Dark Fic in Video Games.
Series with their own pages
- Animal Crossing:
- Yahtzee of Zero Punctuation fame managed
to make Animal Crossing look like Silent Hill. - The Terrible Secret of Animal Crossing makes the above look like Care Bears meets The Smurfs, managing to turn the DS Animal Crossing into the most depressing and psychotic thing imaginable. Mention "the Mouse" anyone who read the LP and watch them shudder.
- Scythemantis' contribution to Animal Crossing darkfic, WHERE AM I, is a combination of Surreal Horror and one man's descent into madness.
- Reset deconstructs the concept of what happens when you reset your town. There are heavy implications the previous protagonist died.
- Destroy Me, Please has the player character as suicidal and destroying their house so they won't leave anything behind. Isabelle saves them though.
- Happy Birthday has the mayor missing for twenty years, which is implied to be the player not playing their game anymore. Isabelle displays Undying Loyalty despite all of this and stays in the town despite everyone leaving and it turning to shambles. She dies at the end.
- Isabelle Wants To Leave is a horror fic involving a glitchy copy of New Leaf.
- In My Name Is Molly, a plague has wiped out humanity. Children are forcibly turned into anthropomorphic animals, brainwashed into forgetting about their past, and shipped off to isolated villages. However, one human boy survives unscathed and tries to turn others back into humans.
- Yahtzee of Zero Punctuation fame managed
- Bully fandom had some of this. It's not even that optimistic a fandom. Some of it's well pulled off - taking things that were punchlines in the game and making them shockingly serious - and some of it... isn't.
- Cave Story is plenty dark to begin with despite first impressions, but The Stranger I Knew makes things even worse, complete with a Downer Ending. If you didn't hate the Doctor before, you will after reading this fic.
- Crash Bandicoot: Outcast Bandicoot is an incredibly dark and gritty take on the Crash Bandicoot series. It focuses on the character of Crunch Bandicoot, who is abducted from his home and forced into slavery by Dr. Neo Cortex.
- While the Danganronpa series is already pretty dark, being a series about teenagers forced to kill each other and all, it balances the grim premise with a wacky cast of characters and goofy humor to keep things from getting too depressing. However, some fics drop the goofiness entirely. One of them,Toying With My Sanity, is a Self-Insert Fic about the heroine slowly losing her mind at the hands of Nagito. With scenes like Nagito raping the heroine off screen and carving his name into her stomach while she had the Despair Disease, the heroine being forced to drink his blood, and the deaths of both Nagito and the heroine with a complete execution for the latter, it’s considered to be very dark even among other Yandere Danganronpa fics.
- Dragon's Lair has inspired a darkfic that can be found here.
- Dead Fantasy combines characters from Final Fantasy, Kingdom Hearts, and Ninja Gaiden and puts them in darker and more violent situations than in their respective canons (especially for the former two).
- The Final Fantasy VII fanfic series, beginning with Eromenos: The Beginning, is pretty awful. It features Cloud getting raped by Sephiroth, and its sequels make Cloud into a sadistic abuser himself.
- Fate Deceived follows after the events in Final Fantasy VIII, although Final Fantasy VIII was meant for an older audience anyway, this Fan Fic takes it to a whole deeper level with the level of maturity in relationships between the teenage protagonists, sexual tension and actions as well as the over the top violence and sequences.
- Fallout: Dust: While vanilla New Vegas wasn't exactly sunshine and rainbows, Dust takes the prominence of some of the game's darker wanderings further, killing off most major characters if they're lucky and giving the rest horrible fates. The Legion has disintegrated into a tide of warring tribes and the NCR has left the shattered remnants of its totalitarian rule across the Mojave in its retreat back West now that various calamities have left Vegas completely decivilized.
- Friday Night Funkin' fan works mostly consist of remix packs, new songs, and fan characters without a plot (at least not one meant to be taken at face value), but those that do aren't afraid to pull punches:
- The web series and Game Mod Friday Night Funkin': Corruption, is an alternate ending to Week 5 based on the severed human head that appears in the vanilla ending. In it, the titular corruption is unleashednote and brainwashes the Boyfriend and Girlfriend while also transforming them into bloodthirsty monsters that take on a distorted silhouette of their original selves. The rest of the story deals with the other characters attempting to Hold the Line against them and failing repeatedly, with particular emphasis given to the conversion of Skid and Pump; Week 2 begins with Pump already corrupted, Skid still singing anyway because he refuses to give up on his best friend despite his obvious fear. However, he ends up succumbing as well, leading to the story's first original song, "Chiller".
