Drowning My Sorrows / Video Games

Magnus: I thought to try and drown my sorrows... but somehow... the bottle's never deep enough.
Thancred: No bottle ever is.

Final Fantasy XIV Shadowbringers

People attempting to deal with depression by getting drunk in Video Games.

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• In Assassin's Creed III, Connor recruits an old ship captain by the name of Robert Faulkner, who fell into drunkenness after his ship, the Aquila, was decommissioned and he lost his purpose. He leaps at the chance to sail her again for the Assassins and by all appearances remains sober afterward, or at least as sober as any other sailor.
• Jack McClendon, from the BioShock 2 DLC Minerva's Den, turned to drink after an ill-advised contract to make robotic Little Sisters left him with nothing but a huge R&D bill and a massive amount of unsold inventory. He is clearly wasted in the audio diary you find in his office, along with what appears to be his corpse, implying he drank himself to death.
• The Japanese version and the DS retranslation of Chrono Trigger implies that Frog did this when he learned King Guardia was wounded in battle, though the act itself is not shown on screen. In the SNES translation, such a thing would be unheard of.
• In Conker's Bad Fur Day, Conker ends up back at the bar where his adventure began to drown out the pain of his girlfriend Berri's death which was exacerbated by being forced to take the Panther King's throne. On a more humorous note, the Grim Reaper can also be seen getting smashed after he has spent the game dealing with Conker and his extra lives.
• In Darkest Dungeon one of the ways the characters can relieve the stress of braving horrifying dungeons full of horrifying monsters is by getting tanked at the local tavern. If you're unlucky, said characters might get the Resolution quirk after a bad night of drinking so they can't relieve stress in a tavern, or get the Tippler quirk after gaining a dependency on alcohol meaning they can only relieve stress in a tavern. If you're really unlucky, the character might end up with both quirks meaning they can't relieve stress in town at all.
• Deadly Premonition: After the murder of her daughter, Sallie Graham starts spending a lot of time getting drunk at the SWERY '65 bar.
• This seems to be the source of Oghren's alcoholism in Dragon Age: Origins. He got on the sauce after his wife left him and he was restricted from ever carrying a weapon while in the city or fighting in the Deep Roads. Other dwarves openly mock him for it. Constantly.
• Hinted at with Fenris in Dragon Age II. Hawke can find him drunk on the anniversary of his escape, which could also be the same day the people who helped him were killed by his hands. Oddly, though, he's more cheerful drunk than he normally is.
• Nearly every dwarf in Dwarf Fortress has in their bio: "Urist McAlequaffer needs alcohol to get through the working day" and will add "and is working more slowly due to its scarcity" should the fortress run out. Given the myriad horrible things that can (and frequently do) happen to the dwarves, it is rather easy to see why they would drink so much? Besides them being, you know, dwarves. Notably, sentients of any other sort only start flocking to alcohol in the same manner when they've achieved the famed "doesn't care about anything anymore" level of emotional jadedness, and they'll match dwarves drink for drink no matter how much it hurts their lesser livers.
• Escape from Monkey Island has Carla drinking at the microbrewery on Jambalaya Island to forget her time on Monkey Island. Unfortunately, Guybrush inadvertently reminds her of what she was drinking to forget, and she complains "Thanksh a load, Threepwood. Now I gotta shtart all over again."
  Guybrush: Drinking isn't the answer, Carla."
  Carla: That depends on the question, doeshn't it?
• In The Evil Within, it is mentioned that Sebastian Castellanos started drinking heavily after his daughter died in a fire implied to not have been an accident.
• Cass, one of your possible companions in Fallout: New Vegas is found doing this in a crappy military bar after her caravans have (suspiciously) been vaporized. She's still The Alcoholic after she joins your party but at least she isn't depressed.
• Happens in Final Fantasy Tactics Advance, where Cid is originally drinking heavily after the death of his wife. In the American translation, he merely has trouble keeping a job.
• Cloud from Final Fantasy VII is implied to do this rarely and only when he gets really, really, REALLY depressed, like in On the Way To a Smile: Case of Tifa.
• More or less speculative, but...in Final Fantasy IX, when Garnet resigns herself to becoming The High Queen, Zidane is found by their friends in a bar sulking about the possibility of his and Garnet now becoming more distant regarding their relationship. The way Zidane speaks throughout the whole scene certainly seems like he was in a drunken stupor, but...
• In Fire Emblem Gaiden, if Gray and his crush Clair survive but his best friend Tobin does not, Gray crosses the Despair Event Horizon and falls into this. The remake, Echoes: Shadows of Valentia, is more merciful: he gets drunkenly depressed too, but Clair manages to help him recover and they marry, naming their firstborn son after Tobin.
