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T
- Tales of Monkey Island. For starters, the sex jokes and Double Entendres are more frequent and overt. The comedic, silly deaths from previous games are mostly replaced by gruesome, occasionally-tragic deaths. LeChuck tones down his Large Ham persona. There's almost no fourth wall breaks. Oh, and Guybrush DIES...he gets better later on, but still.
- Team Fortress 2 parodies this somewhat; in contrast with the increasing violence and realism seen in many current online FPSes, all the characters look like they're from a Pixar movie. It's gory, yes, but a game where the standard infantry character was rejected from the army during WWII and got on a plane to Poland, going on a Nazi killing spree (in 1949) and awarding himself medals that he made for himself can't be anything but outlandish and silly.
- The Tekken games have both been an example and subversion of this trope. While the games have become more story based and darker (What with Jin's angst regarding his bloodline and all) they've at the same time introduced increasingly ridiculous elements like kickboxing kangaroos, endings where people are launched into space or blown up with bow ties, and training dummies that communicate through nonsensical clicking noises.
- Test Drive Overdrive: Brotherhood of Speed is the darkest installment in the entire Test Drive series, with dark tones and Heavy Metal music as well as a pre-defined story that pushes it further. Also, some opponents are jealous of the protagonist's winnings. One notable darkest moment is Donald Clarke becoming a hostility in the end after much bad publicity, and tells someone to steal the car he lost to the player.
- The unreleased PlayStation game Thrill Kill is the Darker and Edgier form of Mortal Kombat. Yes, that is possible. The game was never released because it got an AO (Adults Only) rating for being too gory and sexual (AO-rated games are not allowed on consoles), and because Virgin Interactive was bought up by EA Games, who refused to release something like this.
- Tomb Raider went this direction.
- The first game had Lara Croft simply hunting for artifacts and getting into shootouts for self-defence. As the games progressed the character became darker and more violent, with the player being unable to avoid killing in order to proceed with a level in some cases. One game's cutscene has Lara cold-bloodedly allowing a man to fall to his death, while a mission in Tomb Raider: Anniversary chronicles Lara's first killing of another human being. (See Literature for how Lara got even more darker and edgier.)
- The reboot of the series takes it a step further. It follows Lara on her first archeological expedition, just after college. She ends up stranded on an island occupied by crazy, homicidal cultists and must learn to survive and kill, or die. Features copious amounts of physical and psychological trauma.
- Tenchu isn't exactly a family friendly game but its prequel, Birth of the Stealth Assassins, elaborated on Rikimaru and Ayame's tragic back story.
- In the Touhou Project game series:
- During Subterranean Animism, the playable characters have to go to the Former Hell of Blazing Fires, a Fantastic Ghetto inhabited by youkai that not even other youkai wanted anything to do with, in order to stop a Hellraven who had eaten the corpse of a dead sun god from using her newly-aquired nuclear powers to turn the surface world into a blasted hellscape.
- The plot of Legacy of Lunatic Kingdom revolves around the protagonists attempting to prevent the Lunarians from purifying Gensokyo in order to relocate there after they were driven away from the Moon by Junko, a resentful divine spirit, and Hecatia, the Goddess of Hell. The two of them, on their part, sought to commit genocide upon the Lunarians just to get back at one of them, Chang'e, because Chang'e's husband, Hou'yi, who Junko has already murdered, killed both Hecatia's brother and Junko's son.
- Among the official written works, Forbidden Scrollery is by far the darkest one in general tone (with only the below-mentioned ZUN's Music Collection topping it), partly due to being primarily told from the perspective of Kosuzu Motoori, a human villager and a bookworm who has recently developed an ability to read any language and has no combat abilities whatsoever. It also deals with the darker sides of living in a Fantastic Nature Reserve as well as the darker parts of Reimu's job. Humans are Bastards and the Real Monsters along with Secret War of sorts between human and youkai are recurring elements of the story, as humans treats any youkai as dangerous and alien, which is a stark contrast to Wild and Horned Hermit, which emphasizes the ways humans and youkai are equal and how they can coexist. By the end of the manga, Kosuzu realized that humans and youkai are closer than she thought, and much to her rejoicing, Reimu and the others accepted and welcomed her as a part of Gensokyo society.
- Also, among the official side materials, Touhou – ZUN's Music Collection is not only darker, but also more cynical and bleaker than the core series, to the point of being the darkest story of the series as it deals with loss, fate and insanity. Some stage themes and character themes in these albums have a much moodier and grim tone. This is especially true of Dolls in Pseudo Paradise with an "Everybody Dies" Ending, complete with gruesome deaths and further examination of what happens to those who get spirited away to Gensokyo.
