better appreciate the desolation depicted throughout the game. The sadness of the main character and the efforts to find resolution is an element that remains a thorn in my mind, months after watching the story.

DEATH STRANDING

I can thank Hideo Kojima for introducing me to Low Roar, a singer perfect for a sad and rainy drive. I suppose the theme of the game is more about building hope among a community than showcasing a lack of hope, but the world is deeply damaged, perhaps irrevocably, with only one man able to start threading things back together. I think the struggle to find purpose in a ruined world is one filled with despair, and many areas of the game felt deeply lonely.

SOMA

What a sad end to a world: to know the surface is burning and the survivors deep within the earth are dwindling and often seeking an end to it all. To struggle with one’s identity at the same time is deeply discouraging. I thought the horror elements of this game certainly provided opportunities to ponder what it was like to exist as one of those creatures, but I don’t think they added much to the gameplay. I wanted to know more about what the final moments on the surface were like, with more information about what caused all the fateful events to occur. I wanted to know what the general population thought when things all started to burn.

Returnal

I don’t think I felt the full weight of hopelessness in this game until I contemplated what escaping the planet and living out as close to a normal life could mean, if death always meant a return to the planet. How horrible a fate that even death was no escape.

I do smile from time to time

I suppose my fascination with the end of things and the reasons for everything failing might seem like I am a miserable person to be around, but I don’t welcome oblivion; I much prefer to live in a society that is growing or thriving than I am to live in one near its end. As much as I have enjoyed playing games with post-apocalyptic themes, I don’t relish the thought of these events ever occurring in reality.

What I have learned from these games — and this may seem like an odd lesson, but I do think there is a connection — is that hope requires effort. Without striving for improvement, we all slide towards annihilation. Submitting to hopelessness will ruin us all, even if the villains or predicaments in our lives seem unbeatable. I think that is why I often pay attention to local and national politics, as I am worried for the future of the country and for all the people who live in it, even those who don’t act or look like me. These games have shown me that hopelessness is easy; it’s the default position of any person who has given up their agency and accepted the abyss. True heroism comes from finding hope within that chaos.

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