- Everywhere at the End of Funk is a tribute to Everywhere at the End of Time, and as such deals with the hellish experiences of early onset dementia. To be more specific, it deals with Boyfriend himself suffering through the mental illness, looking absolutely miserable while everyone he's met from the first six weeks tries to get him to remember.
- The web series and Game Mod Friday Night Funkin': Corruption, is an alternate ending to Week 5 based on the severed human head that appears in the vanilla ending. In it, the titular corruption is unleashednote and brainwashes the Boyfriend and Girlfriend while also transforming them into bloodthirsty monsters that take on a distorted silhouette of their original selves. The rest of the story deals with the other characters attempting to Hold the Line against them and failing repeatedly, with particular emphasis given to the conversion of Skid and Pump; Week 2 begins with Pump already corrupted, Skid still singing anyway because he refuses to give up on his best friend despite his obvious fear. However, he ends up succumbing as well
- Katamari Damacy:
- A parodic example: Death Ball, Katamari Damacy in the style of Sin City.
- Katamari Damacy: The Shocking True Story features heavy amounts of And I Must Scream.
- A parodic example: Death Ball
- The Next Frontier ended up becoming this by the standards of the Kerbal Space Program fandom, especially in the last act. It doesn't go into gorn territory, in fact by the standards of what it's a crossover with it's fairly tame, but it still has a significant amount of on-page violence.
- This is extremely common in Kingdom Hearts fanfic. Like Tales of Symphonia, the canon certainly gives many hooks for dark fics, what with the Nobodies and their quasi-existences, the various Disney villains, and such. And if all else fails, one can exploit The Multiverse to simply send the cast to a particularly dark setting:
- There are numerous "Organization 13 running a brothel" fanfics, which generally focus on "LOL SEX MAKES MY FIC EDGY." One fic, oblivion, is inspired by Toni Morrison's Beloved, beginning with Axel having killed the rest of the Organization and being haunted by Roxas, who is violently unhappy about his state. Most people focus on the unsettling plot and Roxas The Angry Ghost, but the aching dynamic between Axel and Roxas has been commented on by more discerning readers.
- One of the better examples of this genre is All The Roads We Have To Walk, which tosses Sora through a keyhole into a "shadow dimension" of sorts and charges him with finding a way home. Despite being a darkfic, the series maintained much of the tone of the original series simply by taking the darkest moments of the games and using them as a baseline for the overall tone of the series; it isn't dark so much as it is darker, and much closer to the center of the Sliding Scale than the main series. Granted, there are some very dark moments (just to name one, Halloween Town comes with its own Heartless Expy of Pyramid Head) but the situation never feels completely hopeless, and the series comes highly recommended even for people who usually avoid darkfics like the plague.
- There are numerous "Organization 13 running a brothel" fanfics, which generally focus on "LOL SEX MAKES MY FIC EDGY." One fic, oblivion
- The very aptly named Knights of the Old Republic fic called Worst Case Scenario.
- Of Sheep and Battle Chicken, written by Logical Premise, is this to Mass Effect. The civilized Galaxy is not a nice place to live, the Reapers are capable of warping reality, and Sarah Shepard is, well, known as The Butcher.
- Mega Man:
- Rockman: the Robot War: Creative liberties with the characters aside, the result is a deconstruction of the games: Wily starts out trying to prove that removing humans from industry would destroy mankind, aligns with the Human Supremacy League, a robot hate group/terrorist organization, but is ultimately driven insane from his efforts, why the human military doesn't get involved in the fighting, the robot masters are mass produced, and Rock is creative with his weapons, like using Rolling Cutter to decapitate Iceman.
- One can't mention "Mega Man" and "Dark Fic" in a single sentence without thinking of The Protomen first.
