Darker And Edgier / Video Games: A to C

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A - C | D - H | I - O | P - S | T - Z

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A

• Ace Attorney:
  • The first game had your standard crime themes and motives for killing. Justice For All cranks it up by introducing more complex themes and motives for the murderers; a con artist panics seeing a police officer nearby so he kills him out of fear, snapping the guy's neck from a fall. An overworked nurse accidentally causes 14 patients to die under her care. A woman who lost her place of power plans to pin a murder on her niece just so her daughter can take her place. A wheelbound circus actor plots to kill a young and childlike girl who accidentally caused his brother to go into a coma and she remains oblivious to the dire situation, but the killer accidentally kills his father figure instead by dropping a bust on him. A woman hangs herself after being dumped by an actor she used to date and then being dumped by another actor when he found out she used to date his rival, which also causes her confidant to commit suicide as well, but fails. And then there is the deconstruction of the series premise in the final case, where your client really is guilty but you still have to defend him or your best friend will die. And he is not a Sympathetic Murderer at all, but the sociopathic Big Bad. Yikes.
  • Trials and Tribulations continues the trend. In addition to having one of the darkest prosecutors in the form of Godot who eventually becomes a murderer and culprit, the game also introduced us to Dahlia Hawthorne, one of the darkest, most horrifyingly evil Big Bads in the series. It's also the first game in the series where we see a character die during the story, and not offscreen or in flashback stills; what's more, it's suicide by poisoning (which includes blood dripping from his mouth). The series has never shied away from depicting and using blood as a plot point, but actually showing it on the usually quirky sprites makes it seem a lot more real.
  • Apollo Justice seems Lighter and Softer, but things quickly take a turn for the worse. The justice system is shown to have gone from "merely" incompetent to outright corrupt, and the Big Bad Kristoph Gavin is a male version of Dahlia if her raving lunacy was replaced with cold, detached sociopathy. Meanwhile, your clients might not be guilty of murder but they are also often morally ambiguous and guilty of a lesser crime.^{Explanation (spoilers)} Phoenix Wright uses forged evidence to trap the first culprit. Wocky Kitaki didn't kill Pal Meraktis, but he did corner him with a gun. Machi Tobaye isn't a murderer, but he is guilty of drug smuggling, and convincing him to confess to that crime is essential to forcing his accomplice, the true killer, into a breakdown. Zak Gramarye goes on the run for seven years, abandons his own daughter and tries to ruin Phoenix's reputation as a poker player. Vera Misham is complicit in making forgeries, including the piece of evidence that cost Phoenix his career
  • Dual Destinies is the first game in the series to be rated M (ages 17 and older) where all games before it were rated T (13 and older). The first cutscene shows a full courthouse of people running for their lives as a bomb explodes and destroys the courtroom. You also encounter a witness who is so petrified of monsters that she starts hallucinating and believes she actually sees them. Then there's the finale where, through a flashback, you get to see a young Athena Cykes covered in her mother's blood as she tries to "fix" her with machines due to her naivete on how people get treated for injuries (luckily her mother was long dead before Athena used the machines). Due to the upgrade to 3D, all the grim details aren't left out. And the Big Bad, The Phantom Fulbright, is tied with Dahlia for the highest body count in the series and beats them in the category of highest attempted murders thanks to the above mentioned bombing. And of course, like Matt, Dahlia, and Kristoph, they’re a sociopath and is portrayed far more realistically as one too.
  • Spirit of Justice gives us the kingdom of Khura’in, a Police State run by a Corrupt Church using a genuinely broken and corrupt justice system that sentences lawyers to death if they fail to prove their client Not Guilty; and everyone, including the Judge, the prosecutor and the gallery, despises Phoenix and thinks he is corrupt. The cases are also much darker, including multiple murders (most of which are not the result of a cold case being connected to the current crime like normal examples of multiple murders in the same case), emotional rollercoasters for the protagonists that cross the Despair Event Horizon and a complete, total and brutal deconstruction of the effect that a system that discourages lawyers would have. The final case is the darkest of all: four deaths (the highest in a single case), one of whom we see die and is actually Durke, who we have spent most of the case thinking is alive and well and a Big Bad, Queen Ga’ran, who combines the worst aspects of several previous villains.