- In terms of fangames, Koumajou Densetsu fulfills this trope among the fangames by putting the characters from Embodiment of the Scarlet Devil and Perfect Cherry Blossom into a Castlevania-inspired universe. Another darker fangame is Concealed the Conclusion which serves as a What If? scenario: what could happen to Gensokyo if something wrong happened to the current shrine maiden of Hakurei, which is crucial to Gensokyo's existence.
- While Transformers has had darker and lighter reboots multiple times, Transformers: War for Cybertron seems to be one of the darkest takes yet. For once it focuses on the fighting on Cybertron and how absolutely brutal it was, and we see cities getting torn apart, a nightmarish Decepticon war prison, and it's not just the Decepticons who have large numbers of unnamed expendable soldiers.
- Transistor is much darker than its spiritual predecessor Bastion. Bastion takes place After the End, but Transistor takes place while the end of the world is occurring. Bastion has a rather light and colorful artstyle while Transistor has a much darker style and color palette. Bastion's OST is filled with generally up tempo songs that are a fusion of western and Asian styles of music while Transistor's OST is mostly dark synth. And biggest of all, in Bastion all the main characters can survive and can set off to find a new place to live within the world, while in Transistor no matter what you do, EVERYONE dies including the main character who kills herself to be with her lover inside the Transistor.
- Done well for the nightmarish Twisted Metal: Black. To put this in perspective, Twisted Metal began as a series about a burn victim inheriting genie like powers, and putting on a no holds barred kill or be killed destruction derby in densely populated areas between maniacs with heavily armed vehicles. They went darker from there. In Black's case, it's justified as it all takes place in Needles Kane/Sweet Tooth's twisted mind.
U
- The idealistic Ultima IV: Quest of the Avatar was followed up with Ultima V, which involved resisting an oppressive tyrant using twisted versions of the very virtues the previous game was founded on to keep power. THAT was followed up by Ultima VI: The False Prophet, which STARTS OUT with the hero narrowly avoiding being sacrificed as part of a terrible interspecies war.
- And that trilogy was the Age of Enlightenment. Let's not get started on the Age of Armageddon. Ultima VIII, for the first time in the series, requires the Avatar to commit evil acts.
W
- Telltale's The Walking Dead:
- Season 1 gets darker from chapter to chapter. Chapters 1 and 2 start out as no better or worse than a lot of Zombie Apocalypse stories, but from that point on, the darkness just goes up and up. Example: Chapter 1 has only two on-screen major character deaths, both at the hands of zombies. Chapter 3 has one major character being murdered in cold blood after a heated argument, one character committing suicide, and the on-screen death of a child. By the end of Chapter 5, nearly every character in the group has either left or been killed off, including Lee himself. The tone of the characters shifts dramatically too: Lee gets bitten and turns into an angry and determined dead-man-walking who doesn't care if he lives or dies, Kenny descends into alcoholism and depression and seemingly gets eaten just as he finds hope, pregnant Christa is seen downing a bottle of liquor in an implied attempt to kill her own baby, and Clementine ends up wandering lost and alone, grieving the loss of both her parents and Lee.
- The fact that Season 2 managed to completely overshadow its predecessor in terms of bleakness is nothing short of impressive. While Season 1 was dark and had it's bleak moments, it at least managed to overall keep a tone of hope as well as a group that, despite plenty of infighting, was more or less was able to function. Season 2 in its entirety begins with Omid dying for really no reason beyond telling the audience "Yep it's going to be THAT kind of story" and Clem needing to kill a dog after briefly bonding with it, and then almost entirely boils down to a disorganized dysfunctional group of jerks bickering and even killing one another for petty reasons while characters die almost constantly.
- Wario Land 4 is considerably Darker and Edgier (although also considerably Denser and Wackier) than the previous games in its series; the game's soundtrack contains some very-genuinely dark and disturbing songs (along with several extremely badass ones), the setting that the game takes place in feels (and often is) surprisingly unsettling and haunted, many of the game's bosses (Spoiled Rotten, Cuckoo Condor, Catbat, Golden Diva, and arguably even Cractus) are grotesquely deformed and astonishingly creepy (not to mention the fact that nearly all of the game's bosses are ghosts), Wario is able to actually die (outside of the game's final boss fight), levels such as Crescent Moon Village and The Toxic Landfill are featured in the game, and the game's level-escaping sequences (on Super Hard Mode, at least) involve Wario desperately struggling to outrun the quite-literal ends of the worlds that he visits in the game's levels.
- Wild ARMs 3 is the darkest entry in the Wild ARMs series due to having the most sinister villains, and Filgaia (normally A World Half Full) being a flatout Death World.
