History SceneryGorn / VideoGames

*** Argus is even worse, consisting of three continental masses torn free from the ravaged planet itself, with Krokuun and the Antoran Wastes being more extreme version of the Broken Shore. Mac'aree appears beautiful at first glance but the earth has been shattered since then and void corruption is spreading to pollute the land.

* The introduction to ''VideoGame/{{Fallout| 1}}'' ends with a slow zoom out to reveal the television we have been watching is sitting unattended in a ruined house in a blasted, ruined cityscape.
** ''VideoGame/{{Fallout 3}}'' opens with a slow pan back through a rusted, broken-down bus as "I Don't Want to Set the World on Fire" plays... until the camera swings up to reveal the ruins of Washington D.C. The gameplay lives up to this, so that the first thing you see after your eyes adjust from leaving Vault 101 is [[SceneryPorn a scenic overlook of the post-apocalyptic Wasteland]], with the half-skeletal Washington Monument far on the horizon.

** ''VideoGame/{{Fallout 4}}'' brings the series to the ruins of Boston, and while the area itself wasn't nuked directly, the city is in ruins, a sprawling, multi-level nightmare of urban combat between bands of raiders, mercenaries, and Super Mutants. Then there's the Glowing Sea, where the nuke ''did'' fall, an irradiated wasteland that will kill an unprotected explorer in a manner of minutes, assuming the local wildlife doesn't find them first. Worse, the danger of the Glowing Sea doesn't stay confined to it, and occasional Radiation Storms sweep through the Commonwealth and force the wise indoors.

* In ''VideoGame/FinalFantasyVI'', AfterTheEnd [[TheEndOfTheWorldAsWeKnowIt of the World of Balance]] occurs, and right before Celes' awakening, there's a silent camera pan across the new, twilit face of the World of Ruin, driving home the point that nothing will ever be the same anymore.

* ''VideoGame/TheLegendOfZeldaOcarinaOfTime'': When Link emerges from the Temple of Time for the first time as an adult and sees the devastation that Ganondorf's seven-year reign has wrought: The bright, colorful Market with its happy music has been turned to ruins, the carefree villagers replaced by Redead zombies. Likewise, beautiful and majestic Hyrule Castle has been replaced by the onyx coloured Ganon's Castle -- hovering over a lake of molten lava, to boot.

* ''VideoGame/SuperMetroid'' has Old Tourian, the wreckage of the first game's Tourian, as well as the wrecked ship.
** In ''Fusion'', after you destroy Nettori, [[spoiler:Nightmare lays waste to Sector 5, flooding most of the area.]]

* The [[NightmareFuel infamous]] final level of ''VideoGame/{{Psychonauts}}'' shows us what happens when two [[JourneyToTheCenterOfTheMind mental planes]] collide with one another. In this case, its the mind of the protagonist, who grew up in a circus, and the antagonist, who grew up in a butcher shop. Neither of their childhoods were exactly happy, and what we get is a truly nauseating landscape known only as the "[[BodyHorror Meat]] [[CircusOfFear Circus]]". Despite the notorious DifficultySpike of the place, it needs to be seen to believe.

* Creator/ElephantGames are known for these in their ''Mystery Trackers'' game series as much of the locations that the player visits are abandoned towns and buildings due to either supernatural disasters or man-made disrepair. And in their joint production of ''Fate's Carnival'' for the ''VideoGame/MysteryCaseFiles'' series, their highly detailed rendition of Madame Fate's carnival is scarier than its original design.

** ''Hell's Highway'' takes this UpToEleven with Eindhoven, which is destroyed by German bombers and buildings are shown bombed out and burning in the process. And then there's "[[TitleDrop Hell's Highway]]", which goes even further, with burning vehicles and buildings at literally every other meter one looks.

** UpToEleven in ''VideoGame/LightningReturnsFinalFantasyXIII'' . Near the end of the game, you can see [[spoiler: What amounts to a world-spanning tornado ravaging familiar locales from the previous games, including the above-mentioned Oerba]]. Justified considering the [[EndOfTheWorldSpecial very nature of the game.]]

** ''VideoGame/HaloReach'' takes this UpToEleven, particularly in the level "New Alexandria". Made harsher by SceneryPorn in the first chapters.

* Speaking of ''VideoGame/CallOfDuty 4''... [[spoiler:When Jackson, one of the player characters, [[SomeAnvilsNeedToBeDropped staggers out of the crashed helicopter into the hellscape created by the detonation of Al-Asad's nuclear bomb, allowing the player to soak in the devastation before dying of radiation poisoning]]]].

