Summary
The third-person shooter genre, similarly to the first-person equivalent, has slowly turned to the darker side over the last two decades. With horror games becoming more popular, in addition to plenty of game narratives becoming more nuanced and psychological in nature, the shift to a darker style is natural.
This means that, while there are still plenty oflight-hearted games in many genrescoming out today, the general nature of the third-person shooters being released has changed. Darker stories, fewer white knight protagonists, and more grayness all around are what fill many such games in the genre today.
Any game that was set up to be the video gaming version of a dark, thriller TV series, with an episodic format throughout the game, was likely to contain a lot of darkness. The developers at Remedy Entertainment describedAlan Wakeas having “the mind of a psychological thriller” but the game skirts the edges of becoming an outright survival horror entry.
Alan Wakefollows an author who goes on a vacation to see a famous psychologist, and ends up in an intense series of sequences against nightmarish creatures, never quite sure what is real. Having mostly third-person shooter elements over any more horror-based content,Alan Wakeis the perfect game to revisit for lovers of dark shooters,especially with the sequel on its way.
TheMafiaseries focuses on exactly what the title suggests, as players take control of a taxi driver in the 1930s who becomes a member of the Salieri crime family and rises within the organization by completing a variety of criminal activities, making for a pretty dark and twisted story.
Mafiais a fascinating game that was recently remastered with a definitive edition, prompting a lot of players to rediscover the dark, even at times chilling story within. From the moment when it is discovered that everybody Tommy secretly saved has been murdered, to the depressing ending and what it says about the world,Mafiais a truly dark, though fascinating, game to try out. There are also a whole bunch ofgreat games similar to theMafiafranchiseavailable.
Any game that opens with the lead character’s family being brutally murdered by junkies is likely filled with darkness.Max Payneis another game set ina dark world of crime, conspiracies, and intrigue, going as far as using gritty-style graphic novel panels throughout the game, and the nature of the story took a lot of inspiration from hard-boiled detective novels.
Max Payneis a great franchise with a unique style, always including a lot of darkness as Max traverses various secret societies, gets framed multiple times for murder, and kills a lot of people. The game also has drug-induced nightmare sequences, just to make sure the darkness is in the forefront of the player’s mind throughout.
One of the strangest games released in recent years,Returnalis set on an alien planet where explorer and pilot Selene crashes after trying to investigate a strange signal. She then discovers corpses of herself and realizes that after dying, time loops back to her crashing onto the planet, making for an initially terrifying premise.
Returnalworksin a roguelike fashion, so every time players die they are looped with Selene back to the crash. The game is heart-breaking, at one point Selene even escapes the planet, returns to Earth, lives a life, and dies of old age, only to reawaken on Atropos again during the crash.Returnalis a game filled with darkness and devastating themes that make players question everything.
Zombie games are generally sad affairs, after all, there is a lot of darkness and terror in the entire world being devastated by a pandemic that kills almost all of the planet’s population.Days Goneis set a couple of years after just such an apocalyptic event and follows Deacon St John in his attempts to find the wife he initially believed to be dead.
The subject material throughout the story ofDays Goneis generally quite brutal, with cults and betrayal at every turn. This is all in addition to the overarching story about NERO’s research and their involvement in knowing about mutated freakers.Days Gonehas bright spots throughout, but generally, the story and world are some of the darkest in recent gaming history.
By far one of the darkest and most controversially tragic games in recent years,The Last Of Us Part 2decided to take a fascinating approach. While not strictly a shooter, the game incorporates many third-person shooter elements in addition to stealth and survival horror ones. Instead of choosing to just focus back down on the relationship between Joel and Ellie, the main duo from the already dark first game in the series,Part 2doubled down on the bleakness of the post-apocalyptic world where they had been living by dealing with the consequences of Joel’s former actions.
This led to Abby, a character who was the daughter of someone Joel had killed in the first game, coming back for vengeance. This led to a brutal ensuing conflict where players took control of both Abbie and Ellie at various points as they sought each other out. At different points, both engage in horrors in their search for vengeance, making many players uncomfortable with the level of darkness the game achieves as it continues tochallenge their moral compass.
