Too Bleak Stopped Caring / Video Games

#-G

• Top-down shooter 12 Is Better Than 6 is a game set in a very dark and gritty Wild West where nearly every character is a sleazy criminal, a corrupt sheriff, a manipulative cult leader or just a good old-fashioned unlikable racist asshole. Even the main character — a Mexican outlaw — is violent and abrasive, with the majority of the bad things happening to him being his own fault, and while his racism against "gringos" could conceivably be understood by being surrounded by people who are just as racist towards him, he also makes racist remarks against Native Americans, and ultimately shows no remorse for any of his actions. The end of the game has everyone die, with the protagonist triggering a landslide that kills the various factions that he angered into hunting him down, but he himself is killed by the same landslide, with the implication that the people he was working with are killed as well, and it's hard to really care about any of this.
• This is one reason why the 2009 installment of Bionic Commando is so divisive. Nathan Spencer is difficult to root for due to taking several levels in jerkass, and the plot revolves around a conflict between an awful Police State and an equally awful terrorist group. The Reveal that Spencer's wife was killed and used to make his bionic arm seals the deal.
• Call of Duty: Ghosts has virtually no likeable characters. Logan is a blank slate who follows his father and brother with Blind Obedience, Elias sends his children out into warzones without the slightest hint of concern for their safety and put them through Training from Hell at a very early age, Hesh is a Flat Character with terrible voice acting, Merrick is a murderous Blood Knight who executes unarmed workers, Keegan's sole burst of characterisation is his execution of an unarmed soldier begging for his life, Ajax is the Token Minority who dies moments after we first meet him and is completely forgotten ten seconds afterwards, and Kick is a Mauve Shirt with no personality whatsoever who doesn't even need to die to be forgotten. Rooting for the Empire is also off the table, as the villains are all genocidal racists who want to murder all Americans for reasons never elaborated on, and of the four important ones, two show up for only one level before dying, and another is the leader of the villains, who never appears in person or is even given a name. The only one of them with any development is Rorke, who not only has a crappy motivation (he had been a member of the Ghosts, but one of the others had to drop him from scaffolding that would have given out under their weight and killed them all if he didn't, so he wants to kill all of them for it), but is also an Invincible Villain with Plot Armor so thick that even when you kill him in the finale by shooting him directly in the heart with his own Hand Cannon and leaving him to drown in a train that crashed into the water, he ultimately wins by coming back from the dead with no explanation five minutes later. All of the one-off playable characters are just as silent and undefined as Logan, leaving perhaps only Kyra Mosely and Lieutenant Collins as even approaching likeable — and the former is killed off after five minutes. At the very least, there's always Riley.
• Children of Zodiarcs is a game about adolescent serial killers raised as cannon fodder by a bastard terrorist trying to start a bloody revolution in a walled-off dystopian city that has seen far better days. Your enemies include corrupt nobles, overaggressive guards, bandits, cannibals, cannibal priests, rival gangs, and your own party members. At this point you're better off skipping every cutscene you come across no matter how cute and lovable the protagonists pretend to be.
• There's a reason a lot of people ignore the lore for Dead by Daylight. It's effectively a groundhog loop of people who are forced to undergo trials of escaping a blood thirsty killer repeatedly, and it happens until the person loses any hope of escape and can no longer feed a mysterious entity. Most of the survivors are genuinely decent people, and some of the killers are only doing it because they're forced into it. The only people that are genuinely happy with the situation are ruthless monsters that garner no sympathy from anyone.
• The trailer for Dead Island has a little girl thrown out of a hotel window by her father after she becomes a zombie and bites him when her parents are fighting a losing battle against zombies. The trailer for the quasi expansion/sequel Dead Island: Riptide has a loving couple blow themselves up just as zombies are about to tear them apart. The Virus stems from the very real kuru disease that stems from cannibalism, which can lead to a zombified state, making it if not a true Real Life threat then more plausible than other portrayals of a Zombie Apocalypse. Creepy voodoo type imagery is strewn through the games. Death, despair and suicide are very much a focal point of the games, there are not really any type of Hope Spot. Most of the characters are fairly unlikeable. The proposed Big Bad is simply tragic and set up. The games themselves are good, enjoyable, if flawed, but they are dark dark dark and can be too depressing for some gamers.
• Dead Space: Even if the player succeeds in any of the games the endings seem bleak, as somehow more markers keep popping up in each game. Very few of the characters in the game are helpful, and most are either driven insane, or are Stupid Evil. DS3: Awakened hammers the final nail in hope's coffin with the awakening of the Brother Moons.
• Dead to Rights:
  • The games can sometimes fall into this. The series takes place in an all-around Wretched Hive where every single person is either a criminal or being victimized by those criminals and every single authority figure is either corrupt or killed off by those who are. Jack Slate, although the story claims he is a good cop only trying to solve his father's murder, generally solves all of his problems by killing the people causing them and usually doesn't come off all that much better than the criminals he's fighting against. Every single one of Jack's allies is only in it for themselves and either ends up betraying him at some point or dead. The only characters in the first game who aren't even hinted at being either corrupt or a jerk in some way are Jack's father, whose murder kicks off the entire plot, and the preacher Jack meets in prison, who only appears very briefly. At the end of the game, the chief of police and both mayoral candidates are dead and Jack decides there's nothing he can do to fix Grant City and decides to just walk away and let it rot. About the only thing that keeps the games from being soul-crushingly bleak is the Narm Charm surrounding the ridiculous and over-the-top action and Jack's dorky one-liners.