  • The second Ace Attorney Investigations compared to the first one. While the first had its fair share of dark themes and brutal murders, the second tops them by beginning with a presidential assassination attempt, setting its second case in a prison, and having an overarching plot about corruption in both the legal profession and politically, most characters going through severe emotional trauma and Edgeworth questioning his career. And while the first game's Big Bad was threatening, Quercus Alba was also an over-the-top cartoonish villain. The second game? Has Simon Keyes, an incredibly unhinged Vigilante Man who was Maddened Into Misanthropy due to almost dying as a kid and later witnessing an assassination, who manipulates all the game's other villains into killing each other (or at least having their lives ruined) and, to make it 100 times worse, managed to pass himself off as a nice guy and ally of yours for almost the entire game, and Blaise Debeste, a horribly abusive father with a lot of legal power who was involved in the assassination and is the man mainly responsible for Simon’s torment.
• In addition to having one of the higher body counts in the Ace Combat series, Ace Combat 7: Skies Unknown touches on some fairly dark themes such as the usage of convicts as military assets, the efficacy of drone warfare, and the utter chaos of war in general and its effect on the civilian population. As well as deconstructing the typical Ace Combat player through the character of Mihaly. This trope especially comes into play in the last act when the collapse of Usea's satellite network plunges Erusea into civil war, sparks refugee crises across the continent, and very nearly allowed two highly advanced drones to launch an apocalyptic Robot War. There is also a lot more swearing.
• Nintendo Wars:
  • Advance Wars 2: Black Hole Rising still has its quirky charms from the first game, but there is a noticeable shift towards a more darker setting; nearly all the nations from the first game are having trouble repelling the Black Hole army (with Green Earth nearly on the verge of defeat), Lash destroys Olaf's hometown just for kicks, and Sturm aims to launch a giant missile that can destroy the world just because the allied nations put a dent in his plans. Even when Sturm is defeated, he attempts to blow himself up with allied COs, but is stopped by Hawke.
  • Advance Wars: Dual Strike makes the setting more grim by having the Black Hole army sapping Omega Land of its energy, turning the landscape into a desert wasteland. Black Hole also develops a superweapon called Oozium 238, a blob that can devour any unit and instantly kill/destroy it. The final battle has a giant version of the superweapon that can devastate the landscape by sapping its energy as it advances. The man behind the Black Hole army, Von Bolt, causes the entire mess just so he can use the world's energy to live forever.
  • Advance Wars: Days of Ruin is clearly Darker and Edgier than the other three Advance Wars games, which sometimes bordered on silly. It pulls it off just fine, thanks in part that it's a brand-new continuity, plus the fact that it recognizes that adult themes don't necessarily mean throwing out all humor. It works because the setting is After the End but the survivors are trying to make the best of things. The doctor exemplifies this, saying that it's times like this you need to laugh. The last mission is called Sunrise.
• Aleste 2 is this to the first game, as it starts off with Ray getting killed off, and the Vagand obliterating New York before overrunning Earth.
• Alan Wake II: As Alan himself puts it the opening narration, this isn't the ending or story he wanted, and he sincerely regrets the amount of hell his manuscript is going to put everyone through — the Dark Place's influence makes "monsters and victims", not heroes, and from the start, with Nightingale being murdered by the Cult of the Tree from the player's perspective, it's clear that for all of Alan's power over the Dark Place, he and Saga are actually in a more helpless and violent situation. This is specifically justified in-universe in one of Alan's recordings. He notes that with the Dark Presence's power growing greater and greater, it's basically forcing his hand to make a darker story to stay consistent with what it is pushing him to do; Alan describes it as an "arms race", one he has to win soon or else the Dark Presence will be too powerful to stop.
