Cosmic Horror Story / Video Games

Video Games

• Alan Wake: Cauldron Lake is a portal to an Eldritch Location, which contains a powerful, godlike entity which has the capacity to Mind Rape people simply by them being in darkness, and wants to enter our reality to consume it. Even at the end, Alan can't defeat the Dark Presence. At best, he manages to stop its plans temporarily and destroy its current avatar, but the ending shows that it's taken Agent Nightingale as its new face and is planning to try again.
• Anchorhead is an award-winningly well-regarded example of an Interactive Fiction text adventure set in the "slowly unraveling horror" Lovecraftian milieu. Look here for download and information on the game.
• Arknights: ...Oh boy, where to even begin? There are... demons living on the outskirts of Terra. The Emperor's Blades, famed in-universe as being able to each exterminate an army by themselves, are the way they are because they've voluntarily sealed parts of these demons into themselves through pocket dimensions, running the risk of them leaking out and contaminating the world with something otherworldly if their armor is to break. Not only are these things powerful enough that entire squads of Emperor's Blades are expected to face heavy casualties when fighting them, but they're also explicitly stated to grow stronger simply by being known. And then there's the Seaborn, a Lovecraftian hivemind from the depths of the sea which, as of "Mizuki and Caerula Arbor", could cause a Bad Future in which the Blades were forced to unleash the demons within them to create a defensive line against them. It fails.
  • And of course, there's the increasing Foreshadowing here and there that Originium may not only be alive somehow, but may also be sapient...
• It is revealed in Asura's Wrath that Chakravartin created The Gohma to test humanity after giving them his type of power, and resets the world when he doesn't find an heir, as well as the universe with it. He's done this countless times, implying this has been going on for eons before any of the named characters have even existed.
• The universe of Battleborn is set when Solus is the sole remaining star after the rest of the stars in the universe have been darkened by the Varelsi. By the time of the game, the Jennerit Imperium, the most powerful civilization in war against the Varelsi, has been knocked out of the war when Lothar Rendain overthrew Empress Lenore and sided with Varelsi with beliefs that joining them would be a better option than engaging in a Hopeless War. The titular Battleborn were formed by the five united-but-squabbling factions (the United Peacekeeping Republics, the Last Light Consortium, the Rogues, Eldrid, and resistance forces from the Jennerit Imperium) with goals to make a difference by uniting against the Varelsi rather than waiting to die alone. The ending has them defeat Rendain, but the Varelsi are still a continuing threat, and just a single star which surely cannot last forever is left in the universe for all life remaining in it...
• In Bayonetta, Heaven is a white-and-gold version of Hell. That doesn't mean Heaven is at all good, nor that Hell isn't all evil. No, they're both equally evil. Which means humans are screwed the moment they take their last breath.
• The world of BlazBlue is incredibly hostile to its human inhabitants, being overrun by Toxic Phlebotinum fumes spewed by an Eldritch Abomination that killed around half of humanity. Said fumes have created all manner of terrifying monstrosities and the places outside of the hierarchical cities are rife with them, and humanity relies on said fumes as a source of energy. The Gods of this world include an Ax-Crazy troll known as Yuuki Terumi who wants to plunge the world into even deeper hell and is also the one who made the world into what it is to begin with and is secretly its ruler, and a literal death goddess known as Izanami who actually managed to plunge the world into deeper hell. Compared to the aliens and gods from the Marvel Cinematic Universe and DC Extended Universe, the heroic godlike characters like Rachel and Hakumen are rather indifferent towards humanity. Central Fiction goes further by revealing that the original world (dubbed the Age of Origin) was actually destroyed by a war between humans and Prime Field Devices that gained sentience and Turned Against Their Masters, which can all be traced to humanity finding the Susanoo Unit and later the Amaterasu Unit after having dug deep into the Earth and wanting to explore the Boundary, and that the whole universe is at the mercy of a war between the Master Unit and Terumi. And guess what caused humanity to dig deep into the Earth for the Susanoo Unit, leading to all of this? Terumi. Simply put, humanity's little more than his plaything. Also the universe keeps getting time looped whenever a certain event happens.
• Bloodborne: The city of Yharnam and its environs are one big Great One playground, where most humans go insane with horror or bloodlust and the few that remain sane are picked off one-by-one. There's also other eldritch factions that nobody has ANY intel on. That's not even getting into the possibility that the entire game is a mass hallucination brought on by the dreams of the Great Ones. In a bit of a twist, the Great Ones themselves are generally pretty docile and non-interfering, and some even appear to be trying to help humanity with this situation. Most of the danger and madness comes from human factions that have obtained a sliver of the Great Ones' power through various means and misuse them catastrophically. The game is also something of a zig-zagged example that downplays the true unfathomability and unstoppable nature of the Great Ones and related creatures due to them being enemies that can be killed (maybe; it's a bit unclear). In the initial parts of the game it masquerades itself as a traditional Gothic Horror story with vampires and werewolves and the like, and it's only at a certain point (after attaining forty Insight or defeating Rom, The Vacuous Spider) that the eldritch nature of Yharnam becomes readily apparent. If one were to never get to those points they'd be forgiven for thinking it was just a Gothic Horror story with some weirder bits of lore.
• From a gameplay perspective, The Breach is closer to Lovecraft Lite, but in narrative terms, it's more like this. At no point is there any hope of permanently defeating the Yellow, just pushing it back where it came from, and Sergei firmly believes (correctly) that if hyperspace experiments continue, humanity is doomed.
• Call of Cthulhu: Dark Corners of the Earth is an alternate viewpoint retelling of Lovecraft's The Shadow over Innsmouth with the main character going irrevocably insane in the end, thanks in part to the knowledge that he has, at best, only slightly postponed the inevitable downfall of humanity.
• Call of Cthulhu: The Official Video Game has a Shellshocked Veteran of World War I who's now an alcoholic PI investigating a suspicious death on a remote New England island. As this is an official adaptation of the pen-and-paper RPG, that madness, horror and cults to ancient slumbering monstrous gods beyond human understanding are par for the course shouldn't surprise anyone. You can even choose to kickstart the end of the world yourself at the end by siding with the cultists, completing the ritual to fully awaken and summon Cthulhu.
• Call of Duty: Black Ops III has not one, not two, but three distinct examples of this:
  • In the main story, humanity in the 2060s is at war with Corvus, a rogue, malevolent AI which desires to control the human race through their DNIs. The threat he poses to humanity is very much an existential one, and he is also responsible for the creation of the Frozen Forest, a virtual eldritch location that could have ended up being humanity's realm for the rest of eternity. Or the protagonist could have been dead the entire time, bringing the very ontology of the campaign's universe into doubt.
  • The Nightmares campaign takes place in an Alternate Universe where the experiments, instead of giving rise to Corvus, end up opening up the realm of Malus, inhabited by Deimos, the demigod of dread, and Dolos, the demigoddess of trickery. Deimos unleashes a zombie apocalypse on humanity so he can have an army to kill Dolos and usurp Malum. The protagonist thwarts Deimos' plan with Dolos' help, but not because Dolos cares about humanity; she doesn't care about us at all, she's just bored with her brother's antics and wants to go home.
  • The new Zombies mode, The Shadows of Evil, takes place in a Lovecraftian Film Noir setting where a cynical magician, a Dirty Cop, a Femme Fatale, and a washed-up boxer are tormented by a mysterious figure called the Shadow Man. He orders the four around promising them redemption, but naturally this is all a crock of shit and he's really trying to trick them into unleashing his "masters" onto our realm. The protagonists eventually realize the deception and defeat him and prevent the takeover.
• Heavily implied by the ending of Carrion. The monster has learned to perfectly mimic humans and has escaped the base. Anyone who knows about it, its capabilities and the danger it poses is presumably dead, and the music track playing is called "The End As We Know It", likely meaning humanity will now be easy prey to the monster. The twist being, YOU play the monster.