  • In Dead to Rights: Retribution, a Darker and Edgier reboot, Jack's father gets some scenes before his death and he, much like Jack, generally opts to kill criminals instead of even attempting to arrest them (despite the game's claims that they're both good cops). Jack himself is less into the dorky one-liners that made him even a little endearing in the first game and now just screams and curses at everyone. Even Jack's dog generally acts more like a bloodthirsty beast than a police dog this time around. About the only thing that prevents this game from being as bleak as the first game, despite taking itself much more seriously, is the fact that Jack's goals are more obviously heroic and the story doesn't get far enough into the politics of Grant City to show whether it's quite as corrupt as in the first game.
• Deponia is an adventure game that takes place in a fictional world Deponia, a planet covered by landfills, and the flying city of Elysium is seen as the humanity's only hope. The main conflict throughout the series (in the original trilogy, at least) is the clash between the Deponians and the Elysians, as they have different ideas about how to make the best out of the crapsack world they live in. However, critics take issue with the fact that Deponia engages in the Black Comedy that undermines its setting and the characters, making the whole story pointless to them. Most Deponians are either apathetic or incompetent to solve anything about their situation, and if there's some progress made by them, it's quickly undone in the next installment. The Elysians are equally full of dim-witted, unlikeable folks, and those plotting against the Deponians show little characterization to consider them as Well-Intentioned Extremist. Central to the controversy are the series' protagonist Rufus, commonly considered a Designated Hero who gets more free passes by the story than he deserves. Even as a black comedy, these issues made the players eventually stop caring about what happens in the game.
• Many players and critics felt this way about Deus Ex: Invisible War as well, considering two of the options are largely the same as in the first game, and one of the two remainders goes along the same lines. All the factions have questionable goals and are willing to kick a few dogs to achieve them. It's telling that you're given the option to kill everyone and let God sort them out. Which backfires horrifically.
• On one side of the central conflict in Dragon Age II, we have Knight Templars led by an iron-fisted extremist. On the other, we find blood mages and demon consorters. A lot of players have ultimately found it difficult to find much reason to support either. Combine that with the bleak fates of several characters: Hawke loses one family member after another and there is no way to prevent it; no matter what you do, Anders blows up the Chantry and everything goes to hell; and any potential Reasonable Authority Figures are either killed off, annoyingly passive or turn out to be batshit insane hypocrites. This is part of the game's Central Theme—sometimes both choices you have in front of you really suck that much, and trying to Take a Third Option isn't always possible.
• Drakengard:
  • Between the incredibly bleak world and characters who have few, if any redeeming characteristics, it's practically impossible to find hope or optimism in the original Drakengard. This was actually intended by Word of God to try and make it stand out against all the other RPGs that were out at the time, and one of the reasons Yoko Taro has his fans.
  • Similarly, the sequel, NieR, which has the strangest ending of Drakengard cause an apocalypse, and all four endings of which involve the extinction of humanity. Good thing there's Drakengard 3 to partially undo the downers.
  • The sidequests of NieR: Automata can fall into this. 90% of the quest-givers either die (as a result of the sidequest or just as a consequence of the main plot), get driven mad, or turn out to be awful people you shouldn't have helped, and the ones that don't go that way are usually deeply bittersweet at best.
• Dying Light 2: A common complaint about the game's story is that there's virtually no one worth rooting for. Aiden is a jackass who openly admits to seeing everyone else as either obstacles or tools to use to achieve his goal, Hakon is a traitor, Lawan is a violent, bloodthirsty sociopath, Frank is a naive moron, the Survivors are a bunch of murderous, selfish thugs and bullies, the Peacekeepers are borderline fascist, and the Renegades (with the possible exception of the Colonel himself) are basically bandits in all but name.
• Elemental Gearbolt is one of the darkest and bleakest Light Gun Games you'll ever play. The protagonists are dead to begin with, only being revived as living corpses to destroy the kingdom they once considered their home. By the end of the story, Bel Cain himself is dead, along with the rest of his kingdom, and Tagami, having planned the whole incident, is unable to leave World 4 in the aftermath. To top it all off, you already know what happens at the end due to the entire game being a flashback. Needless to say, this game is not for the faint of heart.
• The lore of EVE Online can be summed up with: "Everything sucks. And then you showed up." The writers have to actually to tell the readers when the ending is not a bad ending. Gameplay-wise? A perpetual Hopeless War for territory between pilots who can never die eventually becomes hard to tell apart from a Perpetually Static galaxy.
• The Fallout 3 DLC The Pitt. You can either join forces with Ashur and leave the slaves to suffer in this irradiated hellhole with a glimmer of hope that the cure for the disease that gradually reduces people to Trogs will be found, or steal a key to said cure from Ashur and leave the slaves to try to develop it. However, it is implied that Wernher, who leads the slaves, won't improve their situation by much, they miss skilled scientists such as Ashur's wife to have a hope of finding the cure, and most importantly, said key to the cure is their baby, so you have to kidnap a baby from his loving parents. No wonder people have trouble completing this DLC.