• Aliens vs. Predator (2010) shows the full extent of Weyland Yutani's actions regarding the Xenomorphs and the Predators. People are shown being harvested en masse to create Xenomorph specimens, and it is heavily implied said specimens are tortured to learn more about their biology. The Predator campaign shows the company's staff being murdered because they know too much, and the Marine campaign makes it clear that these situations are incredibly common, while showing how sadistic and evil some Weyland Yutani officials are, something the films and the comics have rarely shown so directly.
• Alone in the Dark: The first three games had streaks of goofy humor while still firmly entrenched in the horror genre. Perhaps the most outlandish bit is in the second game where you can dress up as Santa Claus (without a false beard) to fool a midget zombie cook. Yes, you read that right. From the fourth game onwards such odd moments were completely absent.
• American McGee's Alice is almost a literal definition of this. It's a take on Alice in Wonderland where Alice was put into asylum after her family was killed in a freak fire that turned out to be a murder used to cover up Alice's sister being raped. And Alice: Madness Returns manages to top even that, what with all the Mind Rape and a surprisingly Anvilicious pedophile psychologist as the Big Bad.
• Amnesia: A Machine for Pigs manages to be even darker than Amnesia: The Dark Descent. The relatively light and abstract gothic horror of The Dark Descent is replaced by the more personal and tragic tale of a father's love for his children causing him to do truly awful things, with an underlying Industrialized Evil message. Daniel of the first game tortured dozens of strangers to death out of selfishness, while Mandus mutilated, lobotomised thousands of them, and turned them into self-aware monsters in some misguided attempt to "save them from their humanity", and murdered both of his own children to spare them from an even more horrific death in the trenches of the Somme. The villain of The Dark Descent is an alien creature from another realm, while the villain of A Machine For Pigs is a fragment of Mandus' damaged and insane soul given a life of it's own.
• Anarchy Reigns is much more serious than its predecessor, Madworld. There isn't as much humor, most deaths are played out seriously, electrocution is portrayed realistically rather than cartoonishly, Howard and Kreese (the announcers from Madworld) are gone, and there are several Tear Jerker moments during the campaign.
• Arc the Lad 2: the game takes every trope and cliche found in Japanese RPGs, then apply with bullheaded consistency Murphy's law, turning the sequel of a generic RPG into one of the most sadistic game on the first PlayStation.
• Army of Two — The 40th Day was a much darker compared to the original Army of Two, Morality decisions that is in the Black-and-Gray Morality section. A much darker plot and quite the number of people killed off. Then there's Army Of Two Devils Cartel which simply doesn't let up, showing the events of the 40th day had on Salem of all people.
• Assassin's Creed III, the last one had a relatively good conclusion to Ezio's life but Connor's been dealt nothing but sorrow as in this series the morality of the Assassins Templar Conflict is of the Black-and-Gray Morality compared to the previous series where the Templars was incapable of anything but one atrocity after another.
• Episode 11.5 and Part Iv Nirvana of Asura's Wrath are darker then the rest of the game, which already has a rather serious story as a whole despite the over the top action. It's also darker and edgier then a lot of Capcom's other IP's as well.
• While the Atelier Series is mostly a cute series about girls doing alchemy with a Slice of Life story, some installments are a bit darker in tone.
  • The PlayStation 2 titles (the Atelier Iris and Mana Khemia series) are among the darkest in the series, with plots closer to traditional JRPG fare.
  • The Dusk subseries, starting with Atelier Ayesha: The Alchemist of Dusk, is somewhat darker in tone. The setting itself is a bleaker World Half Full, the games tend to have higher-stakes plots that get more focus, and the color palette is desaturated. That said, there's still a lot of cute and comedic moments, but the change in tone is still very obvious, especially compared to the Arland subseries that came right before it.