• Whether or not Lavos qualifies is up to the player's imagination, considering that Crono and co. can kill it with great difficulty, but as of Chrono Cross, where it's revealed that it never truly went away...
• In the Chzo Mythos, it just so happens that there's another world next door, a world ruled by the VERY EMBODIMENT of PAIN, and he can't wait to get his hands on our world. Don't worry that he has an intricate web of followers that are helping him to succeed, but thanks to his non linear view of time, he already has. Though, luckily for humanity, it's all a kansas city shuffle on his part.
• Conarium is a subdued example, but as a sort-of sequel to At the Mountains of Madness it's inevitably one. Fleeing or avoiding enemies is almost always the appropriate response, everyone involved experiences gradual and not-so-gradual hits to their sanity, and in the end the protagonist either is implied to die from the strain of experiments into Things Man Was Not Meant to Know, or ends up with his consciousness stranded in an alien body on a distant world, with no likely way to return back to Earth.
• The Consuming Shadow by Yathzee Croshaw (like Chzo Mythos above) is a typical Eldritch Abomination invasion scenario, with all the madness and Body Horror one would expect. You must assemble the rune to seal away the god that is currently invading Earth; the problem is there are three gods. There is one who is helping the invading god, and the other one is working against the god and potentially your ally. If you seal away the wrong god, well...
• Of all things, Crash Bash can dive into this territory. Aku Aku and Uka Uka decide to settle their age-old rivalry with a contest that will determine the stronger alignment between Good and Evil, as well as the fate of the Earth. Should the player win as a member of Cortex's team, Uka Uka draws absolute power from the collected crystals and fully intends to prey upon an Earth and its universe that can no longer stop him. Aku Aku despairs over his naïve faith in goodness and begs Crash and Coco to run for their lives, knowing that no one will be safe from his brother's wrath.
• Dark Souls:
  • The presence of the Dark makes the setting into this. In humans, it manifests as the Dark Sign, a curse which leaves the victim in an permanent state of undeath, slowly losing their memories and becoming Hollows. For gods or those without the Dark Sign, they become monstrous entities. Anyone who could have done anything to stop the tide is either dead, mad, or both.
  • In the Artorias of the Abyss DLC, the Chosen Undead is thrown back in time to Oolacile, a citystate of magic users which Dug Too Deep, pouring out a plague of Dark from the primeval man that the magister excavated.
  • Dark Souls III makes it even worse. After an unspecified (but MASSIVE) number of cycles where someone chose to Link the Fire and renew the world, the system keeping the world kinda-sorta functional has failed. Not "it will fail soon (no really!)" or even "right about to fail". It FAILED. You, an Unkindled that is unfit to do this naturally, have been tasked to find five Lords of Cinder in a drastic attempt to make yourself strong enough to Link The Fire, and one of those former Lords literally broke time to buy the world one last chance; the world actually died in the previous timeline because its champion didn't reach the Firelink Shrine in time. As you near the end of your journey, the sun bleeds out and the Abyss covers the land. This is the apocalypse and while there are multiple endings, they all come down to whether or not you try (and fail) to Link The Fire again, give the world a mercy kill, or Usurp the Fire to claim whatever power it still holds for yourself.
  • The final DLC The Ringed City adds another layer of senseless tragedy to the whole mess. The Pygmies once had full mastery over the Dark Soul and were faithful allies to the gods of Anor Londo. But Gwyn feared the Dark Soul's power and placed a seal of fire on humanity in an attempt to keep it in check. This seal became the Dark Sign, ushering in the Undead Curse and the Vicious Cycle that would doom the world. All of this sorrow was wrought because of a paranoid god. For bonus bleakness points, the Ringed City is set at the very end of time. Fire, Dark, whatever else, eventually everything fades away and all that's left is a wasteland, full of the crumbling corpses of long-dead cities, and even giving the Dark Soul blood to the Painter so she can create a new Painted World is 1) a temporary solution, as you spent the entirety of Ashes of Ariandel learning that Painted Worlds eventually decay and must burn and be repainted, which requires the Dark Soul as pigment, and 2) tragic in and of itself as the blood used to paint it comes from the sacrifice of the very man the painting was to house.
• Darkest Dungeon comes very close to this trope, with the bleak, gothic visuals, Permadeath system that can result in the player feeding numerous party members into the dungeon meat grinder and the Sanity Meter wherein all the horrors the party encounters can wear away their sanity until they finally break and lose their minds. Ultimately, though, the trope is subverted by the occasional shred of optimism, with near-broken characters occasionally catching their Heroic Second Wind instead and coming back stronger than before, and the narrator sometimes reminding the player that, despite how utterly daunting the final goal may seem, victory is still possible. Until it is Double Subverted - in the end, all your character did is delay the inevitable, and the knowledge of the creator of humanity and heart of the world drives them to suicide, leaving them as nothing but a ghost trying to delay it even further, fully knowing that in the end, when the stars are right, the horror within the Darkest Dungeon will hatch from the egg that we call the world and bring an end to humanity. All you can do is delay it again and again so that humanity can live a short while longer, plunging the game fully into cosmic horror and Downer Ending territory. Then again, it may be even Zig-Zagged, as the game downright tells you, the Heart is an Unreliable Narrator, and this causes doubt in whether it's true or not.
• Darkwood takes place in a Polish forest during the 1980’s that no one inside can escape due to the trees growing big and out of control. Meanwhile, strange eldritch beings and mutated wildlife continue to flourish while a plague that mutates people and drives them mad is spreading unchecked. The people there, including the Protagonist, are falling apart under pressure and starvation, the Protagonist himself desperately trying to accomplish an unknown goal while doing his best to stay alive.
  Eventually, it’s revealed that an Eldritch Abomination known as “The Being” was responsible for everything that happened inside the forest, plus it has the ability to create the other eldritch beings seen throughout the game. There’s nothing to suggest The Being is intentionally hostile to mankind, only that it wants humans to sleep under its control. It’s up to the player whether to embrace The Being and whatever goals it has in mind for humanity, or confiscate a flamethrower from one of the nearby captured soldiers and use it to burn The Being as well as everything around in an effort to keep humankind safe from it, albeit this comes at the cost of the Protagonist’s life and most of the people living in the now burning forest. Also, due to the existence of The Being it’s likely there are other eldritch beings who could invade humanity and repeat the situation all over again, plus there’s no guarantee The Being perished in the fire.
• Dead Space. All life in the galaxy seems to exist for no other purpose than to be eaten by the Brethren Moons. Humanity is alone in the stars because every race before it fell into the same rut of expanding beyond their resources and falling prey to the temptation of the Moons' Markers. The Moons can be fought, but only at a high cost. The image at the top of the page? That's pretty close to what Brethren Moons do to planets during Convergence events.◊ The third game also hints that the Moons are waking up, which is exactly what happens in the Dead Space 3: Awakened DLC pack. Though protagonists Issac Clarke and John Carver survive their Heroic Sacrifice moment, they are now faced with the impossible threat of an entire race of hungry planetoid abominations descending upon Earth and the colonies...
• Surprisingly, Deadly Premonition ends up with elements of this genre. The Big Bad is an immortal Humanoid Abomination from another plane of existence that has warped the hero's life since childhood and thrives on torturing humans For The Evulz. The story is just vague enough to make every detail questionable, making for a Psychological Horror experience.
• Demon's Souls, unsurprisingly given that it's the Spiritual Predecessor to Dark Souls. The Old One is an unstoppable, unspeakably ancient demon. Whenever it awakens, a colorless fog begins to swallow the world, and anyone (even ancient spirits) caught in that fog will eventually become a demon themselves. The only hope for the world is to assist the Maiden in Black in lulling the Old One asleep by defeating the most powerful demons and offering their souls as bait. The player can choose to prove what a magnificent demon they are by instead slaying the Maiden and becoming the Old One's new Archdemon, thereby dooming the world to being devoured Don't count on the setting's God to save anyone either since "God" is the Old One.