• The entirety of Farpoint. For the first half, we follow the two main characters, astronauts Dr. Eva Tyson and her colleague, Dr. Grant Moon being stranded on a hostile alien world after they're dragged into a wormhole, until two-thirds through where Grant reveals that earth is 3 billion years away, too far for any rescue efforts, and their previous attempts at sending a distress signal is a "Shaggy Dog" Story. After a lengthy Despair Event Horizon moment, Eva resigns to her fate that they will never return to earth; we then get a Time Skip cutscene where Grant and Eva has decided to settle down on the hostile planet as farmers, and raise their daughter, only for a sudden solar storm to kill them both with their child orphaned. The remainder is played from the POV of the deceased main characters' orphaned daughter. Seriously?
• While the story isn't the main draw of the game, For Honor is still pretty bleak. To keep it short, the goal of the Big Bad is to instigate a Forever War; she manages to manipulate the three factions into implementing her plan; the last level ends with the truce between the Samurai and Knights broken; the last scene of the game has the three leaders agree to try to bring peace, while fully knowing they might not just fail, but die in the attempt; and considering Word of God states that the multiplayer happens after the single-player, the senseless Forever War is truly here to stay.
• Much like the original books and television series, Game of Thrones (Telltale) is plagued with nothing but hopelessness and depression. All of your main characters will suffer in their war with an overpowered kingdom while witnessing every friend and ally you make getting slaughtered before your very eyes. But the real kicker is the finale, where you lose in the end despite all of the choices you've made throughout the game. The twist is that there was never any hope for you to win in the first place. Instead, it just wanted to tell you the story of why these characters never made it into the main story. The only thing that makes it less depressing is that you can choose which characters can survive your crushing defeat, and whether they die or live with honor and dignity. A second season was planned, but its fate remains up in the air with the bankruptcy and subsequent restructuring of Telltale Games.
• Every faction in Geneforge, with the possible exception of the Barzites, has some supporters who'll argue in favor of it on the Internet. Every faction also has some haters who argue that the misdeeds it commits render it unworthy of power. The only one that doesn't cross the Moral Event Horizon at least once is the faction of Wide Eyed Idealists who canonically get massacred by the fourth game.

H-L

• Half-Quake^note alternatively HalfQuake or Halfquake:
  • The Half-Life mod trilogy can be very difficult to sit through due to its bleak message of "Life makes no sense, everyone hates your guts and it's all your fault, you may as well just kill yourself" it tells you from the get-go, aggressively supported by an extremely limited monochromatic palette and by its similarly downbeat soundtrack. However, each of the three mods themselves carry varying degrees of darkness that can be difficult to sit though just by themselves:
    • The first mod, Half-Quake, stands as the least dark part of the trilogy, but that really isn't saying much considering that you won't see much of anything that isn't either an enemy, concrete and/or steel, or lava. It also happens to be the only part of the trilogy that gives you a HUD, as well as the classic run/gun action of Half-Life. The theme of not being able to escape the facility is made clear in a section where you sneak through the backrooms and into a house, only to be dumped right back into the trap-laden path unceremoniously with a message aptly saying "You cannot escape, fool." You also end up getting killed right after you defeat the boss of the mod, Somos, setting the bar for the ending of the next two parts.
    • The second part, Half-Quake: Amen, marks the series's swan-dive right into darkness. Most of the time spent throughout Amen will be either though the recurring life or death chambers, mostly barren atmospheric environments, and/or the deadly traps/puzzles the first game uses. Whilst the captors in the first game made humourously dark remarks about the situation you're in, Amen ramps up the "dark" part, but not the "humorous", leaving you to deal with one group of cruel and unpleasant people after another. The darker tone of Half-Quake can be seen most in "patience", an almost-empty level where you do nothing for 20 minutes, anything that you are able to do being completely pointless, and is where you captors outright suggest you commit suicide early on. Amen's music for most of what you're going through (best showcased in its ending song, "Half-Quake Theme") are rather downbeat, both in music and lyrical content.
    • The third entry in the series, Sunrise, gameplay-wise, is where the series starts to become an exercise in futility, with the deadly puzzles and trap-laden hallways ramping up and becoming more merciless in this iteration. The few splashes of color that the previous two games had, aside from camoes near the end when part of the facility falls apart, are now entirely gone, save for a really light blue. Story-wise, aside from the final boss and a few disembodied voices you hear from panels cheerily describing ways to suffer and/or die, there's no NPCs to interact with in Sunrise at all, your only form of breaking this emptiness being a "Victim Message Box", which introduces to the only three people you'll be hearing from consistently throughout the mod: A guy voice who wants you dead and taunts you about it, a crazed man rambling about a cogwheel named "Mary", and getting angry at you when you're unable to find her, and a lady who really hates you and wants you dead. The pitch-black atmosphere of Amen is also present as ever here, and save for the few spots of pitch-black humour, doesn't stop for any moments of levity.
  • Half-Quake's spinoff, Personal Half-Quake, is directly based on Amen and a bit of the original Half-Quake, as well as having updates to support some of Sunrise, and it proves to be just as dark as the main game. Most of the game is spent stealing people from what's implied to be places that haven't done any wrong, and placing them in similarly made trap-laden hallways the Half-Quake trilogy features. Most of the places you go to are all managed by slaves, who have either been broken beyond repair, or are jerks who loathe your guts. The "Chosen Victim" mechanic involves kidnapping one of your victims, and inducing Stockholm Syndrome in them, allowing you to do particularly cruel things to them.
