With Halloween imminent, I thought I’d review some video games that I think are apropos for the season, and that I might recommend if one is looking for something to kill some time on for a solo Halloween. None of these are horror games, but I consider all of them to be in some form or another, dark. Not in aesthetics either. Not from aesthetics either, but in theming and story.
DEFCON
The tagline is “everybody dies”, and they’re not too far off the mark. If you’ve ever seen the movie WarGames, then this is basically that game. This game simulates global thermonuclear war. You have a complete arsenal of strategic weapons, including nuclear-armed aircraft, fleets, and ICBMs. In the base game, you gain two points for every million enemies killed, and lose one point for every million casualties taken. The game isn’t detailed, and it prioritizes gameplay over realism wherever there is a tradeoff, but it is still haunting. You are in complete control of a superpower, and yet are nigh powerless to prevent massive and irreversible devastation, because even if you’re merciful to your enemy, your enemy won’t be to you.
The level of detail is minimalist in such a way that it gives your imagination just enough fodder to work with. You can see the renditions of individual, nameless pilots, and real life cities, and can’t help but fill in the details. Each point measures a million people dead, and you can see how many survivors are still around to kill. All rounded of course. At this scale, you can only ballpark to the nearest million or so. You have as much data and detail as a real nuclear commander would have, and nothing more.
One of the things I found most chilling: the default speed for the game is in real time. Let that sink in. If you’re playing in a basement away from windows, it is entirely possible to imagine that a WarGames style scenario has happened, and you’re watching the end of the world in real time. And just like in real life, you can’t pause or quit once you’ve started, until there is a victor (yes, this is annoying when you’re actually playing, but the statement gets through). The online manual takes this a step further, including in its instructions on setup and play strategies, pages copied directly from actual Cold War civil defence pamphlets, describing in terrifying detail, how to build a fallout shelter for you and your computer.
Plague Inc.
Back when I was in primary school, there was this game called Pandemic II (it still exists, it’s just really old and outdated), and the basic idea was that you were a disease trying to wipe out humanity. Plague Inc took this idea and ran with it, adding all kinds of new features, new interactivity, and new scenarios. The game calls itself “hyper-realistic”, which seems to be their way of saying it parodies the real world and takes everything to extreme, video-game/cartoon logic ends (One guy in China is coughing. Clearly the world needs to go to full scale pandemic alert).
Perhaps others disagree, but I always felt this rather undercut the game. Sure, it’s amusing to see that “Apple$oft is working on the iCure app”, but this doesn’t really make it emotionally engaging. It’s just too easy to wipe out the puny humans without really pausing to reflect on what you’re doing. I can see the juxtaposition they were going for, using cutesy bubbles and highly stylized graphics to display information about millions of casualties. The artist in me can even appreciate, and applaud the effort. I just don’t think they managed to pull it off.
This doesn’t make the game bad, by a long shot. It’s a great app game to kill some spare time, say, in the hospital waiting room (no, I’m not joking). For a game with such a heavy subject matter, it just doesn’t carry the weight well. In many respects, this makes it a better app game than a video game. You can wipe out all the humans in a short play session between IV changes, and without actually having to commit emotionally. But on this list, that’s a bad thing.
Prison Architect
As proof that you can tackle a heavy subject while still keeping simplistic, cartoon graphics, and a sandbox game, Prison Architect tackles a whole slew of heavy material. The game itself is pretty much all in the name: you build and administer a prison. In doing so, you make a variety of choices, big and small, which have moral, political, and strategic implications and consequences. Do you maintain order through the brute force, or balanced incentives? Do you aim primarily to rehabilitate, or punish? Are you willing to bend human rights to satisfy a tight budget?
These aren’t questions that are pitched to you directly through narrative. Even in a sandbox game, these are all still legitimate strategic questions that you have to contend with. There aren’t developer-ordained right answers, though there are consequences. If you treat your prisoners too badly, and they will be more motivated towards violence and escape. Forget to lay down the law, and they will walk all over you; to say nothing of your company’s shareholders, who are footing the bill for all this expensive “rehabilitation”.
This game does a lot to show, in an approachable, understandable way, a lot about the current situation in regards to criminal justice and the debate about reforming it. It shows how you can get to a place with such an atrocious system as we have in the US today acting from perfectly good (or at least, defensible) intentions, while also demonstrating some of the paths forward, including the costs that need to be considered. It tackles real world themes that we often shy away from, because they’re dark and ethically charged, without, as I usually put it, “The author standing over you and beating you with a sack of morals”.
Papers Please
This game is often described as a “bureaucracy simulator”, which is dark and depressing in and of itself, but the theming and story of the game take this further. Your work as a border checkpoint officer takes place in a brutal totalitarian regime, where failure to follow the rules means certain death. Even the unwritten rules. Especially the unwritten rules.
It is incredibly difficult to be a “good person” in this game, because in order to have the resources to do the right thing, you have to be good enough at your job to not be replaced (or arrested, or killed, or some combination thereof). Which means you have to be good at picking out the smallest discrepancies in paperwork, and ruthlessly enforcing the order of the day. Which means you develop a certain paranoia and disdain towards, well, everyone. (“You changed your name. A likely story. Guards, arrest her!”)
The game manages to not be ham-fisted in the way it presents player choices (most of the time) while also not pulling any punches. This game also manages to humanize a particular kind of job that tends to get the brunt of a lot of criticism: the poor schmo on the ground responsible for implementing bureaucratic orders, in this case, government security and immigration directives, and absorbing the abuse of the people on the receiving end. You can see how this position is both terrible to start with, and could easily wear a person down into being a terrible person.
Honorable Mention: Democracy series
This isn’t exactly dark, though it can be. It is, as the name implies, a democracy simulator. You play as someone in a position of power in a country, and you need to balance your policies carefully, not just to keep your country afloat, but to appease your constituents. It isn’t realistic by a long shot, but it does a good job of getting across the central message: every policy comes with a cost and a tradeoff.
What’s right may not be popular. What’s needed to keep the country from plummeting into fiery chaos tomorrow may not be popular, or even workable, today. This can be really frustrating and depressing if you’re the idealistic type, or if you favor niche policies that aren’t added into the game. If you really just want to force your agenda through, you can always fiddle around with the difficulty settings, and can exploit some quirks of the game. Or you can do as I do: invoke emergency powers to have your critics dragged from their homes and imprisoned without trial. Admittedly this won’t do much for your approval rating, and won’t stop you from being voted out of office (somehow, your fanatical police state can’t seem to rig elections properly), or being assassinated (an unlimited secret police budget, and they can’t stop one idiot with a gun?).
My biggest complaint about this series is that the fingerprints of the developer are all over which policies work and which don’t. Policies are blunt and one dimensional (maybe this is more accurate than I give credit for), and change is either immediate and dramatic (you can effectively abolish religion, capitalism, and liberalism in one term) or nonexistent (I have complete censorship, and yet somehow attack ads against me are sending my administration into a tailspin), and the policies you can implement tend to be, with a few exceptions, pretty bland and generic.