B

• Inverted with Backyard Sports. The executives wanted to make the series darker and edgier by making the kids older and giving them new designs, but it became Lighter and Softer, and its audience's age went down.
• Compared to the first Banjo-Kazooie, whose plot is simply about rescuing Banjo's sister Tooty, Banjo-Tooie is about avenging the death of Bottles (and later King Jinjaling), the destruction of Banjo's house and the overall sabotage of Spiral Mountain after Gruntilda was rescued by her sisters from the boulder that had her trapped for two years since her defeat in the first game. The game's levels are also less whimsical than those of the original, and in one of them there are sidequests involving the resurrection of deceased characters. Lastly, the game has more black humor.
• Batman: Arkham Series:
  • According to Kevin Conroy, Batman: Arkham City would be this compared to the first game. That's saying something considering how dark Arkham Asylum was.
  • Batman: Arkham Asylum itself was essentially a MUCH darker version of Batman: The Animated Series. In fact, it was so dark and filled with so much scary stuff, that many people who play are shocked that it didn't get rated M. One wonders how they got away with a Teen Rating for Batman: Arkham City.
  • Batman: Arkham Knight on the other hand, did not get away with a Teen Rating, making it the first Batman adaptation to get an adult-level rating. The game pushes Batman to his physical and mental limits more than any of the previous games, with the single darkest and most disturbing story yet. There's also a character specific example with Scarecrow, who goes from a minor villain and moderate threat in previous media appearances (and most comics), to a truly nightmarish Big Bad and No-Nonsense Nemesis whose plan involves breaking Batman in every way possible.
• Telltale Games has Batman: The Telltale Series. A sign of the game being this compared to other Batman stories in open with the guard getting shot in the head. It also has coarser language like "shit" and "goddamn", and is Bloodier and Gorier including a crime scene involving a corpse that was torn to pieces by an explosion and another with a corpse with the eyes stabbed out. It also has both Thomas Wayne and Vicki Vale undergo Adaptational Villainy, with Thomas (an honest man in a corrupt city in the comics) in league with Carmine Falcone and Hamilton Hill and Vicki (an honest reporter in the comics) a revolutionary who plans to take down Gotham's elite because of Thomas having her birth parents, the Arkhams, killed. Additionally, this Vicki was also an abused child as the mutilated corpse missing its eyes was her adopted mother.
• Bayonetta 2 takes itself a lot more seriously than the first game did. With the world out of balance, the Infernal Demons are turning against Bayonetta, and her life-long friend Jeanne is killed in battle from one of these demons right within the first 15 minutes of the game, resulting in Bayonetta going on a quest to enter Inferno (Hell) and revive her before she's gone for good. We also get an insight into how and why Father Balder became evil, as well as witnessing the Witch Hunts for ourselves.
• The Binding of Isaac is easily Edmund McMillen's darkest game, featuring a small, naked child trying to survive his insane religious mother trying to kill him, with Gorn, bodily fluids and Black Humor aplenty.
  • The Updated Re-release, The Binding of Isaac: Rebirth, takes the already plenty dark game and cranks it up even further with bleaker visuals and a new soundtrack that is far more doom and gloom than the previous one (compare Satan's original theme to the harsher, more oppressive Rebirth version.)
• Blazblue Central Fiction is much, much darker than previous titles (which by themselves were fairly dark to begin with). The game takes place in an Alternate Universe; the real world lies in ruins and is facing an apocalypse, and the cast (with the notable exception of Ragna and Litchi) are "Entitled", battling to decide the fate of the world as Izanami drives tirelessly towards oblivion.
• BloodStorm for all its Black-and-Gray Morality (only 2 were actual good guys, everyone else was either an Ax-Crazy sociopath or a bastard) and Bloodier and Gorier worth compared to Time Killers failed miserably to compare to Mortal Kombat since even in Mortal Kombat morality wasn't that grey. This caused the company to go bankrupt as a result.