• The only "plot" Hatred has is a flimsy excuse for the sociopathic protagonist to kill as many innocent people as possible. Top it all off with a dark, gritty, grey and red aesthetic in the style of Sin City and you've got a real bummer on your hands. Reviews thrashed the game for its grimdark-ness even before it was released, claiming that the gameplay wasn't deep or fun enough to really provide the excitement of the game's ultra-violent ilk and noting that the game isn't dark to tell a story or make a sociopolitical statement, but seemingly just to be "edgy" for its own sake. The developers themselves seemed to revel in the reactions to spread the word in a way the gameplay or story couldn't.
• Haven: Call of the King, if you're already aware of its Downer Ending. The plot is more or less a Shoot the Shaggy Dog story at its bleakest, because despite Haven's efforts, he fails to both save his people and defeat Vetch, and ends up being chained up for the rest of his life with no one to rescue him. And as mentioned on Audience-Alienating Ending, why bother getting invested in the story and characters if you already know that everything ends badly?
• One of the main criticisms of the plot of Hunt Down the Freeman is that it was needlessly bleak, even by the standards of Half-Life 2's setting. The main character is an unlikable Villain Protagonist willing to screw over all of humanity for the sake of petty revenge he's been stewing over for 20 years, other characters have little personality and get killed off left and right, often for little particular reason, the game persistently pushes the idea that humanity has no hope against the Combine, and the player spends much of the game either making little impact on the world, or outright making things worse. It doesn't help that the game plays heavily to Adaptational Villainy (even the Resistance is at the level of hanging their enemies and leaving the corpses to rot, which is closer to something out of an edgy Garry's Mod animation than anything the Resistance was even hinted at doing in Half-Life 2 proper) and reintegrates content that was cut from Half-Life 2 proper specifically because it would have made that game too bleak.
• Defied by I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream. The creator of the original story, Harlan Ellison, was heavily involved with the game's production (even voicing the Big Bad, AM) and was convinced by the devs to allow them to make a Golden Ending for the player to potentially achieve as they were concerned that making it a Shoot the Shaggy Dog no matter what would invoke this in the audience (especially after the controversy surrounding Infidel). It took some doing, as Ellison was known for being The Gadfly and considered the idea of an unwinnable game hilarious. As a result, the game remains a Cult Classic to this day.
  David Sears: OK. This is the thing about games, we can't have only negative, punishing endings. We can have an optimistic ending. Yeah, we're giving humanity another shot, but at the same time it's Harlan's universe, and there's every chance these people are going to screw it up again.
• The Illogical Journey of the Zambonis, as the name implies, is a parody of Logical Journey of the Zoombinis, but, as a result of also being a Deconstruction of Trial-and-Error Gameplay, is far darker than the source material- so much so that it becomes far too dark. Despite the zambonis having a realizable goal, they continually die throughout the story, to the point where it's not a matter of if any of them will survive, but when they will die. Additionally, more than half of these deaths are outright murders caused by other characters, none of whom show any remorse about their actions and none of whom have any sympathetic traits, and all of whom have a reason for killing them that is inexcusable (the game's version of the Allergic Cliffs are completely apathetic to life itself due to having lived a long time, the pizza troll kills them for an incredibly petty reason, and the final of them are humans who are murderous bigots for reasons that never get explained). It doesn’t help that the narration continues to paint a bleak picture as each zamboni dies, that it's clear that the player has no choice but to interact with the puzzles and doom the zambonis even when it becomes apparent that the puzzles have no real answers, and the game outright admits that trying again isn’t going to change anything, killing any replay value.
• As a fanservicey Magical Girl Genre Deconstruction RPG game, this is why players tend to ignore some stories from I=MGCM, especially the ones from the first season/arc and the DX version. However, some player still like the game because of the game's vivid and adorable characters and the players' Play the Game, Skip the Story habits:
  • The game's main story, especially the first arc, is a lot darker and more grim than some may expect from what, on the surface, appears to be a playfully sexy, fanservice-laden game that offers little indication of just how hardcore it will get story-wise. The Gut Punch at Chapter 4 Episode 5 catches players unawares, and those who came for simple titillation may be driven off by the unexpected and unpleasant darkness that ensues. And the amount of darkness almost rivals Puella Magi Madoka Magica and Ryukishi07's works; this is particularly pronounced in the DX version, which adds extra layers of Gorn and Fan Disservice to these elements of the story, and is also the one players mostly looking to ogle pretty girls are most likely to play. Fortunately, the later arcs get slightly less darker than the first one.
  • While some of the NSFW scenes in the DX version are entirely tasteful and run along the lines of Idealized Sex, unless you're into rape and bizarre hentai works, others among them instead feature surprisingly nasty and unpleasant scenarios with Alternate Reality Episode glimpses and gratuitous hallucinations of your beloved heroines getting gang-raped and abused (or the inversion, the demons themselves are raped by humans, including Aka) as your "reward" for unlocking the episode. This can easily turn expectation of incoming sex scenes into something of a minefield — you're never quite sure whether you'll see one of your girls get some deserved love or suffer a horrible, heartbreaking fate. ^note Just a few examples are tentacle rape, literal Mind Rape, gore, bestiality, pedophilia, Bizarre Human Biology, Body Horror, transformation, Interplay of Sex and Violence, and petrification; one of Nijisanji's Virtual YouTubers discovered it the hard way, and another one explains in Japanese here.