- Mega Man X, being a Darker and Edgier Sequel Series, has a lot of potential for dark fics, considering that most of the enemies are driven insane by a virus and that there's a near genocidal war going on. Darkfics usually center on torture/rape by Mavericks, fanatic between humans and reploids (usually where reploids are badly mistreated), and the horrible things that could happen if Zero ever truly went evil.
- Rockman: the Robot War
- The Newgrounds Rumble oneshot Why Is He So Alone? starts with Pico having a nightmare or hallucination about Convict killing Nene, psychologically tormenting Pico afterwards (by Shapeshifting into various other characters, no less!), and then presumably killing Pico himself. The rest of the story isn't much lighter, either, as it's stated in the narration that this alternate take on the game has the characters' friends and families captured, and Nene eventually comes across Pico, who is suffering from Heroic BSoD and blaming himself for the outcome of the events of Pico vs Convict, especially the Downer Ending where he accidentally shot Nene instead of Convict. However, it does end on a heartwarming note, as Nene actually forgives Pico for what happened, but it mostly explores the psychological breakdown of a middle schooler.
- Hands (OMORI) is an Alternate Universe Fic from OMORI where Sunny was molested by his own big sister Mari, who is reimagined as a sexual predator, with her still dying like in canon.
- Chewbot's other Let's Play, the one (link missing) of The Oregon Trail. It turns a gentle educational sim into a hellish-and-funny action thriller.
- In-universe example: Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door, at one point, involves Luigi going off on his own journey through the Waffle Kingdom, which is, if anything, rather comical (as his helpers will tell you). At some point, a book of his travels is published, which surgically removes any comedy his journey may have had and replaces it with overly-dramatic Purple Prose.
- For a dark fic based on the game, see Man of War where Mario surrenders to the Shadow Queen as she brainwashes him into thinking she's Peach. She then uses Mario to wreak havoc, including (or at least, it was heavily implied to be him) having him murder Vivian, Goombella and Koops. The rest of the story is complete Mind Screw, with the reader and Mario being left unsure of what's real and what's not as the the Shadow Queen torments him with nightmares. Thankfully, it does have a happy ending.
- For a dark fic based on the game, see Man of War
- Plants vs Zombies: Garden Warfare has accumulated quite a few of these over time, seeing as its basic premise is the conflict of the original series going military with all the destruction and losses that ensue. The games mask this behind the cartoonish art style, Goldfish Poop Gangs, and Offscreen Villainy, leaving the fanfic scene to try and peel back the veil with a good helping of Grey-and-Grey Morality. Notable examples include a Shared Universe (one starting point here) chock-full of abuse and trauma as each perspective's group of otherwise-True Companions tries to scrape by in the war without going insane or dying.
- For the Professor Layton games:
- Don Paolo's Day Planner, which is a page out of Don Paulo's day planner. Don Paolo has usually been a straightforward Dastardly Whiplash, often played for comedy with a mildly sympathetic backstory. This fic gives the readers a look into his mind, and reveals just how depressed and Ax-Crazy he really is, while undergoing Sanity Slippage. The whole thing is played for Black Comedy.
- Don Paolo's Day Planner
- The Sims, due to how players can essentially create their own stories in the game, has a large roster of Dark Fics. The Sims Wiki's Fanon Portal features a lot. One in particular, "Night of the Living PlumbBob," stands out. It features Sunset Valley being victim to a zombie outbreak, many characters dying, such as Erin Kennedy, Gwen Glover, Agnes Crumplebottom, and CORNELIA AND MORTIMER GOTH (implied), and The Government choosing to destroy Sunset Valley completely.
- Raccoon is a Sly Cooper kill fic (Dimitri brutally tortures and murders Sly), which, to some, has to be read to be believed. The author apologizes in advance to anyone who gets nightmares after reading it.
- Sonic the Hedgehog:
- Prison Island Break makes most darkfic look like a cookbook right from the start, taking the best part of the franchise to prison. We're talking Sonic the Cop Killer here. It's not just the way that the writer seems to find a new way to violate basic human rights in every chapter. It's not even the way that despite the torture, the graphic rape, the murders, the savage bloodshed and the strong drama, they successfully maintain the character's core personalities. It's the way they continue to give their readers the gut-churning feeling that they are being Shown Their Work.
