Something I’ve picked up on with my gaming preference is stories that don’t simply focus on one “mood” for the game, but alter it to fit the situation. Players get a relaxed time exploring or diving into combat, and the world is inviting and colorful, but when the story builds, it puts brutal tests of character in front of the heroes.
Some examples of generally-great games that might fail this test:
- Silent Hill 2: A game well-known for plumbing the depths of the human psyche. But it’s missing any real moments of levity, leading players to pretty much be on guard the whole time.
- Monkey Island: Undoubtedly a funny game. But since it breaks the fourth wall so much, and revels in its own illogical deus ex machinas to fit the “hero cannot die” tropes, it’s never going to make the situation feel tense or at risk even when it tries to (and Telltale did try).
- Call of Duty: Though a dudebro series, one can’t deny the series has occasionally had some great storyline twists. Many of us may not remember them years later though, because as cool as characters like Captain Price are in the moment, they don’t form a lasting impression as someone “complete” with flaws and weaknesses, in part because the storyline is often rushing you forward with action rather than poignance.
- GTA: As a crime drama, pretty much everything is falling apart all the time in GTA, whether it’s the plan, the heroes’ relationship, or the entire city. There’s moments of humor for sure, but little in the game makes you feel “awesome” or heroic, like your violence is achieving something.
Some games that prevail:
- The Walking Dead: While it is a serious game like Silent Hill, it’s more often going to have meaningful, positive and tender moments to settle from the horrors the characters are going through, as well as allowing players to creatively express themselves even if that means having Lee say something boisterous or silly to the other survivors.
- Yakuza: Sort of the posterchild for these emotional oscillations even within individual side quests. One might start through a silly situation where a man is throwing snow cones in the air, and end with using diaper fabric to simulate a snowstorm - so that a terminal cancer patient has a perfect sendoff in her final hours.
- Final Fantasy: Thinking of the one I’ve played the most, XIV, but plenty of the others have had the heroes cross-dress to get back their taken party member, perform in plays for children, before having to dive into hell and confront their dark past, or consider ending an entire civilization to save the world.
- Ace Attorney: The passion for murder tends to run hot. But, Ace Attorney is good at introducing ridiculous characters that tend to soften the blow. They may take premises as simple as security guards or journalists, and find every way they can to exaggerate their appearance and mannerisms. On the other end, the emotions behind proving the state and prosecution wrong about your innocent defendant are always worthwhile. Even when you do your best, the game delivers some poignant and well-written sad endings as well as many good ones.
- Metal Gear Solid: Though diving hard into the “Tacti-cool”, strategic warfare theme, MGS has always leaned hard into silly and highly characterized moments that have made the hard-hitting ones more impactful, as a result winning it lifetime fans.
- Borderlands: Thought I’d throw another Western developer on here. I haven’t played many of the others, but Borderlands 2 at least mastered the idea of having characters be flippant and silly 80% of the time, but getting you to really care when the jokes drop. A certain few moments around Handsome Jack come to mind in particular.
I’ve definitely seen that Japanese developers are often better at this form of emotional openness, but this is something that I’ve wanted to explore a bit more as a prompt; whether people agree this is a good goal for story/theme development, what causes some publishers to stumble in this approach, and especially what indie games people aren’t aware of that pull this off particularly well.
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Kingdom Come: Deliverance II did this really well just this year. Largely a story about contrasting a desire for adventure with the horrors and realities of war, it also has quests that are full of comedy. You can try to attract a pack of wolves using what the shepherd refers to as his absolute dumbest sheep; you can get blackout drunk with a band of mercenaries who may or may not have killed your childhood friends; you can clean up and decorate a crypt full of loose bones for a man who speaks only in rhymes, poorly, and might be a ghost.
I’m playing this now and was going to mention it as well. It’s quite fun and engaging both in the main plot and side quests.
Red Dead Redemption II. The writing is absolutely fantastic and goes across the stream of emotions.
How much are you willing to dig for it? I’m playing through hollow knight atm and have been shocked at the emotional depth that hides in the margins of the world. If you plow through the game and only touch the required content then all you get is the overall somber vibe. But if you turn every stone, talk to every npc, complete every side quest, you might be surprised at how much love and loss and joy and pain there is in the story.
Overall it is about picking through the ruins of a dead kingdom. You can engage with that as much or as little as you want. IMO they do an outstanding job of rewarding you for the effort.
Dung beetle boss never fails to make me laugh
The dude is so happy about his lot in life too.