• Diablo: Humanity are the descendants of Nephalem, who themselves were the offspring of angels and demons, both of whom have been engaged in a war with each other since the beginning of creation, only stopping long enough to figure out how the Nephalem came to be. To start, and to give you a good first look at what you can expect, demons are pretty much Always Chaotic Evil, while it's opposite- that angels are universally benevolent and uncorruptable beings- does not apply. The highest authority of both sides are antagonistic towards humanity, with demonkind actively trying to manipulate and exploit them and the angels looking down on humanity for their demonic blood. Diablo, one of the Prime Evils, has successfully manipulated his brothers, higher-ups who are more powerful than him, into falling for his every trap and scheme, and his machinations have put the world, and even the High Heavens, into jeopardy. While the forces of Hell have been pushed back in the past, a lot of times it came down to humanity to do so, and even then, the only reason why they pulled through in the third game was because the Player Character was one of the first in centuries to tap into their latent angel-demon heritage (which, above all else, makes them Immune to Fate), which was the only reason why they even stood any chance against him... and this was when Diablo had already united and become one with the other Prime and Lesser Evils. In spite of all of this, what truly cements Diablo as this trope rather than merely being Lovecraft Lite is the implication that it's impossible to permanently defeat the titular character, which means that angels and humanity basically have two options- fight Diablo for eternity, or lose.
  • This is further compounded in Reaper Of Souls. With all of the Prime Evils imprisoned in the Black Soulstone at the end of Diablo III, Hell has never been weaker and both the High Heavens and Sanctuary could have looked forward to a time where they could have worked together to possibly end the Eternal Conflict once and for all with good victorious, or at least keep Hell contained in a position of weakness, assuming that nobody with ill intent got their hands on the Soulstone and the Evils within weren't released... both of which are precisely what happens after Malthael acquires it. With the end goal of killing humanity by entrapping their demonic essence with the Black Soulstone, and having rallied various "Reapers"- or, to be more specific, other angels- to his cause, he ultimately succeeds in killing the majority of humanity's surviving population and ends up casting angels in a poor light to the survivors... including the Nephalem, who becomes disillusioned with the High Heavens and causes Tyrael to fear what they may choose to do in the future, now that they no longer see any reason to cast their lot with the angels beyond them being "the lesser of two evils". That's not where the bulk of the "cosmic horror" kicks in, though. Where it does enter the equation is that, when Malthael was first starting to lose the Final Battle with the Nephalem, his solution was to destroy the Black Soulstone and absorb the power of all its amassed souls- which, mind, includes the above-mentioned Prime Evils- meaning that, when the Nephalem finished Malthael off, all of those souls escaped, meaning that the Prime Evils are free and will inevitably reform back in Hell (whether as individuals or in their assimilated state under Diablo, it remains to be seen). In short, Malthael, in his pride and genocidal ambitions, pretty much screws over both the High Heavens and Sanctuary at the one point in cosmic history that they held any advantage over the Burning Hells. Yeah.
• Dishonored sets humanity in a Constructed World that is entirely hostile to its existence. The seas are filled with all manner of terrifying monstrosities, packs of rats from a nearby continent regularly kill men and eat them alive, the state religion has Devil, but No God, an immortal Eldritch Abomination fights off boredom by granting people incredible power for the sake of seeing what they choose to do with it, and the only thing holding off the end of the world is implied to be the whales — whales whose oil fuels an industrial revolution, and who are being harvested to the point of extinction.
• Doom³ is this when the Doom-franchise gets played straight, as it covers several themes from H.P. Lovecraft's stories. Such as that man, in their age of great scientific advancements and expension out in the cosmic space, discovers things that mankind would be better off not finding; in this case the truth and the portal of Hell itself - a knowledge that the mere exposure off quickly causes madness and insanity to skyrocket in UAC's research base on Mars, and Man's insignificance before outworldly, eldritch forces that could easily wipe Mankind out if it so desires. Even the demons are more eldritch than in the original series and even if the Doomguy is badass like in the original series, his war against the demons is less of an One-Man Army's awesome Curb-Stomp Battle against the legions of Hell and more of a lonely survivor desperately trying to survive the incomprehensible monsters that he actually has little chance to win against. And even than, his victory is a bittersweet one, being the only survivor and whose victory only delayed the inevitable, as the demons returns in Resurrection of Evil; once again because Man couldn't let their scientific curiosity go and found an Artifact of Doom that summoned them back again to remind mankind of their own insignificance against them...
• In Drakengard, The World Is Always Doomed because the gods are not just evil, but also composed entirely of Eldritch Abominations. They are not slithering masses of tentacles that cause insanity by their very sight, but something very morbid.
  • This is highlighted even more in Drakengard 2, where the breaking of the final seal reveals that the 'natural' state of the world is chaotic invasion by the Watchers, and that any semblance of peace or protection from them is an incredibly fragile cosmic abnormality. The universe is so hostile that we only stave it off by deliberately breaking the system.
  • And finally, in the spin-off franchise Nier, we see the effect of Drakengard's Ending E where Angelus and Caim fight and kill the Queen Beast in modern day Toyko. The mere presence of particles of matter from the Drakengard universe causes the end of civilization simply by being an element foreign to our world.
• So, you think The Elder Scrolls is simply a High Fantasy RPG set in the land of Tamriel on the magical planet of Nirn? You don't see anything cosmic or horrifying about that? How about the fact that the universe itself is apparently made up of a "Hurling Disk" structure, with Nirn at its hub and the Aedra/Daedra functioning as the "spokes" of the wheel, and even the elimination of one of them could cause the universe to unravel? If that's not enough, consider that mere mortals can influence this balance with the right application of belief/disbelief or even with a badly timed ritual and can cause entire millenia of Surreal Horror to occur at a time. And those planets in the Alien Sky you see over head? Yeah that's actually the dead corpse of the Creator God Lorkhan, which your mind perceives as celestial objects to keep you from going insane if you so much as looked anywhere but the ground under your feet—ground which itself may be simply projecting what you want to see. Oh, and those starts are actually portals outside reality made when the other creator gods fled from Nirn during the fight that killed Lorkhan. Oh, and the titular Elder Scrolls are artifacts the origins of which are completely unknown, which can display an infinite number if possible futures, up until the events come to pass...even then, merely glimpsing one can cause a lesser man to go insane, and even those who spend their entire lives training to read them are eventually struck blind, and the true level of their power is completely unknown, possibly even by the Gods themselves. Suddenly, you might feel very, very small in Tamriel...
• The Survival Horror game Eternal Darkness: Sanity's Requiem is often seen as this, but strictly speaking, while the tone is unmistakably Cosmic Horror, the plot itself is not, and all three of the standard endings involve the Player Characters triumphing over the Ancients and saving humanity, which lands this one squarely in Lovecraft Lite territory. The bonus ending reveals that there's a bit more to it than that, and that Mantorok, the most powerful and sole surviving Ancient, engineered the deaths of the other Ancients as part of a larger plot. But while on paper that probably sounds like a Bolivian Army Ending, it's not made clear in-story what, if anything, that means for humanity.
• Eversion gradually reveals itself to be a game of this kind. It starts out as a cute Sugar Bowl of a world, but as you progress further and use your Reality Warper powers in order to get the gems you need, the game gradually gets darker and darker. The Let's Play by DeceasedCrab in particular reads like a Lovecraft story towards the end of it, right down to the rejection of the Sugar Bowl world's "cheery lies."
• Fade to Silence. The plot is set in a Class 3a (bordering on Class 5) scenario where an Eldritch Abomination with nakedly-malevolent intentions finds its way to Earth by the accidental machinations of human science before it proceeds to wipe out mankind through an Endless Winter and a Zombie Apocalypse. The protagonist is nothing but the Big Bad's plaything, giving him Resurrective Immortality just to watch him fight, suffer and die again and again for no other reason than its own personal amusement.
