Looking for a feel good video game to ease your troubled mind? Keep looking. Each of these melancholy masterpieces have “troubled” as their middle name. These games are moody and macabre the energy of that quiet kid in the back of the class whose parents just “don’t understand.” Big feelings captured by thousands of little pixels, these games aren’t “games” in the traditional sense rather playable emotional landscapes, digital dives into the human heart. If you’re looking to get in touch with the more somber aspects of the human experience, you can’t go wrong with these ten best melancholy video games. Just make sure to play with a box of tissues on hand. Recommended Videos Nier: Automata From the melancholy minds at Square Enix comes one of the most dearly depressing titles that the company has ever put out. Set tens of thousands of years in our planet’s future, Nier: Automata follows a proxy war fought between androids loyal to humanity and alien-made robots. You play as 2B, an impeccably dressed warrior who carries out missions to assure human victory, which feels further and further away as time drips by. As you stack up robot bodies, you begin to questions just how unfeeling the automatons you’re killing actually are. The more you murder, the more “human” your foes seem to be getting. What gives you the right to serve as judge, jury and executioner for synthetic beings that aren’t so different from you? Existential questions abound in Nier Automata, and there are no easy answers just the difficult feelings that come with asking. Red Dead Redemption While the gun slingin’, horse thievin’, train robbin’ Red Dead Redemption might not seem all that melancholic on the surface, one lonely ride through the Mexican desert at sunset will change your opinion real quick. Set in the dying days of the Old West, you take the reins of John Marston an outlaw tasked with hunting down the remnants of his old gang. In order to save your family held in the grip of the increasingly long arm of Johnny Law, you’ve gotta ride across a vast and desolate world hunting down old friends who once held your loyalty. Violent as The Wild Bunch and ethically ambiguous as Unforgiven, this game will having you riding your horse down many a thin moral line. The days of cowboy ballads are over, now it’s a funeral dirge echoing across canyon walls. The Legend of Zelda: Majora’s Mask The darkest Zelda game that Nintendo has ever created, The Legend of Zelda: Majora’s Mask is sautéd in sorrow and deep fried in despair. The game takes place in Termina, a mirror world of Hyrule that Link finds himself stranded in after bumping his noggin when a forest spirit stole his horse. Possessed by an ancient evil housed within a mask, this forest spirit intends to bring the moon crashing down on Termina in three days, unless our hero can do something to stop it. Impending lunar apocalypse is far from the only disaster Termina faces poisoned swamps, frostbitten mountains, ghost haunted canyons, the land itself appears to be in the grips of deep depression. Some say the game is a metaphor for the five stages of grief, others theorize that Link is dead the entire time, and the game’s hallucinatory plot serves as a vision of a dark afterlife. Whatever is going on here, it’s a beautiful downer to say the least. Journey The sorrowful beauty of Journey comes from its simplicity. You play as a robed figure tasked with making a pilgrimage to a remote mountaintop, platforming your way through a beautiful and desolate world. The details of what you’ll stand to gain when you complete the *title drop* journey are never quite made clear, at least not in the very beginning. But like desert wind slowly uncovering a buried monument, the meaning of the game becomes apparent as time goes on. Journey is challenging in the way mediation is challenging. A deceptively uncomplicated ramble through the desert with a straightforward goal, one that gives you plenty of time for introspection along the way. Is this a quest for enlightenment? A saga of solitude? Or maybe something deeper still? You might not be conscious of the answers, but like the warm desert un on your neck, your soul will feel them along the way. Disco Elysium More of a playable visual novel than a game, Disco Elysium takes place in a dystopia the feels straight out of heavyweight sci-fi literature. You play as a cop waking up from the mother of all benders, and you’re tasked with solving crimes and rebuilding your substance-obliterated personality along the way. Based almost entirely around dialogue options, the “combat” of this game comes from making choices and boy are those choices complicated. In a politically, socially, emotionally, and psychologically unstable world like this one, everyone is looking for answers and they come, but they’re anything but easy. It’s that inescapable existential ennui that gives the game its deep sense of sorrow, a struggle to find meaning in a world where the meaning is never quite made clear. How can you make sense of existence when you can barely get a handle on yourself? Shadow of The Colossus Perhaps the greatest Playstation 2 game ever made, Shadow of The Colossus is the story of Wander a young man who takes a journey into the Forbidden Lands in order to resurrect a woman for whom he cares deeply. A cosmic horror story disguised as dark fantasy, Wander is told by a dark god that the woman can be brought back to life if he fells the Colossi mountain sized giants that stomp through the hills and deserts. As Wander topples the titans and becomes slowly possessed by darkness in the process, you can’t help but wonder if you’ve been playing as the villain all along. Does the end justify the means? The answer isn’t quite clear, but the question becomes increasingly depressing to ask with each innocent giant you murder. Elden Ring The pinnacle of somber dark fantasy, Shadow of the Colossus lumbered along so Elden Ring could fly. Like pretty much every other Soulsborne title, Elden Ring is set in a kingdom whose best days are far behind it. The Lands Between are haunted by all manner of melancholy monsters decaying warriors, rotten gods, and ghosts of glories past. As you navigate across the broken land, it becomes increasingly clear that your job isn’t to save this world, but put it out of its misery. The silver lining to this downer of a world? The game gives you a nearly unlimited number of weapons and spells to finish the job. Gris The most emotionally difficult walking simulator ever, Gris is a surrealist dive into the psyche of a a young woman. Navigating a dreamlike landscape, Gris‘ heroine has to subtly platform her way through a watercolor world for a melancholy motive that isn’t quite made clear at least not in the beginning. As the game goes on, you realize that Gris isn’t making a physical journey at all, but an emotional one. The landscape she’s navigating is grief, and her goal is acceptance. By the end of this game, your eyes will be blurry as its gorgeous watercolor animation, you’ll be wallowing in your own waterworks as well. Kingdom Hearts Don’t let the happy Disney characters that populate this game fool you, Kingdom Hearts is a thoroughly somber affair. You play as Sora, a fourteen year old boy whose home world and his loved ones in it were swallowed up by a primordial, intelligent darkness. Cast out into an alien multiverse, Sora is tasked with defeating the scourge of The Heartless beings that devour the hearts of humans and worlds alike. Even though most of the worlds you journey are straight out of Disney film classics, the feeling of loss remains palpable despite the cheery surroundings. In fact, there’s something about the juxtaposition of nostalgic, childhood comforts and total isolation that makes the game feel even sadder. While the sequels certainly lighten up the tone, the original game is one of the Kingdom Hearts series’ darkest and best. Kentucky Route Zero The surrealist, digital equivalent of a Kerouac novel, Kentucky Route Zero follows its namesake road in a melancholy journey across an unexplored swath of America. According to this game, the state of Kentucky has a little known highway that runs underground, and it’s this road that trucker Conway must travel in order to make a mysterious delivery. A point and click adventure that’s light on combat and heavy on vibes, this game is the dictionary definition of “liminal” capturing all of the unsettled feelings that comes with being in a space between. There is a quiet sense of desperation that permeates the lonely highway, as the people along it seem to be holding out for an American Dream that died by the roadside long ago. Literary and laconic, this game is a lament not for an America past, but an America that never truly was in the first place.
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The 10 Best Melancholy Video Games