I don’t know about mastering both, but Project Zomboid maybe?
It can be somewhat chill and even relaxing occasionally, but when it makes you anxious it makes you ANXIOUS (and queasy, eventually).
A friend of mine wrote some lyrics for a contest, which includes the lines “if I alone remain, what would it mean to fail? Is there still a world to save…”. This comes into my head a lot whenever I’m playing certain games, especially post-apocalyptic games.
I’d say the Zelda series struggles with this. I put in ~40 hours into Breath of the Wild before I got bored and stopped playing. I never got around to defeating Gannon and I think I only did 3 divine beasts. I kept on looking around and asking myself… Why is Link bothering? It seems like the world is doing pretty well without him. The land of Hyrule is teaming with life. Sure, the people of Hyrule are no longer building megastructures or cities, their populations might be smaller than they used to be, but everyone seems pretty happy and unbothered. The evil forces of Gannon’s corruption mostly keep to themselves, so as long as people avoid the ruined Hyrule Castle or the ruined towers they are fine. Sure, there are monsters that spawn in the wild, but there are also just plain old evil humanoids out there too. There’s regular ass animals. It seems like nature, civilization, and even evil itself have achieved a harmonious equilibrium in Link’s absence. There are some minor problems in the settlements, but in the whole everyone seems pretty happy just living their lives. It’s like they asked the question “what if we give up and let entropy take over” and the answer was the most beautiful and vibrant state that we have ever seen Hyrule in.
By comparison, Majora’s Mask and Twilight Princess have a much broader range. TP does this very overtly by having the areas cycle through Twilight vs normal states. They establish Link’s relationships with everyone in Ordon Village first, then have Twilight fall and reduce them to cowering spirits. In other areas you see the Twilight version first and then clear it. Majora’s Mask does similar- everything is bright and sunny and cheerful on Day 1, while Day 3 is an active apocalypse. Which then gets reset over and over again.
I would say Skyrim does a decent job of balancing the two as well, though perhaps not as extreme as other examples. Moments in the main quests like the civil war battles and the journey to sovengard are serious and epic, with the fate of Skyrim (perhaps all of Mundus) resting on your shoulders. There’s deep, personal moments like the Dark Brotherhood quest to kill Narfi or talking the ghost of the child killed by a vampire in Morthal. But there’s fun moments like coming across copies of the Lusty Argonian Maid or getting drunk and carousing with Sanguine. The Sheogorath quest line starts out as “OMG so funny and random XD, cheese!” And then dives into the child abuse and subsequent mental illness suffered by one of Skyrim’s last high kings.
I didn’t quite get that feeling with Breath of the Wild, but I’ve certainly had those moments where the theme of a ruined world absolutely ruined my emotional stakes, so I can understand it.
The opening lines of Nier Automata are nihilistic and signal 2B’s desire to just get death over with. Nothing in the whole game’s story brought this feeling back in the other direction, and as a result of an adventure spanning a gray and brown “Abandoned city and death” the optimistic ending absolutely didn’t hit with me. Hard to identify why my response was so different from everyone else’s.
The pointlessness of a fight amid a ruined world is also what makes me not care about a lot of uber-dark Soulslike games. I don’t see much of what I’m saving in most of those, and learning the lore behind all of Dark Souls’ endings reinforces that feeling.
The Souls games is another good example I considered bringing up. I’ve only played Bloodborne so far and while I did enjoy it one of my criticisms is that it’s pretty monotone. Even the few NPC’s there are tend to not be very likeable. Everything is dark. Everyone is bad. It’s not even clear whether anything the player experiences is “real” even within the game world, or whether anything the player does accomplishes anything. While I haven’t played the other games I get the impression that they are similar.
I can also think of games that only lean into one side or the others but they do it in a way that I dont mind. “Cozy” games have made an entire genre of this, like Animal Crossing.
Or games where the tone of the game is always dark, but the player and player character both know that there is an “outside” world they can escape to. Resident Evil, Portal, BioShock, etc.
You brought up Metal Gear Solid because it has moments of levity within a gritty military espionage setting, but I think it’s also helped by being set in the real world. If I remember correctly, the end of MGS2 has a boss fight on the roof of a building in Philadelphia and we are shown in cutscenes that the streets below are filled with normal people going about their business, completely unaware of the threat. It’s a reminder of what the player character is fighting for.