• Fallen London fits most of the criteria (uncaring cosmic monsters who can instantly incinerate anything they find disagreeable, monsters and locations so alien that witnessing them can drive you insane, etc.) but usually veers towards Lovecraft Lite, focusing mainly on the zaniness you get by combining an exaggerated Victorian London with an Eldritch Location. However, players can pursue stories that jump right into cosmic horror. The most well-known is Seeking Mr. Eaten's name, which has almost no humor and revolves around the player becoming a cultist who self-destructively seeks to bring about the return of an Eldritch Abomination.
  • The ''Sunless Skies' branch of the setting is a very bad place to die in. The setting’s afterlife, the Blue Kingdom, is a glorified meat processor that feeds you to an Eldritch Abomination, and if you manage to avoid getting eaten for long enough you’ll eventually dissolve in what’s implied to be a Fate Worse than Death. If you dabble in immortality and end up here anyways, your punishment is getting thrown down a pit full of giant spiders that will feast on your undying body, forever. And if you die somewhere out of the Kingdom’s reach (such as London itself) you instead end up in the Far Shore, which seems like some sort of horrifying cosmic landfill.
  • In Fallen London and Sunless Sea get off a bit easier, as death is often temporary due to your character being out of the sight of the settings Eldritch-equivilants, which in this case would be anything under the sun's light. This means effectively when you die once, you technically are dead but it doesn't start to kick in until you're exposed to sunlight. (A process that actually feels so pleasurable, sunlight is considered an illegal narcotic.) Thus the only ways to permanently die require your body to be completely destroyed, or for you to die outside of the physical realm. However if you die or drown at zee, a physical God present in the setting known as the Fathomking will pass judgment on your fate. By the time you're traveling across the zee in Fallen London your character is so influential that the Fathomking decides it is more in his interest and less of a hassle to bring you back to life in exchange for tribute. Your Sunless Sea captain? Not so lucky, and at best probably can hope to become one of his drownie servants if he's taken a liking to you over the course of your travels.
• Fear & Hunger revolves around the Player Character entering an infamous labyrinthian dungeon on a rescue mission, but quickly becomes this as they face warped abominations and discover the truth of the world they live in. The few old gods that still exist are either evil or completely apathetic to the world's condition. Even the traces of Gro-goroth are strong enough to drive the player character insane by showing them humanity's "true form". Meanwhile, the new gods are either madmen who lust for power, or well-intentioned men who became mad and started lusting for power after their ascension. To make matters worse, the game's true ending as shown by the sequel has a new god with the strength of the old ones born that drowns the world in bloodshed in order to bring about a new age.
• Final Fantasy VII dabbles in this a little, namely when learning about the backstory of JENOVA and the Ancients, the Reunion at the Northern Crater and the releasing of the WEAPONs, and the final stretch of the game involving the center of the planet and the Big Bad transforming into an Eldritch Abomination.
• Freespace is basically what happens when Wing Commander meets this trope. The Shivans aren't really massive unfathomable monsters (well, they are massive, at least, next to humans and vasudans) but they come right out of nowhere to utterly decimate both sides of an interplanetary war until they're forced to team up just to survive, next to nothing is known about their ultimate goal in killing everything in sight, and any major victories against them come at a great cost (the destruction of the Lucifer in the first game resulted in Earth getting completely cut off from the rest of the Alliance) and are short-lived regardless, because whatever superweapon gets taken down, they have about a thousand more anyway, and many more that are even stronger.
• Frictional Games specializes in this, with their games Penumbra, featuring the otherworldly Hive Mind Tuurngait and the more popular Amnesia: The Dark Descent, with the relentless Shadow. It is established that neither the former's Phillip nor the latter's Daniel can do anything meaningful to kill them, only temporarily halt them.
• Of all games, Frostpunk. While a very unusual take on the genre, the series of discoveries showing mankind's desperation to find the cause for the endless winter, which ultimately fails, has surprisingly many characteristics of it. There is no comprehensible intelligence or intent behind the disaster which has brought the Earth to its knees. It's nothing human science can explain, nor is it something that could make sense on a religious or mystical level. It does not seem to be mankind's punishment, and there's no special reason to it. It just happened, and there's nothing that anyone can do about it. The theme of mankind facing not merely destruction but the realization of its utter insignificance in the great scheme of things defines the Cosmic Horror elements of the story more than any amount of tentacled aliens could've.
• Genshin Impact: The game starts out as a heroic fantasy adventure story about the Traveler searching for their lost Sibling. However, as the story progresses, and the Traveler learns more about the world of Teyvat, it slowly goed through a Genre Shift and shifts more into a cosmic horror story. The first clue that things are not what they seem is in the ‘Unreconciled Stars’ Event, where the Traveler learns that the skies above the world is an illusion. The next clue is when the Traveler learns in the Archon Quest ‘We Will Be Reunited’, that the creatures of the Abyss Order are people who were corrupted by the Abyss, who once hailed from the nation of Khaenri'ah, a nation that had no god to lead it and was destroyed by the gods of Celestia and want to destroy Teyvat to spite them.
• The plot of Goodbye Volcano High is set into motion with the discovery of an asteroid on a collision course with the planet. Naturally, as said asteroid draws closer, Fang, their brother, and their friends begin dreading, if not despairing, over futures and efforts rendered moot by the asteroid's inevitable impact. Even as the story concludes with Fang and the others inspiring their classmates and the residents of their town not to give in to despair, the world and everyone on it will perish.
• The Half-Life franchise displays many hallmarks of a cosmic horror story, coupled with orwellian scifi elements. Ironically enough the player is working for the unexplainable eldritch abomination in this case (the G-Man), while the main antagonists (the Combine) can be explained more or less rationally as an invasive extraterrestrial space-faring species which has a nasty habit of conquering/assimilating one dimension after another into their empire, complete with all the inhabited (and uninhabited) worlds and civilizations they contain - Though the sheer speculated size of the Combine's empire compared against the player could itself be defined as a cosmic eldritch abomination in this case.
• Halo, of all things, became this with revelations gleaned from The Forerunner Saga. All life was created, or at least had their creation influenced, by a race of incomprehensibly old, powerful, alien and incomprehensible superbeings known as the Precursors. The only thing known for certain is that, thanks to their near genocide by one of their creations scorned in favor of humanity, their only desire is to see all their creations suffer horrible pain and death at the hands of their newest, most recognizable form: the hive mind Virus known as the Flood.
• Homeworld Cataclysm: Real-Time Strategy example about a minor faction of mere miners unleashing Sealed Evil in a Can called The Beast on the galaxy and their scrambled response to them. The Beast itself in the Naggarok has been sealed away for a million years after taking over a vessel when Hyperspace Is a Scary Place and their Escape Pod is encountered, leading to half the ship being seized by a cross between Grey Goo and The Virus. Even the characters struggle to explain it, but The Beast uses people’s flesh as Meat Moss Organic Technology nerve endings for operating their ships after painfully devouring them, and it only sees people as food. The Beast is intelligent enough to negotiate allies for itself as well. It’s scary enough to convince the Bentusi to Run or Die.
• Iron Lung: Humanity has mostly inexplicably disappeared along with most celestial bodies, leaving few survivors in barren and small space stations. They send you in a small cramped submarine into the bottom of an unexplained and unexplored ocean of blood tasked with taking pictures that you can barely explain.
• Jak and Daxter: The third game features the Dark Makers. While they had no involvement in the previous games, their history is that they are creatures of darkness that were formally Precursors, the beings that created the universe, before prolonged exposure to Dark Eco consumed them, and they traveled planet-to-planet destroying all life before moving on to the next.
• The King of Shreds and Patches is another IF example, originating as a Call of Cthulhu campaign set in Elizabethan England concerned with a reconstructed manuscript of The King in Yellow.