  • The infamous New Year 2020 event was polarizing among the fanbase as the heroines ended up killing Kannagi, Mao's demon, after befriending her. This causes Mao (who is also a demon) to make a Face–Heel Turn against humans and the heroines, while even Lilly herself is aware what have her friends done. What doesn't really help is the fact that Mao then becomes a recurring villain in some future events. Because of this, the morality of the heroines was called into question, with many players considering them to be Designated Heroines. However, the developers fixed this by continuing the story where Mao, after being defeated by the heroines, is betrayed by two other demons, Hakuri and Kokuri, and subsequently Killed Off for Real in the Christmas 2020 event.
• Kane and Lynch: Dead Men is this for quite a few people. On one hand, Kane's trying to save his family. On the other hand, he's a bastard who betrays people, takes people hostage, and does generally bad things to accomplish his goals. In fact, the only reason that the bad guys captured his family was because he betrayed them and they wanted revenge. And let's not even get started on the Ax-Crazy Lynch, who has no middle ground between making things worse accidentally from his mental issues and making things worse on purpose by willingly being as unpleasant as humanly possible.
• The Last of Us Part II:
  • One of the biggest criticisms of the story is how unflinchingly dark it is. In the first game, there was still enough hope that players were still able to get invested in the world and its characters without getting turned off by it, with Joel and Ellie's relationship playing a big part in that. This game, however, was criticized for being much darker and more violent while also lacking the same ray of hope that the first game and its Bittersweet Ending gave off. Joel's brutal death early on in the game, in particular, is a point where some players stopped caring about what happens in the story, and it doesn't get better from there. Through the game, Ellie is consumed by hatred, and countless people die in her ensuing Roaring Rampage of Revenge. Abby, the character responsible for Joel's death, is a protagonist and playable for half of the game, and her sections are nearly as dark as Ellie's; many players found it very difficult to sympathize with or root for the woman who so callously and brutally murdered such a beloved character as him. As a result, the game's story is frequently criticized for its incredibly dark narrative, in stark contrast to the first game being praised for it.
  • In addition to the dark story, a closer look at the environments and flavor text shows that the world appears to be getting worse instead of better. All hope of a cure or vaccine is dead because Joel apparently killed the last brain surgeon alive in the previous game. Unlike most fictional zombies, as well as Real Life decaying corpses and fungi hosts, Infected actually get stronger over time by mutating into tougher and deadlier forms, and almost all attempts at rebuilding civilization are thwarted by either the Infected, warfare or internal strife, such as in the conflict between the WLF and the Seraphites in Seattle. The only exception is the Jackson community, which constructed a thriving place for survivors and remains relatively safe and efficient throughout the game.
• The Laura Bow games involve a large cast of characters, all of which are nasty egotistical stereotypes. The main goal of the game is to spy on all of them to learn their little secrets, such as who is blackmailing who and who has had an affair and such. And then they all die like mayflies, slaughtered one by one by a serial killer, which you cannot prevent, making it hard for the audience to care about any of the characters.

M-W

• Mad Max (2015): Max is an absolute asshole, none of Scrotus' atrocities are Played for Laughs, the first two allies you find are jerks and the last one is insane. There are only three people you can really root for in the game and, by the end of it, two of them are dead.
• Mafia II, due to its protagonist, Vito Scaletta, already being a criminal and a jerk before the game opens and the plot is about him... well, joining the Mafia. If someone's played the original Mafia: The City of Lost Heaven, it doesn't help that Chapter 14 reveals that Vito was the one who said "Mr. Salieri sends his regards," to that game's hero Tommy Angelo before Vito's best friend Joe shoots Tommy, meaning in this game, they've been playing as one of Tommy's killers all along.
• Max Payne 3, due to abandoning the Heroic Bloodshed tone of the previous games. From the beginning, the vast majority of the characters are excessively shallow and materialistic, while Max himself won't stop whining about how terrible his life is while making little effort to change it. Most of the characters he saves die horrific deaths soon afterwards. It's hard to care about anybody when they're one-dimensional and it's likely that they'll get killed with little fanfare. And it only gets worse when the villain's scheme is revealed as exploiting the poor for an organ-harvesting ring.
• One of the big flaws with Mercenaries 2. In the first game, each playable character has their own distinct personalities (Chris is the closest thing to The Hero, Jennifer is the Lady of War, and Mattias is the Comedic Sociopath). In the sequel, all three are written as if they were Mattias taken a step further, going on a Roaring Rampage of Revenge and tearing Venezuela apart because... the Big Bad shoots him/her in the ass. On top of that, while the factions in the first game are a mixed bag, in the sequel all of them are completely selfish Jerkasses; even the Allied Nations, who were the good guys in the first game, ran humanitarian operations, and were very reluctant to hire a psychotic mercenary, loses whatever noble intentions they had in favor of "We want that oil, dammit!" for no real reason other than the developers had an opinion about what they saw on the news.