- Being based on Maria Robotnik's past and the ARK massacre, it makes sense for the Echoes of Eternity series to be grim. Yet it adds onto this with its psychological elements, its Bloodier and Gorier approach (for example, Maria being Forced to Watch Shadow execute her adult friend as a child and Robotnik having no issue killing people), and its added dark elements. Then there's the AU oneshot Snow Angel, where Maria escapes to Earth with Shadow but slowly dies from NIDS.
- Frenzy is a Sonamy fanfic where Sonic is framed for the murder of Amy (and not even an aged up Amy) while he's trying to stop the Serial Killer from striking again.
- EternalTails starts with showing Tails as a mentally damaged Child Soldier directly responsible for genocide after the events of Tails Adventure and gets progressively darker from there.
- Megami no Hanabira: Take the characters from the WAFF-y Yuri Visual Novel series Sono Hanabira Ni Kuchizuke Wo (A Kiss for the Petals) and drop a Devil Survivor-style demon outbreak on them and what do you get? A surprisingly upbeat Shin Megami Tensei story, but that's only because that series has a very low bar to clear. It's still leagues of magnitude darker than anything you'd see in SonoHana, with plenty of trauma and despair to go around.
- One of the more well written dark fics in the Soul Series is an as yet completed fic called The Pitfalls of Madness featuring the main character Cassandra slowly going insane.
- Space Channel 5 has some pretty dark fics despite being a happy series. Space Channel Sacrfice, which crosses the series with Alice Human Sacrifice, and Light Character Study: Purge, which gives a new look on Purge, one that people may miss.
- Splatoon:
- Rather than shrugging off her trauma as she does in Splatoon 2, the fanfic Her Fractured Spirit has Callie begin to suffer from Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. Though the fic isn't that dark, it deals with more serious topics than the Splatoon games themselves and features some profanity.
- Splatoon: We Become Monsters is a somewhat downplayed example. It starts with Callie getting mauled by a wolf and transforming into a werewolf herself, alongside Marie transforming into a vampire, but the middle chapters are relatively tame. Still, it does still introduce mauling, lycanthropy, vampirism, zombieism, ghosts, ritualistic cults, a bucketload of Body Horror and gore, and an outright apocalypse brought on from connection to forces beyond understanding to the world of Splatoon. And even that gets outdone by the author's next main work...
- Splatoon: Crimson Gaze. For comparison, this story starts with Callie dying, rather graphically, by having her head blown off by an overcharged Hero Charger shot. It's a Death Fic as well, so there's some rather gruesome repercussions that spiral into a story about depression, racism, insanity, alcoholism, abuse of minors, and some rather detailed and nasty deaths.
- The normally comedic Space Quest has at least a couple. The Middle of the Night deals with Roger not quite being the idiot he appear to be. Burn, Xenon, Burn follows Roger's son from the future, the horrific implications of Space Quest IV: Roger Wilco and the Time Rippers, and portraying an extremely unflattering depiction of Xenonian society.
- Story of Seasons:
- Her Scarlet Letter is an Animal Parade fic where the protagonist's neighbors turn against her after she ends up pregnant out of wedlock with an unknown married man.
- Frostbitten Flower is an A Wonderful Life AU where Celia's husband Jack is killed a few months into her marriage. She's left a grieving, pregnant widow at eighteen.
- Super Smash Bros. is a generally light-hearted series with characters from all across gaming history fight in a casual platform fighter and is rather light on lore. One of the darkest, if not, the darkest, fanfics based on this is Super Smash Bros.: Guardians Arise!. To wit, Tabuu is a victorious Evil Overlord who enforces sadistic slavery, endorses minions who commit genocide without whim, and is even implied to have sexually assaulted people. The Smash Bros. roster spend nearly a century wallowing in their angst, and their Guardians aren't better either, sometimes being very, very antiheroic and jerkish. While it does have lighthearted moments, they stand out a lot due to how unfitting these moments are.
- Tales of Symphonia is very far toward the idealistic side of the sliding scale, full of bright colors and empowering morals. But since almost none of the characters have any living family, the Exspheres that give the protagonists extra power are not only made from human souls, but those souls are implied in some cases to be still conscious, and you have the option of killing the Handsome Lech, the canon seems practically designed to inspire Dark Fic.