- WipEout started out with a subtly alien setting and enthusiastic optimism after the discovery of anti-gravity technology. The sequel Wipeout 2097/XL was set in an environment that resembled Blade Runner and you could actually kill other pilots now. Then the N64 semi-port had a track set on an active volcano because the audience was getting bored and a pilot was quoted as saying "We race, we die. There is no beauty anymore". Then Fusion featured widespread corruption, sabotage and murder; the only team still dedicated to the "beauty of the sport" was publicly mocked by their competitors. This lasted until the Pure reboot, which restored the old clean and high tech futuristic setting and the series stuck with it ever afterwards.
- Wolfenstein: The New Order is far, far darker than previous Wolfenstein games. In the events of The New Order, the Nazis' experiments with super-advanced technology have come to fruition and not only has World War II dragged on for another three years but the Allies are so horribly outmatched that the war in Europe is all but lost and only a desperate assault on Deathshead's compound can turn things around. This attack fails and a few days later the Nazis drop a nuke on New York, forcing an Allied surrender. Several years on, the free world is a distant memory and the victorious Third Reich has almost complete control, with only a scant La Résistance desperately fighting a losing battle against the fascist maniacs. In the previous games, and indeed many World War II-set games, the exact nature of the Nazis' brutally racist and reactionary worldview was glossed over, but here, they're fully on display to horrific effect.
- World of Warcraft seems to go this way in many of the expansions.
- In Vanilla, there was less focus on evil villains as opposed to the player factions.
- In Burning Crusade, there were some rather frightening demonic areas.
- In Wrath of the Lich King, there was some more creepy undead areas. The player even has the option of becoming a death knight. They start out working for the villainous Lich King. The quests force the player to some things more disturbing than normal, like torture soldiers with pointy metal spikes with red hot tips. The more personal story of Arthas and the Lich King were brought to the forefront.
- In Cataclysm, the villainous Deathwing the Destroyer makes all Azeroth more Darker and Edgier. His Cataclysm was able to ruin signature Vanilla questing areas like Auberdine in Darkshore, causing a giant volcano to sprout in Ashenvale, splitting the Barrens through the middle, and making a line of destruction across the Badlands called Scar of the Worldbreaker. And that isn't even considering how the war between the Alliance and Horde is escalating and how the factions hate each other so much they fight each other even in the face of the world being broken.
- Legion is easily the darkest entry of World of Warcraft ever. Gul'dan survived the events of Warlords of Draenor and traveled to Azeroth orchestrate the third invasion of the Legion. Not only that, but the leaders of the Alliance and Horde are killed during the invasion, leaving both it total disarray. Just to make things even worse, the Emerald Dream and the Green Dragonflight are corrupted by Xavius, and Ysera is killed trying to save it. Suramar takes this up to eleven — the supremacist elvish city is being ruled by demons and demon-sympathizing Nightfallen (which are explicitly shown kidnapping and corrupting Nightfallen children) and a near-Withered resistance group of exiles is the only thing that can save them. One of the scenarios even features Velen accidentally killing his own son Rakeesh — who turned into a demonic general long ago. "Kingdoms Will Burn" indeed.
X
- Xenoblade Chronicles 3 is notably darker than previous entries leaning quite heavily into War Is Hell, filled with Child Soldiers stuck in an endless loop of fighting and being reborn with an antagonist who is revealed to be an emotionless Eldritch Abomination. Also ending on a somewhat Bittersweet Ending, at least more than previous games. Though still has its moments of levity.
- In the 90's, the space sim genre dominated by X-Wing and Wing Commander wasn't exactly sunshine and rainbows to begin with. But then FreeSpace appeared with a much more serious tone, but it also got far surpassed by FreeSpace 2, which was even darker and edgier and comparable in mood to Halo: Reach, if anything.
- X3: Albion Prelude compared to X3: Terran Conflict. The previous game's eponymous Space Cold War goes hot when one of the characters from X3: Reunion suicide-bombs Earth's Torus Aeternal (a massive space station ringing Earth), killing millions of Terran civilians instantly (never mind the surfacer deaths from deorbiting debris). The Terrans deploy their fleet in a Roaring Rampage of Revenge against the Argon, who retaliate with artificially intelligent warships reverse-engineered from the Xenon. Add to it a Broken Aesop. The player is apparently supposed to think the Argon are the good guys and the Terrans are the bad guys, even though the Argon committed the 30th century equivalent of 9/11 and are now trying to wipe the Terrans out, while the Terrans are acting in self-defense.
Z
- Zork Nemesis was a black sheep in the series, largely eschewing the light-hearted, satirical nature of the rest of the series for a dark, grim story set in an abandoned and ruined temple, where the only characters to interact with are four self-aware corpses and the Eldritch Abomination who killed them, and that's just the first area.