Uncharted is another series worth discussing. The first 3 games all kind of blur together in my memory so I could be mistaken, but I remember the first game felt too isolated. I don’t think you really spend much time in a non-hostile environment: it’s all either jungles or ruins or the enemy base. 2 and 3 did a better job of putting Nathan in more mundane and civilian settings: museums, tourists sites, cities, etc. There’s moments where you need to put away your fun and act like a normal person, and that contrast makes the action sequences hit that much harder.
The opening lines of Nier Automata are nihilistic and signal 2B’s desire to just get death over with. Nothing in the whole game’s story brought this feeling back in the other direction, and as a result of an adventure spanning a gray and brown “Abandoned city and death” the optimistic ending absolutely didn’t hit with me. Hard to identify why my response was so different from everyone else’s.
Yoko Taro let the answer to the player, even in the good ending is for you to decide why is worth living.
spoiler
If you find the 2B flight unit you can read the message she left for 9S. “The time I was able to spend with you It was like memories of pure light”. To me this message is 2B answer for the question of what is worth living. Another thing, the OST for the main area of the earth, the cozy ost, is named Rays of light(I think is the same name in japanese) and to me is referencing the “memories of pure light”
which emotional extremes? happiness? joy? fear? sadness? terror? hunger? beautiful food? lust? lust for the beautiful food? i got a lot of emotions just right now lets be real, there’s more than two.
Sorry I should have clarified.
I specifically meant hunger and lust. I will begin removing other examples.
I dont think hunger is an emotion
Tell me this doesn’t uh evoke or invoke, maybe invoice I dunno anymore, an emotional response
Oh no doubt food can evoke an emotional response, like coming home on a cold rainy day to smell of your loved one baking cookies or something. But hunger itself I wouldnt class as an emotion
i guess you haven’t experienced capitalized Hunger yet then. like, not eating for two months hunger. trust me, it’s an emotion as well as a physical response.
Omori. Somber, sad, but goofy and joyful.
Other times terrifying, horrifying worse than a horror game.
I wept through the last five hours of this game, just straight up crying.
This game gave me everything from anxiety to existential dread, to laughs and moments that made my go aww.
This game spoke to me.
Doki Doki Literature Club is a fun dating sim, but it has slightly more emotional breadth than that, so it might pass this test.
God damn I wish I’d stumbled across that naturally instead of being forced into it because i cant tell you lol spoilers iykyk lol dude you gotta play it.
Tap for spoiler
I found Inscryption naturally though, I had no idea it was gonna do half the shit it did. That cheered me right up.
Mother 3 is both the funniest, most charming game and also the most emotionally brutal story about loss, grief, and growing up with trauma. Never has a Gameboy advance game made me cry so much
Minecraft: Super chill sandbox building game, but when you are lost 150 blocks deep in the mines, just found your first diamonds in the dark after you ran out of torches and you hear that hissing sound just behind you…
Something I realize I never touched on is the specific way emotional extremes tie in to specific characters.
Quite often, what I enjoy most about story-driven games is the way you either see characters change, or get to see different sides of them. The moment that the quirky and silly kid turns deathly serious and speaks directly. The moment that a calm, collected tactician falls into a panic attack and runs away. The moment that an emotionless assassin is pressed into laughter for the first time.
One specific game that gave this feeling in spades is JRPG “Trails in the Sky”. I think it sometimes forces its extremes a bit, but it’s very good at spending a long time building joy and normalcy before establishing how much trauma and violence exists in the history and near-future of the world.
But while JRPGs can bore people with their 50-80-hour runtimes, one game I think demonstrated that principle fantastically was “Elite Beat Agents” for the DS. Within the scope of a 5-minute pop song, a focal character may go to the lowest point of their life, and bounce all the way back to happiness. Pushing the idea along with a frenetic musical pace makes it more acceptable, but it shows the importance of taking someone to both extremes.
This Valiant Hearts is very emotional but very good. https://store.steampowered.com/app/260230/Valiant_Hearts_The_Great_War__Soldats_Inconnus__Mmoires_de_la_Grande_Guerre/
It’s hard to tell which extreme is going to surprise people first with Valiant Hearts.
Like, it’s a WW1 game so of course you’re expecting it to be brutal. Then, it’s cute to have so many stories of soldiers not based around killing people - just adventure, puzzle-solving, making friends across country lines, as well as the heartfelt letters written.
Then it gets to Chemin des Dames, and holy shit, not even the most brutal shooters evoke the unfathomable amounts of death happening in those meat grinders. Neither element would’ve hit so hard without the other giving you that kind of whiplash.