• A much less successful video game example was Bomberman Act:Zero for the Xbox 360. That's right, Hudson Soft tried to make Bomberman Darker and Edgier. To be fair, the original concept of Bomberman was rather dark (robot-like beings trapped in an underground arena and forced to kill each other with bombs) and the lighter feel of the original game was actually a compromise. However, none of the other games in the series make any references to Act Zero in any way, choosing to stick with the familiar Hello Kitty-esque Bombermen.
• Borderlands 2, although quite a bit Denser and Wackier than its predecessor, is stuffed with Black Comedy, and in contrast to the first game's Excuse Plot, has a genuine — and frequently very dark — plot. The antagonist, Handsome Jack, hops across the Moral Event Horizon early on and doesn't let up from there.

C

• The Call of Duty series has the weird example of becoming darker and edgier three separate times throughout the series.
  • Call of Duty 1, 2, and 3 were all T-rated World War II shooters which, while showing the intensity and violence of war, weren't really that brutal or dark, and all of them had happy endings for their protagonists. Call of Duty 2 and 3 were slightly darker and edgier than Call of Duty 1, but not by much, only with minor cursing and intense hand-to-hand combat respectively. Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare amped it up with an M rating, with more swearing, more violence, and a significantly darker story in which almost every major character dies, including one of the main characters by nuclear explosion and a lot more pessimistic view of things. And then Call of Duty: World at War came out, which amplified Modern Warfare by two, with much more cursing, complete with a good amount of F-bombs, dismemberments and charred corpses being standard fare, the opening mission which has one of your squadmates brutally tortured and his throat slit by a Japanese officer, and enough war crimes to fill an encyclopedia, especially by the more sadistic Soviets who are also supposed to be the good guys.
  • Modern Warfare 2 tops that off with you getting to partake in a massacre sequence and witness your character being burned alive IN FIRST PERSON.
  • Modern Warfare 3 is also quite dark, simply put the moment the cover went from men heroically attempting to break past the enemy lines to a silhouette of a soldier with a gun was when the series became dark to the point of no possible return. Oh, and everyone except Price dies as usual.
  • Call of Duty: Black Ops goes even further, with the gore being amped to 11, in addition to the plot revolving around your teammates torturing you, and the scene were Weaver gets his eye gouged out and the infamous tunnel scene, among others. However, none of those top the fact that there is a torture scene, where YOU are the torturer!
    • But this doesn't stop here. Call of Duty: Black Ops III has a claim to being the darkest Call of Duty yet, even in the already grizzly Black Ops sub-series. Gorn levels are ramped up from previous installments, making this the bloodiest and goriest Call of Duty since World at War. The game's setting is hopelessly bleak and dark, even for a Cyberpunk setting. The world is being torn apart by a new Cold War and atrocities like endless warfare and human experimentation. And that's just at the beginning folks. Naturally, the world is going to get a lot more torn up from there.
  • While both can be equal in tone, the Treyarch games tend to be this, Bloodier and Gorier and more profane than the Infinity Ward ones aesthetically.
• As far as Carmen Sandiego games go, Carmen Sandiego: Word Detective qualifies. The art style is much less colorful than previous games and the music is far less upbeat. To top it off, unlike other games, the villains actively will try to harm you, ending with a nice Freeze-Frame Bonus of the players about to have their face bitten off by an alien or about to be stabbed by a sword. They all get away with this, too. Carmen Sandiego: Treasures of Knowledge comes in at a close second by taking its plot very seriously, and leaves out many of the franchise's many staples including pun-based dialogue and names, impossible thefts, and goofy side characters.
• Castlevania: Lords of Shadow is easily a dark Continuity Reboot of the Castlevania franchise, given the level of Gorn, bucketloads of Black-and-Gray Morality, and the exceptionally Crapsack World setting. Its sequel took this up to eleven.
• The later half of cat planet, in which the environment becomes a dull grey with Spikes of Doom and Creepy Crow enemies. Certainly a bit of a Mood Whiplash.