* ''VideoGame/HuntShowdown'' takes place in the abandoned bayous of Louisiana filled with abandoned buildings, walking corpses and dark shady trees.

* ''[[{{VideoGame/Bioshock1}} Bioshock]]'' has your character arrive on the scene in Rapture after a lot of crap has gone down. Evidence of firefights, messages written in blood on the walls, damaged electronics and wires, corpses, and whole areas frozen off by sub-zero seawater leaks are visible at every third step. Ghostly hallucinations and audio tapes give you an idea of what the slum ''used'' to be like.

*** Dionysus Park in ''2'' was [[WhatCouldHaveBeen originally conceived as being totally pristine and untouched by the destruction and decay of Rapture]], but at some point the developers went "screw it, let's wreck this place too". Evidently, they found their AuthorAppeal and stuck with it.

* ''VideoGame/CommandAndConquer'', boy howdy! By ''Tiberian Sun'', Earth is pretty much a ravaged, drought-ridden wasteland dotted with lovely things like [[ManEatingPlant Tiberian Weeds]] and raging ion storms. Only a scant few pockets of civilization remain on the blighted landscape, and even they are torn with the ongoing no-holds-barred beatdown between NOD and GDI. And then it goes FromBadToWorse in ''Tiberium Wars'', when we see just how xenoformed the Red Zones have become, with Tiberium "glaciers."
* ''VideoGame/CompanyOfHeroes'' featured this, but in a twist, instead of immediately starting off this, you are the one doing the [[WhatTheHellHero destruction]]. Its a sight when you first start off, some french villas, beautiful market squares, and walls. But once the battle actually starts, artillery starts falling, blowing up houses, grenades and mortars start scarring the landscape, and tanks break apart the walls. By the end a battle, the landscape is completely changed, with only an inkling of the past beauty.

** ''VideoGame/DragonAgeOrigins'' has several examples. The Deep Roads, the tunnels connecting the cities and Thaigs of the Ancient Dwarven Empire, are now swarming with darkspawn and corrupted by their taint. The Circle Tower, after being overrun with Abominations and Blood Mages, has most of the upper floors covered in an an oozy, fleshy... ''something'', similar to Darkspawn corruption. Ostagar comes across as this in the ''Return to Ostagar'' DLC, where the former ruins are littered with the unburied dead from the ill-fated battle, swarming darkspawn and the crude effigies they've constructed.

** ''VideoGame/{{Fallout 3}}'' opens with a slow pan back through a rusted, broken-down bus as "I Don't Want to Set the World on Fire" plays... until the camera swings up to reveal the ruins of Washington D.C. The gameplay lives up to this, so that the first thing you see after you eyes adjust from leaving Vault 101 is [[SceneryPorn a scenic overlook of the post-apocalyptic Wasteland]], with the half-skeletal Washington Monument far on the horizon.

* In ''VideoGame/FinalFantasyV'' there's a place called Gorn Town that is essentially the abandoned ruin of an ancient town, complete with broken pillars, ruined buildings and plants that have overgrown everything. It was renamed to Gohn in the GBA release, which somewhat ruins the joke.

** UpToEleven in ''VideoGame/LightningReturnsFinalFantasyXIII'' . Near the end of the game, you can see [[spoiler: What amounts to a world spanning tornado ravaging familiar locales from the previous games, including the above-mentioned Oerba]]. Justified considering the [[EndOfTheWorldSpecial very nature of the game.]]

* When playing ''VideoGame/HotlineMiami2WrongNumber'' on hard mode, the background of the level selection screen shows [[spoiler: ruins of Miami drawn in a rather sombre palette. In order to unlock the hard mode, the player has to finish the game on normal difficulty first, and the ending reveals that most of the world was destroyed in a nuclear conflict between USA and Soviet Russia.]]

* One of the first few things to realize in ''VideoGame/InazumaEleven 2'' is that the whole Raimon academy is totally destroyed by aliens. The scene specially pans on the soccer club, which is the heroes' important stronghold in the first game. The school gets better, and more fabulous than ever.

* Chapter 12 of ''VideoGame/KidIcarusUprising'' takes place on a massive, already war-torn battlefield that becomes even ''more'' derilect when the Goddess of Nature, Viridi, makes her grand entrance by dropping a massive plant-bomb and converting the whole area into a tangled mess of trees, vines, and the occasional piece of building.

** Every game in ''VideoGame/MysteryCaseFiles'''s Ravenhearst arc get progressively scarier and scarier, to the point where ''Escape From Ravenhearst'' and ''Ravenhearst Unlocked'' needed ContentWarnings for not only the horrifyingly scary plots, but also for the nightmare-inducing BedlamHouse settings.