• It's heavily implied that the world of Little Nightmares takes place in one by Little Nightmares II. It's a world where tiny children are always in danger from twisted adult-like monsters who operate on a perversion of the normal world, while eye symbols watch from every direction. The second game's Pale City has an ominous Signal Tower in the center that obsesses and distorts citizens through their televisions, and it is implied by Six's transformation while in the Tower and the Tower's true form as a mass of flesh with eyes that the Tower is an incomprehensible, likely unstopabble entity whose transmission has warped all of the monsters into what they are and that the eye serves as a symbol of reverence toward it.
• In 1987, Infocom made an Interactive Fiction text adventure called The Lurking Horror loosely drawing on the themes of the Cthulhu Mythos.
• The MUD Lusternia features a lot of different genres, but this is one of the most prevalent. There was even a war between the Precursors of mortalkind, the Elder Gods, and the resident Eldritch Abominations, the Soulless Ones. (Also known as the Heralds of Magnora, Magnora being the personification of destruction.) Nowadays they're largely sealed away, but there's a world-spanning event every real life year or so where one breaks free.
• Marathon Infinity features the Security Officer thrown through time and space when the battle between Durandal and the Pfhor is interrupted by a monstrous, alien creature known as W'rkncacnter being freed from a black hole by their skirmish and proceeds to devour reality. The Security Officer must find a timeline where W'rkncacnter never was released, existed, or something.
• Marrow: the whole game is set in dungeons beneath the mountain, where the protagonist has to find his lost friends. As it turns out later, the whole insides of the mountain is actually a multi-layered burial site, where long time ago humankind's precursors managed to tear up the fabric of reality and open a passage to the other world. That resulted in the appearance of marrow, mysterious liquid with strong mutagenic and spirit-distorting potential, which purpose is to clot and close the gaping wound of reality, sort of like blood. The using of said marrow in the experiments brought the predecessors to their extinction, when they created The Familiar, a demigodlike being and a vessel of the incomprehensible great will from beyond. Despite that, by some reason, they couldn't destroy the creature, they've managed to seal it in some kind of pocket dimension and bury the whole area around the passage under the earthen mass. After that, many centuries later, the only ones of the ancient race left alive and serving as jailers of the Familiar, meeting the protagonist in his quest, channeling him their powers so he could survive the marrow's influence, and laying their hopes of destroying the demigod on his shoulders.
• Mass Effect is initially presented as a Cosmic Horror Space Opera, where galactic civilisations are carefully cultivated and then ruthlessly culled by the Reapers in an endless cycle, as they have done for tens of millions of years. The franchise ultimately proved to be Lovecraft Lite, however; with enough War Assets, you can kill the Reapers, control them, or turn them into willing allies. On a smaller scale, the Leviathan DLC of Mass Effect 3 revolves around Shepard tracking down a mysterious, incomprehensible Eldritch Abomination (the titular Leviathan), which was powerful enough to single-handedly take down a Reaper. It has mind control abilities, which it uses to sway countless lifeforms throughout time in order to keep its existence a secret. Fittingly, the climax of the DLC takes place deep beneath the waters of an oceanic planet, where its revealed that the Leviathan are a race of ancient Starfish Aliens that indirectly created the Reapers. In the end the Leviathan help Shepard out, swinging the DLC back towards Lovecraft Lite. At least until the Leviathans come back again.
• The Metro games, just like the books they're based on, are this. The atomic destruction humanity wrought on itself was so thorough, it permanently affected reality as we know it. In addition to radiation, attacks by nightmarish Mutants, nuclear winter, a ruined Moscow with unbreathable air, tunnel collapses, bandits, communists and Nazis, the metro survivors now have to deal with psychic hazards, restless ghosts that turn you into one of them if you touch them, hallucinations, Eldritch Abominations operating on an entirely unknown kind of morality and a new kind of mutants known as the Dark Ones, "the next step in human evolution", who can effortlessly Mind Rape anyone they come in contact with. Except the Dark Ones aren't hostile, and wish to communicate with humanity, but their Telepathy destroys the mind of virtually everyone they try to come in contact with.
  • Journals by Artyom in the first game's remake and its sequel, Metro: Last Light, tell that when the first tunnels were dug under Moscow by the Dukes, even older tunnels would be found, dating from times immemorial and possibly not even built by humans. He also theorizes that the nightmarish mutants seen in the game may not be a product of radiation or biological warfare, but something much more ancient that lurked deep Beneath the Earth, and now that they sense humanity is dying, are slowly reclaiming the Earth.
• Moons of Madness takes a rather literal take on the genre, as it could be described as At the Mountains of Madness being Recycled IN SPACE!, with an astronaut on an away mission stumbling across eldritch horrors. Par for the course for a game set in the same 'Verse as The Secret World, below.
• The indie Survival Horror/Adventure Game Pathologic achieves this in a very minimalistic, Psychological Horror fashion (no darkness or monsters, just a surreal tale set in a town hit by a mysterious plague).
• Pathways into Darkness, an early Bungie game, features aliens warning the US government that a slumbering Eldritch Abomination is due to wake up in a week in the Yutacan. A team of US Special Forces are dropped in to bury the creature with a nuke. Naturally, all but one dies, and now the soul survivor must reach the bottom of the Pyramid alone, all the while being beset by creatures from the Dreaming God's nightmares and investigating the remnants of previous teams. It's implied, by way of shared continuity, that the creature is W'rkncacnter from Marathon (see above). Notably the aliens tell you to do this not to kill the entity, but to keep it asleep long enough for them to show up and presumably offer a more permanent solution.
• The "Cult of Cthulhu" fan-made scenario for Plague Inc.: Evolved consists in spreading Cthulhu's worship around the world. The abilities and symptoms of this new "plague" include astronomical phenomenons which help the cult spreading, as well as actual actions from the cult. The more the cult is active, the faster it spreads and the more it kills. The scenario is won if the player succeeds to research the Cthulhu's Awakening sympton and if all surviving humans are infected. Note that the cult may lose if the cure is completed (even if Cthulhu has been awakened).
• In Phantasy Star IV, it's revealed that the planets of Algo are the seal on the Profound Darkness, and that the sentient races of Algo exist for no other reason than to produce heroes who can defeat Dark Force and prevent it from destroying the seal and releasing the Profound Darkness back into the universe. Chaz doesn't take well to this news.
• In Radiant Silvergun, possibly inspired by the aforementioned Neon Genesis Evangelion, an octahedral Artifact of Doom known as the Stone-Like is excavated and wipes out life on Earth in a flash, the only survivors being those who escaped into satellite orbit. The Silverguns attempt to stop the artifact and for a moment appear to succeed at the end, but then it transports them back in time and vaporizes them as well. The sole survivor is the Creator robot, who has cloned the protagonists, but unfortunately he breaks down before he can warn them of the Stone-Like's purpose, which is that it will keep wiping out humans unless they can learn the error of their ways.
• Downplayed in Returnal. Selene is capable of fighting back proficiently on her own, and the true ending involves her finally breaking the loop. It is clear, however, that Atropos does not play by any rules humans would regard as sane, as she repeatedly returns from death, finds her own dead bodies, and tries to navigate the ruins of a truly alien civilization, as she suffers Sanity Slippage from being stuck with only her ship for company for who-knows-how-long and the planet exploring the traumatic memories of her childhood.