• This is one of the many reasons why Metroid: Other M is polarizaring among the fandom. Samus is recovering from the events of Super Metroid in which the baby Metroid sacrificed itself to save her life. Through the entire story, she angsts a lot about her past and her broken relationship with her mentor Adam Malkovitch. Said mentor is meant to be her caring father figure but comes off like an abusive and careless jerkass thanks to his questionable actions, which makes his Heroic Sacrifice lack any emotional impact to many players. As if the dangers on the Bottle Ship weren't enough, there is a traitor who starts killing off members of the squad. Samus has a Heroic BSoD upon confronting Ridley despite facing him multiple times before, the explanation for which is conveniently relegated to supplementary materials^note It's less trauma, and more shock that he had survived being blown up in Super Metroid. By the end of the game, everyone but Samus, Anthony and Madeline is dead and the authorities behind the events of the game get away and erase all evidence by blowing up the station.
• Mortal Kombat:
  • Across from the obviously bloody and gory nature of the series, it's really hard to sympathize with the characters when a large majority of the protagonists are either anti-heroes or partial jerks at best. Not helping matters, the majority of the heroes were killed off in the reboot and later became undead servants of Quan Chi, with some of the characters (particularly Kung Lao, Liu Kang, and Kitana) accepting their fate as being undead and taking pleasure in being evil. Then, Raiden becomes Dark Raiden (yet again), this time being corrupted from his exposure to Shinnok's dark essence while purifying the Jinsei Chamber. While he might be more "effective" in the defense of Earthrealm, it makes him a bit... harder to cheer on him judging on how brutal and absolutely merciless (and gleeful) he can be.
  • For several fans, this extends to the entire series due to the implication that Armageddon cannot be stopped no matter what the heroes do. In the original timeline, the Battle of Armageddon ended with the deaths of (nearly) everyone and Shao Kahn's victory, negating all of the heroes' victories up to then (read: six games' worth, seven if you include Mythologies) and forcing Dark Raiden (a borderline-Omnicidal Maniac Knight Templar at this point in time) to try to avert a cataclysm by slamming the Reset Button and (poorly) clueing in his past self on events to come. Things don't pan out all too well, with the triumphs in MK9 and MKX being largely pyrrhic in nature. And though the course of history greatly diverges with the events of games two through four (particularly the Outworld invasion and Shinnok's escape from the Netherrealm), nothing hints at the endgame itself changing, so either the various kombatants will continue to grow in power and inadvertently destroy the fabric of reality, the One Being will be reformed through the merger of all the realms (which would cause its dreams — all of existence — to cease), or some other great threat will put all life in the cosmos at risk. Again. It doesn't help that, as seen with Armageddon and 9, Evil Only Has to Win Once for all of the realms to get hosed. And 11 has Kronika trying to induce History Repeats. That said, though, many characters do eventually find some degree of closure, with Liu Kang and Raiden in particular eventually patching things up with each other and, via a Fusion Dance that turns the former into a Physical God, do manage to defeat Kronika, though the fact that everything except her defeat was undone by her rewinding time does leave a dampener on things. Then again, there's still the chance that Liu Kang (and Kitana if you managed to beat Kronika without losing a round) can rebuild the timeline from scratch into a hopefully better one, but still.
  • This polarization was then later exacerbated by the Aftermath story expansion in Mortal Kombat 11, which pulls a Happy Ending Override on the main game's story. The fallout of such ultimately leads to the Forces of Light being utterly ruined before they could even reach Kronika's keep and EVERYONE either being left dead or wishing they were. The story still ends in roughly the same bittersweet spot as before... except the bitterness is multiplied tenfold, making some wonder if it was worth the effort.
• This was one of the primary criticisms leveled against Outlast II. While the first game is definitely bleak and gory, the sequel ups it with depictions of rape and the death of innocent children. With how much gore and otherwise disturbing content that the game throws at you, it's easy to grow desensitized to it all. The actual situation also deteriorates to the point where it can be difficult to tell what's going on anymore, leaving many players to feel like the entire journey was pointless in the end.
• Pathologic: The ruling families are using the crisis as an opportunity to grab power, the citizens are all self-serving Jerkasses whose only course of action is to go on a massive witch hunt, the three protagonists aren't very pleasant people themselves and they only get more desperate as time goes on, the situation steadily goes From Bad to Worse as the Sand Plague spreads despite all your efforts, there are never enough resources for you to stay healthy, you're always in danger of rendering your game unwinnable, and the atmosphere is unrelentingly bleak and oppressive from beginning to end. Needless to say, this can be a very emotionally fatiguing game to play. It even ends up being the case for the Bachelor's scenario, as he becomes so disillusioned about everything that he decides the only thing worth saving in the town is the Polyhedron.
• This trope is actually invoked in Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney – Dual Destinies, which reveals that the sheer scale of corruption and Jury and Witness Tampering in the Phoenixverse has led to a widespread lack of faith in the judicial system, and therefore prosecutors are free to engage in ever more creative and elaborate shenanigans because they're already in The Tyson Zone and nobody is going to care.