** ''VideoGame/RisingStorm2Vietnam'' continues the trend of showing beautiful jungles intersperesed with the above, only now this includes wrecked South Vietnamese cities, with Hue and Saigon in particular shown to be full of destroyed tanks, burnt out buildings, and dozens of shell craters.

* In ''VideoGame/TheSilentAge'' the scenery 40 years into the future is designed to depict all sorts of decay and absolute abandonment by any living being, save for the flora. Buildings crumbling, windows broken, skeletons everywhere, rust, dust, dirt and electricity out. The final future destination [[spoiler:over hundreds years into the future]] exhibits all the same signs of decline, only partly turning into eerie jungle.

** In the early betas, ''STALKER'' featured even more desolation and destruction; eg. the Dead City with collapsed Soviet-era flats, an old research center in the Dark Valley and more.

* Much of [[{{Mordor}} Cauldros]] in ''VideoGame/XenobladeChroniclesX''. Notably The Capital Wreckage, The Ruined City of O'rrh Sim and The Kw'arah Cloister.

* The ''VideoGame/ZombieArmyTrilogy'' has this twice over. It's Germany in the closing months of World War II, so every building is bombed out and ruined and piles of rubble are everywhere, plus the ZombieApocalypse means liberal amounts of blood, dismembered body parts and bodies, pentagrams, piles of viscera and impaled corpses. If you're squeamish about this sorta thing, you probably should skip this game.

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* In ''VideoGame/DragonAgeOrigins'', the Deep Roads, the tunnels connecting the cities and Thaigs of the Ancient Dwarven Empire, which are now swarming with Darkspawn and corrupted by their taint. The Circle Tower after being overrun with Abominations and Blood Mages, has most of the upper floors covered in an an oozy, fleshy... ''something'', similar to Darkspawn corruption. Ostagar comes across as this in the ''Return of Ostagar DLC'', where the former ruins are littered with the unburied dead from the ill-fated battle, swarming Darkspawn and the crude effigies they've constructed.
** In ''VideoGame/DragonAgeII'', the prologue takes place in the Blightlands, the area surrounding Lothering that has become tainted due to being overrun with the Darkspawn horde. Most of the driving plot of Act I features Hawke preparing to join an expedition to an undiscovered part of the Deep Roads, while the ''Legacy DLC'' journeys to another part, which houses an Ancient Grey Warden Prison.
** The Exalted Plains in ''VideoGame/DragonAgeInquisition'' is a ruined battlefield in the aftermath of a civil war; the land is scarred by ruined trenches, filled with bodies, both dead and ''undead'', and topped by the banners of the two sides still lazily twisting in the wind, forgotten by the armies as they retreated from the undead attack. To make matters worse, the ambient music (if it can be called that) consists of little more than a combination of a mournful chord and an eerie, low humming sound.

* Take a look and compare the differences between the maps [[http://www.zeldadungeon.net/wiki/images/4/4e/Hyrule_Warriors_Stage_Hyrule_Field.jpg Hyrule Field]] and [[http://tinyurl.com/ja7uz9m Ganon's Tower]] in ''VideoGame/HyruleWarriors''. No wonder the narrator said that every time the Triforce fell into the hands of evil, the land fell into misery.

* Every game in ''Videogame/MysteryCaseFiles'''s Ravenhearst arc get progressively scarier and scarier, to the point where ''Escape From Ravenhearst'' and ''Ravenhearst Unlocked'' needed ContentWarnings for not only the horrifyingly scary plots, but also for the nightmare-inducing BedlamHouse settings.

* The ''VideoGame/ZombieArmyTrilogy'' has this twice over. It's Germany in the closing months of World War II, so every building is bombed out and ruined and piles of rubble are everywhere, plus the ZombieApocalypse means liberal amounts of blood, dismembered body parts and bodies, pentagrams, piles of viscera and impaled corpses. If you're squeamish about this sorta thing, you probably should skip this game.
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* Dowerton Station, unpleasant enough in ''Dark Fall: The Journal'', has graduated to full-on Scenery Gorn in ''Dark Fall: Lost Souls''.

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* ''[[VideoGame/GhostsNGoblins Ghouls n' Ghosts]]'s'' second stage is a derelict village of windmills. In the Game Boy Advance port of ''Super Ghouls and Ghosts'', a modified version of the stage appears in the new Arrange Mode as an alternative to that game's own original Gorn stage of a rotting shipyard.

[[caption-width-right:350: The (appropriately named) [[ExactlyWhatItSaysOnTheTin Village of Decay and Destruction]]]]