• RuneScape became this when the truth about the The Elder Gods was revealed. The elder gods create planets until they manage to create a perfect world and then go to sleep on the perfect world for millions of years before waking up, whereupon they destroy all of the planets they created except for the perfect world, which turns into a death world, as they feed of the life energy of worlds, and then start the cycle all over again. Zaros's plan is to ascend to the level of an elder god so he can confront them and convince them to stop because they barely acknowledge that sapient lifeform exist at all other than as tools for them to use. Even before this revelation, Runescape had many elements of this. The young gods, who mostly are former mortal before they were exposed to artifacts left behind by the elder gods and many of whom are Jerkasses, have been fighting each other in multiple Forever Wars that caused the destruction of many worlds and the extinction of many species. The Stone of Jas, one of the artifacts of the elder gods that can grant godhood, is an Artifact of Doom that causes the Dragonkin, a race enslaved by Jas, to grow more and more powerful and enraged whenever it is used, which resulted in the destruction of at least one planet. But despite this terrible danger, both gods and mortals crave its power, causing it to act as an Apple of Discord that has driven many conflicts. Tuska, an extremely powerful but unintelligent Animalistic Abomination god has been rampaging from planet to planet, causing much destruction. It also been implied that the Pirate quest storyline is building towards this with the reveal of Xau-Tak, an evil god of oceans and death, who may also be working with Sliske, the Big Bad of the current main storyline. The game also has a very large number of the tropes associated with cosmic horror stories listed at the top of this page even in the non-cosmic horror parts of the game.
  • Well before this, way back in 2004, a quest called Horror From the Deep has this in its backstory, being inspired by Lovecraft's works. The keeper of a lighthouse, Jossik, investigates the basement after hearing sounds coming from it at night, and a bizarre door stands in your way of rescuing him. However, if you find and read his uncle's diary, you'll discover that the uncle went insane over the course of an unknown period of time, hearing noises coming from the basement and then being called to the ocean as it went on. He began to have dreams of the creatures he discovered under the lighthouse, and then of becoming one as he adopted a schedule based on the creatures so he could be closer to them. It's heavily implied that he turned into one, and that it will happen to Jossik as well.
• Sea Salt is a pixel-art action-strategy game where you play as Dagon (who is depicted as being more akin to Cthulhu) and control a variety of monsters to ravage a city after the Archbishop refuses to offer himself as a sacrifice.
• The Secret World. Beneath the Masquerade, the world as we know it is near-constantly on the brink of damnation thanks to the influence of the slumbering Dreamers: eldritch plagues, apocalyptic cults and barely-comprehensible monsters are running rampant across the planet, and the three biggest secret societies in the world can barely put aside their differences long enough to do anything about it. Plus, no matter how hard you fight and how incorruptible you remain, all your efforts scarcely add up to a drop in the ocean: you can kill the mortal servants of the Dreamers, but there's next to nothing you can do against the Dreamers themselves; in fact, the only thing stopping them from awakening and obliterating everything is the presence of the Gaia Engines, a set of unearthly creations built by entities somewhere between Angels and Humanoid Abominations. Only trouble is, these Gaia Engines can be sabotaged, and at last one of the Dreamers has already awoken just long enough to obliterate human civilization. On the upside, the Engines can reset the world to factory settings and give reality a second chance - but only by harnessing the awesome power of the Dreamers... and they might not be able to do this a fourth time. Every single human being in the setting has a death sentence hanging over their heads, and even The Chosen Many may not be enough to delay the inevitable.
• Shadow of the Comet, Prisoner of Ice and the better-known Alone in the Dark, by Infogrames, are all in the same Cthulhu Mythos-haunted world, with several direct Lovecraftian references, including the Necronomicon and De Vermis Mysteriis. AITD 1992 and The New Nightmare veer towards Lovecraft Lite, since Carnby is ultimately able to punch out Cthulhu at the end of both. AITD 2008 plays this trope straight, with Carnby and Sarah fighting a desperate battle against the forces of Lucifer, and a Sadistic Choice ending where The Bad Guy Wins in both options.
• The Shin Megami Tensei franchise, with the added horror that human passions are to blame for the strength, if not outright creation, of the evil forces that constantly plague the various realities.
  • Shin Megami Tensei III: Nocturne destroys the world in the first ten minutes. The only survivors of the Conception are a handful of high school students and doomsday cultists who are inside a hospital at the center of the phenomenon. And in typical Shin Megami Tensei fashion, the remaining humans turn on each other as they fight to create the Reason of Existence of the new world that is being born, transforming themselves into demonoids in the process.
  • Shin Megami Tensei: Strange Journey follows a crew of UN investigators traveling to a expanding hole in reality in Antarctica. Things go south quickly.
  • The Persona 2 duology - and by extension, Persona - features good ol' Nyarlathotep himself as the Big Bad, and Innocent Sin ends with the bad guy winning and the party having to push the Reset Button to get another shot at saving the world. Even worse, even that is not enough to take him down, and he promises that he'll return with a As Long as There Is Evil speech. The human race itself guarantees his existence.
    • Better yet, in the PSP remake of Eternal Punishment (the last of the three games), he throws an army of entities straight out of the Cthulhu Mythos at Tatsuya, and sure enough he and the other characters have an extremely hard time describing these things. Tatsuya's descriptions make no sense, and Ulala just gives up describing them and calls them impossibly ugly.
  • The events of Persona 3 ultimately leads to the The End of the World as We Know It, complete with a doomsday cult and brain-dead people uttering prophetic warnings. This is all due to the subtle influence of the reawakened Nyx, a vast and ancient being being called down to the earth. Her presence causes people to explode into puddles of black ooze and random organs. In all likelihood, she doesn't care in the slightest. Oh and she's mainly summoned by the Anthropomorphic Personification of the malice and despair in the hearts of humanity. Despite your best efforts, the best action taken was a reverse seal; the protagonist makes a Heroic Sacrifice to keep said personification of malice and despair away from Nyx.
• Many Shoot 'Em Up series, such as Gradius and R-Type, involve fighting a seemingly invincible cosmic menace (notably the Bacterians in the former, and the Bydo in the latter) that keeps regenerating, or worse, multiplying into more copies of itself.
• The Shore appears to be one, if the bleak island setting and numerous Lovecraftian abominations you mostly run away from or watch from afar helplessly are any indication. Then main character Andrew finds himself the pawn of one of the Great Old Ones and ends up confronting a number of Lovecraftian horrors in his search for his daughter.
• Survival game The Solus Project is set on an alien planet, on which the player's expedition crash-landed. As the only survivor, the player must survive harsh climate, meteor rains, tornadoes, find food, shelter and ultimately assemble a comm device to contact the mothership. On his quest, he encounters ancient structures with strange carvings, and ventures deeper into the cave systems under the planet's surface. Underground, the player finds ruins of a long-gone civilization that worshiped the visitors from space, they called the Sky Ones. However, according to the carvings, the natives found out that the Sky Ones tricked them into sacrificing their own children to an Eldritch Abomination that still, centuries after, lurks the underground halls.
• Sonic Frontiers. The game turns out to be one, as true villain of the story, The End, is an incomprehensible horror from beyond the stars that destroys planets like it's nothing. Its true form can't even be seen, and all the backstory segments of the Ancients show their entire planet being wiped out by rays of destruction raining down from the heavens, all without even seeing what it is that's killing them all. When The End breaks free from its seal, it assumes the form of a sentient purple moon and nearly destroys Earth with a gigantic laser. It takes the combined might of Super Sonic and Sage piloting the Supreme Titan to try and stop it, but given its immortality, it's likely that won't stick. There's no backstory or any reason for why it does what it does either, only that it is inevitable, and that it can't truly be stopped.
• The freeware horror game South of Real begins with the cosmic horrors just moments away from arriving on Earth, with only the smallest shred of hope of actually stopping them. Unfortunately, the person responsible for that shred of hope is...questionable. To put it charitably.
• The Blood Cult gamemode in Space Station 13 is this for the crew, with Nar-Sie being the local Eldritch Abomination.
• The entire S.T.A.L.K.E.R. series. The Zone is an unfathomable and horrific Eldritch Location worshiped by a crazed brainwashed cult (the Monolith), and it has the power to manipulate time and space in very weird ways. In the ending of Shadow of Chernobyl, you end up destroying the last thing holding the Zone's power in check; the Zone is rapidly expanding and there's no way to stop it.