• Pillars of Eternity II: Deadfire:
  • The four main factions can suffer from this if one finds the shades of grey in the game's Grey-and-Gray Morality too dark. The Huana are trying to defend their way of life, but one look at the Gullet is enough to make many players question whether that way is worth fighting for. Rautai is an oppressive, authoritarian colonial power that wants to enforce their "superior" culture. The Vailians are mostly Only in It for the Money, save for a few who operate For Science!, even if it means experimenting with souls pulled out of luminous adra. The Principi are the only ones whose endgame quest doesn't result in the player either killing a sympathetic character or a bunch of people who were in the wrong place at the wrong time, but they're pirates, and not the nice sort either: your choices are a violent anarchist or a slaver who masquerades as a man of honor.
  • This is further exacerbated in the party system of the game itself. In a genre of games where there is typically significant emphasis on the personal development and outcomes of party members, three of the four new main characters introduced to the game are each associated with one of the major factions. Because these factions are explicitly and exclusively opposed to each other, without some prior knowledge on how the endgame quests intersect, you will be losing at least two party members that you may have invested a great deal in, and your decision will have negative impact for any of them whose faction you did not support. No amount of bonding, etc. will keep the team together past the point of no return. This has made it difficult for some players to empathize with the plot or story at all.
• A direct example of this in action can be seen with the Prince of Persia: Sands of Time series. The first game had great reviews but sold poorly; the sequel Warrior Within aimed a little more mainstream, making every character a violent Jerkass, darkening the settings, and replacing the Arabian-inspired soundtrack with heavy metal. Fans responded negatively, particularly to the Prince going from a charming Guile Hero to smoldering with generic rage. Ubisoft pulled an Author's Saving Throw for the third game, The Two Thrones, bringing it more in line with Sands of Time and explaining away the Prince's mood shift by giving him a Superpowered Evil Side. Said evil side also calls out the Prince for using the Sands of Time to escape responsibility and act like a Royal Brat, which the Prince himself acknowledges in the end as he undergoes Character Development.
• In [PROTOTYPE]:
  • The "hero" is a sociopathic, people-eating, viral monstrosity driven by little more than a desire for revenge on those he thinks made him into a monster. The only possibly redeeming feature he has is his desire to protect his little sister. His enemies are a military splinter cell comprised entirely of sociopaths and an even more destructive viral monstrosity. None of the above are all that concerned about the civilians or sane military personnel caught in the crossfire. And then you find out that the real Alex Mercer was so bad that even his viral doppelganger is disgusted with him. But, this is up to the player via Gameplay and Story Segregation. Canologically, Alex is much more redeemable; he's not specifically shown killing any innocent bystanders in the story, including there being an achievement for going throughout the game without doing so (the eating innocents part is entirely up to the player). He's shown to be very caring over New York, as shown by the final mission where Mercer ends up performing a Heroic Sacrifice (but he survives) to stop a nuke from destroying the city. Note that "eating civilians" is something that isn't compulsory — you can solely consume Blackwatch and not have major problems with the game, but players ignore this.
  • The sequel takes this to its logical conclusion, with Alex Mercer perplexingly now a complete sociopath. The new protagonist isn't any better as far as the Gameplay and Story Segregation goes and he'll still eat half the population of New York before game's end, but the plot tries to construct a sympathetic backstory for him to show Even Evil Has Loved Ones and paint him as the lesser evil out of the five or so evils running around in total. How well it works is matter of personal taste.
• This was one of primary criticisms of Resident Evil 6. Anybody who's not an important character ends up dying, making it really difficult to care about any of them in the end. The campaign where you can play as either Chris or Piers is a little better about this, since it kills off its characters to show just how deadly the enemies really are and the impact it has on Chris, rather than for the sake of emotional turmoil.
• Ride to Hell: Retribution: The Devil's Hand are almost cartoonishly evil, but Jake himself doesn't seem much better thanks to his reckless disregard for collateral damage. Case in point: His solution for an electric fence blocking his path is to beat up a bunch of truckers, steal a tanker truck, drive it into a powerplant, and then blow it up — possibly leaving millions of people without power — instead of just finding the switch, or even using the truck to plow through the fence (or even as support to jump over it).
• Rise of the Third Power starts out very lighthearted, but soon descends into this territory as the story continues. The party is composed of rather unsympathetic individuals at best, and the ending of the story is a Bitter Sweet Ending without much Sweet to it.
• Saints Row 2:
  • It can be a little hard to care about what happens in the story, due to the Boss being a violent jerkass and some of their actions that have left some players wondering about the Boss' morality (especially in the Brotherhood's story arc). It's not helped that in the bonus mission where the Boss confronts their former mentor Julius, they get called out for this, Julius justifying his reason for betraying the Saints as them having become as bad as or worse than the other gangs they fought instead of putting end to gang violence in Stilwater. The Boss in response declares that they don't care, as the city is theirs and they'll do whatever they want, before murdering Julius in cold blood. However, it seems that Volition took note of this as the later games toned down the Boss' sociopathy into a less cruel and more comedic Anti-Hero, cementing the series' reputation as the Denser and Wackier substitute to GTA.
  • What made this even worse is that Julius’ betrayal of the Boss happened at the end of the first game (and was not explained nor attributed to Julius at the time). But for most of that game, Julius was the leader of the Saints, and the player character was just following their orders, then rescuing them. So Julius being the traitor and his explanation of such fell extremely flat, suggesting that Julius was manipulating the player throughout the first game when he appeared to be a wise leader and mentor.