• Chaos Heat, despite it's various Body Horror-themed moments, is still an action-focused arcade-style Run-and-Gun action game where you spend most of the time kicking all sorts of ass and blowing up giant monsters with assorted weapons. It spawned a sequel, Chaos Break, this time in the Survival Horror genre where the monsters are scarier, the game have far less focus on action and greater emphasis on horror, and you're actually required to flee from danger every now and then.
• Radical Dreamers and subsequently Chrono Cross shifted dramatically in tone from the relatively lighthearted adventurous spirit of Chrono Trigger. The fact that the idealistic heroes from the previous game are strongly implied to have been unceremoniously offed is a pretty good indicator of the general tone of the games.
• The ClueFinders goes up and down:
  • Compared to the precursor (Reader Rabbit, Super Solvers), 3rd grade was much darker, featuring some rather bizarre imagery and the in-game lore suggesting a monster was real. That didn't stop the occasional bits of silly humour from breaking through. The atmosphere lightened up significantly in 4th grade and Math, but then...
  • 5th grade, 6th grade, and Reading all seemed to be in a competition to see which one could be even darker than the last. The games featured a much more eerie atmosphere with ominous musical tracks, upping the Nightmare Fuel and Fridge Horror, having the bad guys escape in one while another is subject to And I Must Scream... easily these are probably the darkest edutainment titles yet.
• As the Command & Conquer: Tiberian Series has progressed, it gradually went from being a fairly dark modern world-war with Green Rocks mixed in to a brutal struggle to simply survive a planet that's dying under alien terraforming.
  • In Command & Conquer: Tiberian Dawn, the worst thing to happen was one faction slaughtering a village and blaming it on the other; Tiberium was a minor nuisance when it was growing in the wrong place. In the third, Tiberium growth had reached catastrophic levels, over half of the world is in a state of anarchy, another world war breaks out and all that is topped by an alien invasion. How's that for Darker and Edgier? Though Word of God said that the fourth game is even worse with an Enemy Mine going on and YET ANOTHER visit from the Scrin on the horizon.
  • The Tiberium growth was stopped in Command & Conquer 4: Tiberian Twilight, but by no means the war is over. All this means is that Tiberium will no longer threaten the world as now anti-Kane Seperatists have their own agenda. And the Scrin remains to be a problem... or rather, they would if EA hadn't forgotten about them.
  • The mod Rise of the Reds for Command & Conquer: Generals is set in a very grim, militarised future where international diplomacy fails catastrophically on a regular basis and WMDs have become an accepted part of conventional warfare. It has been called a deconstruction of the Cold War era gone wrong, but the story has started to reflect a lot about the modern geopolitical climate and what it could potentially become.
• Conker's Bad Fur Day was originally going to be a kid-friendly platformer starring a cute little squirrel in a blue hoodie. Indeed, the predecessor Pocket Tales for Game Boy Color had that tone. Rare kept the cute squirrel and the platforming, but changed everything else, adding enough sex, gore, Toilet Humour and profanity to make it perhaps the most perverse title ever released for the N64. Ironically enough, the port for the Xbox was less offensive due to enforced censorship on swear words.
• Contra: Shattered Soldier went a long way to undo the optimistic ending of Contra III: The Alien Wars. Bill Rizer, the hero of the original games, is now a wrongly accused war criminal convicted for causing the destruction of 80% of the world's population, while his former partner Lance Bean is now a a terrorist leader seeking to overthrow the Triumvirate, who were responsible for provoking the alien invasions in the previous games. It is also noted for being the hardest game in the Contra series as the Japanese version of Hard Corps had lifebars and Infinite continues to make it easier.
• Crash of the Titans: Compared to Radical's previous installment anyway, with a more climatic story and the menacing Titans. Being Crash of course, it's still thoroughly humorous and quirky.
• Series-wise, DaiOuJou is this to the DonPachi series, but when compared to other Bullet Hell games, the series is this also.

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