• The Stanley Parable. Ultimately, your choice is all an illusion, as every potential path Stanley can take has been predetermined for him. Even the Narrator, for all his semblance of control, is just as doomed to this meaningless existence.
• Star Control 2 has elements of this. Your beef is with the Ur-Quan, an entirely mundane alien race, but as you follow the story, it becomes clear there's something much more sinister out there than the Ur-Quan themselves.
  Arilou: No. In a way, ignorance is your armor, your best protection. If I tell you more, you will look where you could never look before and while you are looking you can and will be seen. You do not want to be seen.
  Orz: Orz is not *many bubbles*, Orz is one with many *fingers*. I push my *fingers* through into *heavy space* and you *see* *Orz bubbles* but it is really *fingers*."
  Ur-Quan: We will protect you from the hazards of this hostile universe, from dangers so hideous your simple minds cannot imagine their dark scope.
• Star Control 3 introduce the Eternal Ones as the main antagonists, a threat of this nature who are said to be completely invincible and unbeatable. The player must find a way to appease them rather than defeat them.
• Star Control: Origins, while mostly doing away with the previous games' alien species, being an Alternate Universe of sorts, gives a new spin to several plot elements, including this one: after managing to give a black eye to the Scryve, they are replaced as the main threat by the Xraki, former thralls of the Scryve who, after being exposed to what they call the Gluttonous Eyes became its/their Axe-Crazy cultists, ravaging other civilizations and species to feed it. It also turns out that one of the main reasons you stood a chance at all against the Scryve in the first place is that most of their military might is on the other side of the empire facing an incursion by "the Outsider Phenomenon"; and they're losing, badly. And the Outsider just may be the same type of "thing" as the Gluttonous Eyes, if not one and the same...
• Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic II – The Sith Lords is a surprising example of this in the Star Wars universe. While the previous game was the typical Star Wars interstellar battle between good and evil, The Sith Lords features a dark and bleak story centering around two distinct plotlines: one to save the Jedi from a Planet Eating Life Drinker, and the other to stop a shadow conspiracy to kill the Force itself. It is quite possibly the most Lovecraftian Star Wars story ever told, rivaling Fate of the Jedi.
• For the most part, Stellaris is Lovecraft Lite; after a certain level of technological and industrial development, the player's fleets can put a violent end to many an Eldritch Abomination with proper deployment of tachyon lances and heavy kinetics arrays. But two cannot be so easily dealt with.
  • The less terrible example — as they may leave the player Cursed with Awesome — is the Worm-in-Waiting. Existing outside of time, as a sentient Stable Time Loop, they can potentially utterly alter and reverse-engineer your species. Eventually turning your home system into a black hole surrounded by tomb worlds... as well as giving your species the ability to live comfortably on tomb worlds, and just about anything else. Of course, you can choose to not take the deal... which spawns a creature referred to in-game as a "Dimensional Horror" right in the middle of your home system. But then again, see above re: tachyon lances and heavy kinetics arrays.
  • The more fearsome example is the End of the Cycle, if the player is foolhardy enough to ignore the bright red text saying "DO NOT DO THIS" and bargain with it. It will give you massive, game-breaking benefits for fifty years. Then, at the end of those fifty years, it just snuffs out your entire empire in an instant. Doesn't matter how big, strong or influential you were, your fleets will be destroyed, your pops killed, your planets razed beyond all terraforming. You will be given a single planet named Exile, the one leader who saw this event coming and had been secretly evacuating people, and eight pops. Meanwhile, the souls of the rest of the pops in what used to be your empire are absorbed in an armada of ultra-powerful fleets simply labelled "The End", which will proceed to spread out and destroy every single other empire in the galaxy, while Exile is deliberately saved for last. That is, assuming one of the other star empires doesn't bomb you to smithereens for dropping an ultra-powerful psionic horror on their heads!
  • Simply being a pre-FTL civilisation, depending on the state of the galaxy. It might be full of genocidal aliens, rampaging death machines and devouring hives, and there is not a damn thing they can do to defend themselves against them due to the massive technology discrepancy. Imagine yourself if an impossibly advanced alien species invaded Earth in real life and evicted humanity to force them to find a new home among the stars, or dragged us out of our homes to work in Third Reich-style labour camps, or eradicated our current culture to make us battle thralls or livestock, or simply sent death squads to roam the planet, mercilessly killing any people they can find to make space for their own settlers. By the time Nerve Stapling becomes a thing, you likely won't care anymore.
    • Even a relatively benign alien invasion will likely cause a huge existential crisis and much loss of life due to clashing ideologies, and this is supported by a game mechanic. Materialist Empire versus Spiritualist natives? Your agents prove that the "miracles" the superstitious natives believed in are easily provable as mundane, causing them to either fall into a deep state of depression or, worse, actively persecute religious pops and force them to renounce their beliefs or face imprisonment, banishment or even death. Spiritualist Empire versus Materialist natives? Your agents appear as godlike beings and their society's most brilliant minds just cannot find a way to disprove their "divinity" or prove their miracles are anything but, leading the population to Go Mad from the Revelation, denounce the minds as faithless charlatans and chase them away, giving up on science and reason as it cannot understand the real workings of the universe. Egalitarian Empire versus Authoritarian natives? Fed up of the abject failure of the government to fight the invaders and embittered by past grievances, the locals rise up and begin something akin to the French Revolution, leading to the noble classes being rounded up and executed en masse regardless of their personal guilt. Authoritarian Empire versus Egalitarian natives? Your agents worm their way into the fair and democratic government and tempt their politicans with dreams of power, using propaganda and military might to consolidate their power and do away with rule by the people. Perhaps most tragically of all, though, is Militarist/Xenophobic Empire versus Xenophile/Pacifist natives: Feeling that the natives are a bunch of weaklings who need to toughen up, your agents instigate horrendous wars and atrocities against the peaceful natives, forcing the locals to forgo their once-cherished ideals of coexistence and turn-the-other-cheek as they lose loved ones and become a society that sees paranoia and aggression as virtues, as they begin to accept that the universal struggle of dominance and survival is the natural order of things. That's not even getting into pre-sapient species, who arguably have it even worse — at least sapient primitives have an understanding that evil people with enough power over others can and will abuse it, but pre-sapients are basically just smart animals with no understanding of what their abusers are doing to them. In addition, pre-sapient species can be uplifted, after which, for example, immediately be transformed into powerless slaves-proles or even into livestock.
  • With the Nemesis update, the player can inflict this on the entire galaxy by becoming the Crisis. With the help of Star Eaters, the Crisis Aspirant can fuel the Aetherophasic Engine with dark matter, all for the express purpose of breaking reality itself in order to enter the Shroud and ascend into gods. How bad do they break reality? To the point in which the Shroud itself starts lashing out in fear and agony by spitting out hostile entities that attack anyone they encounter. What happens should the Crisis Aspirant succeeds is up to this point the quintessential example of this trope in Stellaris, even more so than the End of the Cycle: the entire galaxy explodes, turning every single star into black holes and destroying every planet. There's no coming back from this barring outside intervention.
• Sundered has the protagonist trapped in a labyrinthine network of giant caverns filled with malfunctioning robots and shrieking horrors that all want to kill her. Her only ally is a sentient, malevolent crystal that constantly urges her to abandon her humanity and corrupt herself with eldritch powers if she wants to survive. Even death is not an escape from this place, for the crystal will just bring her back to life every time she dies until she succeeds at whatever task the crystal is making her do. And every time she comes back to life, the layout of the caverns changes. All possible endings for the game are bleak: if you resist the crystal’s temptations, you manage to destroy it and the Eldritch Abomination it was part of, but break your arm in the process. If you embrace its horrible powers, you turn into a monster, kill a manifestation of your own discarded humanity, and the crystal uses you to escape from the caverns and bring about the end of the world. If you don’t fully commit to one or the other, you defeat the Eldritch Abomination and escape to the surface world, only for the crystal to reveal that it’s not done with you yet.