• It's quite hard to get invested in the characters of The Sakabashira Game once they get thrown into the titular Deadly Game, as Bella is a vain, insensitive egotist, Evan is an Insufferable Genius and has committed sororicide, Harold is an extremely rude elder, Marjorie murdered her husband and children, and Cool is a former hitman who displays a shocking level of brutality if he gets the chance to kill. Only two characters can reasonably be called sympathetic, and of them, Alex is naïve enough to work with all of the above even after seeing their worst sides to the point that he can potentially throw his life away for them, whereas Ceci turns out to be The Mole and an Eldritch Abomination. Worst still, the game ends with the Sakabashira Game still running and its host facing no consequences.
• Silent Hill: Downpour is easily one of the most depressing games in the Silent Hill franchise. The protagonist Murphy Pendleton has been locked up in prison so he could avenge the death of his son by killing his child's killer from within prison. After doing the deed, the state prison decides to send him off to death row because they fear he's too dangerous. However, the bus transporting him to his execution takes a slight detour through Silent Hill, where he faces the mental torture the town is known for placing upon its residents since the town feasts of off guilt.
• Some are turned off by Sine Mora's cynical and nihilistic tone. The characters are all a Dysfunction Junction, the setting is a Crapsack World, one of the characters is a victim of rape and cancer, and the game ends on a very dark note, even if you get the Golden Ending.
• Tales of Crestoria: The world the story is set in is incredibly bleak, with all authority figures being apathetic at best and flagrantly evil at worst and things constantly going badly for the protagonists due to being framed for crimes while the truly monstrous villains get away scot-free over and over again. The very first chapter of the game opens with Kanata having to save his childhood friend Misella from being sold into sexual slavery by his own father and being Marked to Die for it. Said Misella is a Yandere who routinely attacks and abuses the rest of the party. The party also contains the universe's equivalent of Satan. Even the citizens aren't much better, with most of them being Black Shirts who turn on innocents on a dime. The main characters can also turn people off due to how often their own stupidity gets them into trouble, making it difficult to root for them despite their struggles. This likely contributed to the game being cut short and the continuation manga's^note meant to wrap up the game's story in some form poor sales.
• The Suicide of Rachel Foster has a pretty dark, disturbing story and bleak atmosphere, dealing with a troubled woman investigating the circumstances of the death of a pregnant teenager who her father had an affair with, discovering that the girl was murdered by her mother and ending with madness and suicide with the player even being directed to carry out the steps of Nicole's suicide in one ending. No one is ever held accountable for what happened to Rachel and most of the characters — including protagonist Nicole in places — come off as unlikable, so some players found it difficult to care what happens at all by the end.
• Tekken 7 is where the Mishima saga concludes, which means Heihachi and Kazuya get more characterization and screentime than anybody else. Much of the story is about them trying to one-up each other in terms of villainy, and none of the heroes being able to stop them. Even Akuma comes off as more sympathetic than the Mishimas, at this point.
  Pat: Who am I even supposed to root for? These people are dirtbags.
• The 2012 reboot of Twisted Metal, in which all three characters you control in Story Mode are mass-murdering psychopaths. With no sympathetic or Anti-Hero characters to play as like in previous games, always playing as an utter monster tends to make the story too bleak to really care about the outcome. The series in general (Twisted Metal: Black being the real standout before the 2012 reboot) tends to be like this, although it's somewhat offset by its Play the Game, Skip the Story attitude.
• Valkyria Chronicles 4: You play as the Atlantic Federation, fighting back against an invasion by the East Europan Imperial Alliance. So far, so good. However, over the course of the game it becomes apparent that your leaders are somewhere on the spectrum between ruthless and evil (Powered by a Forsaken Child says hello!), which reduces the feeling that you're fighting for something worth defending.
• The Walking Dead (Telltale) has A New Frontier, which continues the game's tradition of putting Clem through the wringer, largely outside of the player's control. Whoever you chose to stay with at the end of Season 2 dies in a flashback in Episode 1 — Jane is Driven to Suicide after discovering she's pregnant with Luke's child. Kenny is devoured after Clem crashes their car and he's thrown through the windshield. Wellington is overrun and Edith is shot as Clem and Alvin Jr. escape. By the time Episode 5 rolls around, a long string of supporting characters — potentially including up to two members of Javi's family — are dead. Notably, Telltale (seeing the backlash caused by the flashback deaths in Episode 1) added more flashbacks and character development of the dead characters in an effort to avert this criticism.
• Many players accuse Watch_Dogs's protagonist Aiden Pearce of having no moral compass whatsoever. Additionally, the toxic behavior of the city's populace, made evident through privacy invasions, casts a heavy blanket of melancholy that lasts throughout the game. It seems Ubisoft listened when they made the sequel.
• Wurm Online can suffer from this, in a low-key sort of way, if you look too deeply into the lore. The backstory for the game involves three largely interchangeable factions fighting and raiding each other for ill-defined reasons while the setting's gods play some sort of Cosmic Chess Game that spawns the occasional violently destructive monster but doesn't seem to affect much of anything else. Luckily, it's extremely easy to Play the Game, Skip the Story and ignore the more depressing implications even on the PvP servers. The non-PvP servers are a meta-acknowledgement of this issue, being flavoured in-game as owned by a fourth faction made up of people who looked at the Forever War going on between the other three and said Screw This, I'm Outta Here.

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