- Team Fortress 2 fans just seem to refuse to give the characters (especially the Pyro) happy backstories.
- With Apologies to Harlan Ellison, which is a horrifying homage to I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream with a twist, with several sequel fics written by different authors.
- Why The Rainbows Make Me Cry has its fair share of tragic character backgrounds. This time around, the focal character turns out to be the Scout, explaining why he tends to get upset over a certain line of Spy's dialogue... and dear God, the explanation is just heartrending. Sometimes, it just doesn't pay to be a Karma Houdini.
- Touhou Project games are based on Excuse Plots of some Youkai being dumb or just plain bored and end with tea or some similar meeting of all the main characters, heroines and "villainesses" alike, but for every W.A.F.F. or Slice of Life fanfiction there's a darkfic to counter it. The mountains of Fridge Horror and being a definite Crapsaccharine World don't exactly help, with humans almost completely at the mercy of the incredibly powerful youkai that can (and have) put the entirety of Gensokyo at risk on a whim, and despite their appearance, a lot of characters are derived from and/or have the potential to be some truly horrifying creatures.
- Almost every Western fan will know what you're talking about if you mention A Bad End. It starts with an Ax-Crazy Kaguya declaring war on Gensokyo, and escalates from there. It runs on Rule of Funny - no one cares about anyone dying and it runs on Black Comedy.
- Touhou Ibunshu is an Alternate Universe Fic that takes a far more "realistic" view of the aforementioned powerful creatures and the incidents they cause, explored in detail to milk the threat they represent for all it's worth, with things such as an insane powerhouse, a scheming quasi-god, and a deranged immortal portrayed as terrifyingly as they could possibly be.
- Imperfect Metamorphosis is a Deconstruction Fic not only of the games itself, but of popular Alternative Character Interpretations and Fandom Specific Plots in the fandom, and boy does it show. The first chapter ends with a character getting eaten alive, two different Eldritch Abominations start having their fun, there's brutal violence, Mind Rape, horrifying experiments, and the main characters are too busy with their politics and centuries-old grudges to do anything about it. Even the ancillary Worldbuilding shows that Gensokyo is a nasty place for the unprepared and unwary.
- And then Diamond in the Rough (Touhou) manages to challenge both fics above by simply having the least amount of modifications to the source material, showing how dark things can get to outsiders, deconstructing the entirety of the Self-Insert Fic tropes.
- Reimu Surrenders And Is Destroyed is considered one of the most repulsive Hentai Doujinshis to be released about the series (once again links will not and should not be provided) which involves a Brought Down to Normal Reimu encountering a lowlife in an alleyway. Once again, it's a Hentai. Do the math. Graphic for its eleven-page length (a safe way to put it), to the point that several hentai sites don't even allow it.
- A Scarlet-Stained Memoir is a finished CYOA that takes a darker view of the Touhou universe, particularly the Scarlet Devil Mansion and its residents.
- We have the Gensokyo 20XX series, in which most of its main portion is Alternate Universe Fics and Death Fics, which is kicked off by Gensokyo's destruction and things have only gone downhill since then, with insanity, persecution, suicide attempts, and various other things. By Gensokyo 20XXV, it lightens up.
- Perhaps one of the most famous examples of Touhou Dark Fics is Koishi Komeiji's Heart-Throbbing Adventure, a story that features, gory deaths, characters acting far more unhinged than usual in canon, and youkai genocide at the hands of the Lunarians.
- Almost every Western fan will know what you're talking about if you mention A Bad End
- When Angels Deserve to Die, an extraordinarily violent Trials of Mana where the (surviving) characters get routinely killed, tortured, mentally broken or worse.
- Undertale attracts a lot of these by nature of being a Deconstruction of RPGs and nature of certain runs. Probably the most famous of these is Flowey is Not a Good Life Coach, which explores the possibility of Flowey seeing just how far he can push Papyrus before he breaks.
- Queen of Sorrow and Curse of the Triforce by the same author do this for Fire Emblem and The Legend of Zelda, respectively, mostly by applying the the realistic dangers and side-effects of a real war to the setting.