• Sunless Sea jumps straight into cosmic horror, dropping most of the zany aspects of its predecessor and bringing you an underground ocean populated with ancient monsters, increasingly otherworldly Eldritch Locations, Alien Geometries, and a constant supply of things not meant to be known. Despite the change in locales, things definitely haven't improved in the sequel, Sunless Skies.
• Tales of Arise showed hints of this with the backstory of the more technologically advanced Renans invading and conquering Dahna. Of course, it becomes way more Cosmic Horror Story when it turns out that The true cause of it all is a Genius Loci of Rena itself... which had enslaved the actual people of Rena, and consumed all life off of the planet, turning it into a Shattered World. When the player finally goes to Rena, what greets them is a silvery ocean that has occasional buiding remnants poking out of it. Rinwell, the party's mage, cannot sense any astral energy - the planet is dead.
• Thumper: Whether the game itself qualifies is open to interpretation; some hints that it might qualify include the bizarre bosses with inexplicable motivations and forms, and the way the game's visuals take Lovecraftian cues, including tentacles on many bosses and even the track itself.
• Transistor involves a group of Well Intentioned Extremists who Dug Too Deep and unleashed the mysterious creatures that run their world, losing control of them, and everyone and everything is consumed in their path. In the end they are technically beaten, but it's too late to save anyone. The protagonist is driven to suicide rather than to recreate and be alone in an empty void.
• The Turok series stepped into this genre's waters with the introduction of the Cthulhu-esque Eldritch Abomination Oblivion in the second installment, and was fully immersed in it by the third.
• Under Night In-Birth. The very world we live in is partly merged with an Eldritch Location of an unknown origin every full moon. The merging of this world and ours is accomplished by a powerful and unknown source of energy, this energy is the basis that allows every living organism to exist. Born from this power are Eldritch Abominations known collectively as The Void that feed on this power by sucking it out of their prey. Those who become victim to these Void attacks will gain access to this power of Existence and this can go one of two ways: Either they gain access to powerful and potentially even godlike abilities, or they go completely insane from this energy and mutate into a Void themselves.
• Undertale: The player is a separate being from the human child that has unimaginable powers and can use them for good or bad. They control what Frisk does and can easily reset any actions they take. Even when Chara pulls an Eviler than Thou they can only do this because of your actions and you can easily go into the game's files and remove that choice. The game can be considered this even if they use their powers for good because all it takes to undo everything is a push of a button.
• Water Womb World is a short horror game by indie developer Yames with themes of cosmic horror mixed with Catholic theology. The protagonist is a researcher scouring the ocean floor for evidence of the Garden of Eden, which they believe to have been created at the bottom of the sea rather than being the earthly paradise presented by the Church. While there, the protagonist discovers millenia-old fish, skulls of the sons of Adam, and coral imbued with human neurons along with a cryptic, squidlike "angel" and colossal red entities that they identify as being the sinless human descendents of Adam and Eve. The protagonist believes everything they find to be evidence of the divine until the end, when they choose to become one of the beings they identified as the original humans, staying in the place of origin at the bottom of the ocean forever.
• World of Horror: It's to be expected when both H. P. Lovecraft and Junji Ito were major inspirations for the game. The whole purpose of the game is to stall the awakening of one of five possible Old Gods, risking madness, death and worse all the while; and for those thinking this may mean the game is Lovecraft Lite, please note the use of the word "stall" rather than "stop". For the most part, the mysteries you investigate are this as well. With the exceptions of Bizarre Bruit of a Budding Botanist and maybe Chilling Chronicle of a Crimson Cape, your actions never completely stop what's going on, only bringing a temporary fix to the problem, or taking care of a single case of it but being unable to tackle the source.
• World of Warcraft is ultimately a somewhat idealistic Cosmic Horror Story. Azeroth is home to four known Old Gods, ancient, evil and extremely powerful beings that ruled Azeroth until they were imprisoned by the Titans. Imprisoned because, after one of their number, Y'shaarj, was destroyed, the result was that a good portion of the planet's surface was destroyed with it - imagine a weed with such deep roots that to pluck it out, you uproot a quarter of your garden. The Titans decided to imprison them instead, but the old gods are The Ageless, and can thus afford to play The Long Game, slowly corrupting their prison wardens and engineering their escape. And then it's revealed that the Old Gods are actually the agents of the Void Lords, malevolent extradimensional beings from beyond the physical universe that are nonetheless incapable of directly interacting with it. The Old Gods encountered in the game are just four of a great number of Old Gods that the Void Lords created, and then flung into reality at random across the universe. Why did they do this? Because they hate existence and they hoped that at least one of their creations would infest a planet with a sleeping Titan soul, so that that Titan will be corrupted into an unstoppable agent of the Void who will destroy the entire universe. Guess what's inside Azeroth? The idealism comes into it in that the Old Gods can be fought and contained, even if they can't be outright neutralized.
• Xenonauts is what happens when the cosmic evil is an alien race. Every single bit of your research into the alien origins makes it clear that the force you're fighting is the equivalent of a medieval baron invading a tribal neighbor to colonize it, on a whim. Humanity, as a species, is barely above "pest" in the aliens' logic, and there's little interest in trying to communicate, because why bother? Even the ultimate solution to the invasion is presented this way: You can't defeat the star-spanning alien empire. If you manage to prevent this invasion, then you'll just prove that humanity is a threat to be subjugated by the much larger, much more formidable and impossibly vast forces of the empire as a whole. And considering humans are barely able to fight back against the equivalent of a scouting force, that would be death. So instead, the plan is to set up an FTL jammer that prevents anyone from coming within 1000 light-years of Earth, and requiring that they use conventional sublight travel, while also killing the leader of the invasion and then booking it as quickly as possible before the absolute legion of super-fast-breeder Reapers is dropped on the planet. Everyone notes that this likely only delays contact with an alien species at best, but it's the only option they have.

Visual Novels

• Demonbane: A Humongous Mecha eroge with Cthulhu Mythos elements, with the main heroine being the Necronomicon manifested as a girl and an avatar of Nyarlathotep is pulling many strings of the plot.
• Doki Doki Literature Club!: A stereotypical Japanese style "dating sim" VN with 3 girls to choose from, with the twist being that the 4th girl becomes self aware of her status of being an NPC extra in a shallow dating sim world, and it drives her completely and utterly insane, with horrific consequences for everyone. Her attempts to "hack" the game, Reality Warper style, to make herself into a playable character cause reality itself to start to break down, driving most of the cast to suicide. In the end, she does a Total Party Kill Mercy Kill on her universe, or in the best-case scenario merely RetGones herself. Fortunately Sayori, the new club president, processes the revelation much better and thanks the player for their help and bidding them farewell.
  • In one side story, available if you're cheeky and have advanced knowledge of the game's system, you can remove the 4th girl from the equation before the game even begins via deleting her from the game's folder. However, this causes another girl to become self aware, and the realization of their reality as being a shallow visual novel drives her even more insane than the original.
• Muv-Luv Unlimited (though that's really more of a harem story in a warfare setting) and Muv-Luv Alternative, where we actually see the alien invaders who are mindlessly destroying humanity, which turns out to be completely incidental to their goal of mining resources, and at the end of the game it's revealed that there are 10^37 planets of BETA in the universe who regard humanity as completely insignificant.
• Saya no Uta. The main heroine is a clearly Lovecraftian entity that drives people (bar the protagonist who goes off the deep end himself anyway) to madness, it is never shown to the reader and its ultimate goal is to convert all of humanity into Lovecraftian entities. On the other hand, it's hardly invulnerable, but even beating it simply leaves the Sole Survivor to Go Mad from the Revelation.

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