• In Golden Sun: The Lost Age, Piers gets washed away from his homeland by a tidal wave, followed by his mother dying from a heart attack. When you finally bring Piers back to his uncle's house, you find said uncle surrounded by spilled bottles◊.
• In Harvest Moon 64 this is implied to be the reason behind Karen's heavy drinking. She comes from a rather broken family, with a somewhat abusive father and a depressed mother, and has her fair share of angst.
• While it is unknown if he actually does this, Yuri from Infinite Space occasionally makes other characters (usually his sister) worried that something is bothering him when he starts to drink a lot.
• The Legend of Zelda:
  • Gorman in The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask does this with milk, and somehow ends up drunk anyway, even though he himself states this is impossible.
  • And, much more tragically in the same game, the Mayor's wife Madame Aroma can be found doing the same thing on the night of the final day, having resolved to accept the fate of her town and loved ones.
  • Played straight by an NPC in Twilight Princess. After you complete his quest and leave his house, you can come back and find him missing. He's gone to the local tavern and is seated at the bar, crying his eyes out because his girlfriend is seeing someone else.
  • In Breath of the Wild, a Gerudo woman named Deltan is depicted drinking several bottles of alcohol at a bar in Gerudo Town and sobbing over various romantic rejections by men.
• Manafinder: While there is a bar in town, Father Nolwenn often goes into his basement to drink by himself due to his past regrets over failing in his anti-Vikar activism.
• In Mass Effect 2 DLC Lair of the Shadow Broker, you can find info on Captain Anderson that due to the pressure of being in politics and working with the head-up-their-asses Citadel Council, he's since taken up heavy drinking. And watching conspiracy vids, just to see how much bull the public is fed, probably bringing Udina along just to see the conspiracy shitstorm.
• Mass Effect 3:
  • Tali of all people is seen getting soused after Miranda dies on Sanctuary. She manages to get wasted off of triple filtered Turian brandy, introduced through her isolation suit via an "Emergency induction port". (Note that Tali also gets drunk even if Miranda survives the Sanctuary mission, but in that case, the topic that's driven her to drink is a bit different.) And then, assuming you have "From Ashes", she drunk-dials a less-than-amused Javik and becomes convinced he has a crush on Liara.
    Shepard: That's a straw Tali.
    Tali: Emeeerrrgency. Induction. Port.
  • Ashley also gets wasted at some point, but you only see the aftermath, what with her curled up on the floor with a massive hangover. Shepard can then proceed to make fun of her.
    Shepard: I was just thinking it would be a good time to test the fire alarm.
    Ashley: I'll pay you a million credits not to do that, sir/ma'am.
    Shepard: Two million, and we have a deal.
    Ashley: You're a damned space pirate.
  • In deleted content, Engineer Donnelly can be found in Purgatory drinking alone, very heavily, in the event that he survived the collector base and Engineer Daniels didn't.
• By the third Max Payne 3 game, Max has become a raging alcoholic alongside his painkiller addiction in direct response to two games' worth of Trauma Conga Line, which by that point included two lost loves, at least three betrayals, and the deaths of everyone he's ever known or really cared about.
• Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty:
  • Solid Snake mentions that, while he lived in isolation in Alaska, that he was "drinking too much," presumably to drown out his PTSD.
  • Rosemary mentions something similar in Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots, where she mentioned that Raiden was frequently returning home exceptionally drunk for reasons that are strongly implied to be the result of his PTSD memories of his being a former child soldier returning to him.
• In Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater and Metal Gear Solid: Portable Ops, Granin and Skowronski (and to a lesser extent the Russian personnel), respectively, were shown to be drowning their sorrows for being abandoned. It also overlaps into Vodka Drunkenski.
• The final chapter of Octopath Traveler II implies that Kazan/Oboro drinks so much in an attempt to deal with his Dark and Troubled Past-induced nihilism.
• Taro Namatame from Persona 4 is shown drinking after the death of his mistress. His mental state during said moment might be a contributing factor for how he was easily manipulated by Adachi into throwing people into the TV.
• In Pretentious Game 3, this is how the gray square copes with his guilt over the fact that his affair with the bright pink square led to the light pink square divorcing him.
• In Psychonauts 2, Raz discovers that Bob Zanotto, Lili's great-uncle and one of the founding members of the Psychonauts, has turned to drinking to deal with all the trauma in his life (from the death of his mother to the battle against Maligula to the apparent demise of his lover/husband Helmut Fullbear).
• In Red Dead Redemption, Jack Marston implies that he has become a heavy drinker to cope with the death of his family
• Resident Evil:
  • Chris Redfield in Resident Evil 6 is introduced getting himself wasted at a local European bar in order to forget the tragic event of him witnessing his whole team being transformed into monsters. Only Chris and his subordinate Piers survived and he feels immensely guilty for not being able to save his crew. It takes Piers to find him and get him to face the truth in order to overcome it.
  • A similar scene occurs in Resident Evil: Vendetta when Chris and Rebecca go to ask Leon for his help. Traumatized by having to put down his infected team, Leon is deep in the bottle and initially hostile when asked to take on another assignment. When Chris tries to stop him from ordering more to drink, Leon defiantly takes out a flask.
  • Resident Evil 7 gives this implication in regards to retired Marine/family Patriarch Jack Baker having a drinking problem in the past.
• Deego in Rogue Galaxy is first found drowning his sorrows after a combat mission went badly wrong.
• Koudelka has a scene between the titular heroine and Edward, where they get drunk and tell each other their stories. It takes a sad turn when they reveal each other's pasts.
• If you examine the stacks of liquor bottles in the backstage of Heaven's Night strip club in Silent Hill 2, James will comment that he's taken to drinking heavily to get away from the pain and loneliness of dealing with his wife Mary's illness and death, noting that it never really seemed to help.
• After Starkiller defeats him at the TIE fighter construction facility above Nar Shaddaa, Rahm Kota is found in a bar in Bespin.
• In the backstory to Submerged, after the siblings' mother was lost at sea, their father lost himself in booze. When Miku tried to snap him out of it, he drunkenly tried to stab her and her brother intervened and took the spear in his belly. You spend the game trying to save him.
• The Demoman in Team Fortress 2 is characterized this way. His melee weapon is the very bottle he draws his "comfort" from, and his taunt for said weapon features him shouting "Cheers, mate!" and taking a hearty swig. A good number of his in-game lines either sound completely drunk or reference his being so ("I'm drunk — you don't have an excuse!", "Imagine if I hadn't been drunk!", etc.). His "Meet the Team" video features the strongest example of this trope, with him going from sober to somewhat wasted by the end and bemoaning the fact that he is "a black Scottish cyclops".
  "They got more *BLEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEP*s than they got the likes o' me!"
  • A taunt added in a late 2016 patch, called the "Scotsmann's Stagger", has the Demoman continuously drinking from a bottle while tipsily walking forwards and letting out drunken in-game lines with every few steps.
• Although everyone in Touhou Project is fond of strong drink (including the creator), Parsee Mizuhashi is explicitly stated to drink to forget her constant jealousy.
• Valkyria Chronicles 4: Vincey is already a Lady Drunk doing this from before she enters The Squad, being a Shell-Shocked Veteran from being Sole Survivor of her special forces unit. She notably averts Functional Alcoholic in that she's The Load on missions randomly ending her turn prematurely, until Character Development sees her unleash her true potential via her squad mission.
• Parodied in Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines: the player character can subject the hapless, hulking, tattooed bartender at the Asylum Club to a totally nonsensical sob story, then breezily decline to order a drink and walk away.
• Wing Commander III: Halfway into the game, Col. Blair drowns his sorrows after discovering Angel's fate. After the cutscene showing her fate, you're given a choice of talking with Rachel or drinking some more. Unless one is a masochist, talking is probably better than drinking. Especially because of the scramble alert following shortly thereafter. Alcohol and spacecraft do not mix, and flying drunk will make your ship behave erratically.
• The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt features a few examples.
  • It turns out that The Bloody Baron became The Alcoholic that he is due to also being a Shell-Shocked Veteran.
  • Deconstructed with one of your possible choices to help Ciri get over Vesemir's death and her failure at learning to control her powers. Geralt can either try to "lift her spirits" (by starting a snowball fight with her) or offer her "Lambert's famous homebrew" and tell her she doesn't have to be good at everything while they're both getting hammered. The deconstruction part comes with that while neither of those choices has any immediate in-game effects (although you can clearly see which one by comparison ends up actually cheering Ciri up), picking the latter is one of the factors that will earn you a "bad" ending of the game.
• World of Warcraft: In the cinematic for Mists of Pandaria, a shipwrecked Orc and human are forced to fight together against Chen Stormstout, who sweeps the floor with them. In an "outtake" released much later, they go to a tavern to get some drink, still not quite sure what happened.
  Human: So... it was a bear?
  Orc: In a hat! [passes out]
• In XCOM 2, Not too long after the fall of XCOM, the once upstanding Central Officer Bradford had picked up some alcoholic tendencies during his time of despair before he went on to save the Commander and start the XCOM uprising.

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