Darker And Edgier / Video Games: D to H

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D

• Danganronpa:
  • The first two games are already plenty dark, with their premise of a killing game among teenagers, and several deaths of likeable characters. The game Danganronpa Another Episode: Ultra Despair Girls manages to be even darker — it's set in a city filled with hundreds of dead bodies, the perpetrators of these murders being an army of brainwashed pre-teen children.
  • Take a look at most of the executions for Danganronpa V3: Killing Harmony and you will believe that Leon's execution from the first game (which counts as an Establishing Series Moment) was basically way more peaceful than those executions.
• Dante's Inferno is this compared to the poem it's based on. Dante himself is a murderous, self-righteous Crusader instead of an inoffensive poet, Beatrice is his girlfriend condemned to Hell after losing a wager with Lucifer thanks to Dante's infidelity, his father Alighiero is a fat, abusive hedonist lech who ends up becoming a demon in the circle of Gluttony, and there are tons of horrific demons and monstrosities occupying each circle of Hell Dante travels through. Oh, and Lucifer, instead of being the Stupid Evil loser of the original poem, is a Manipulative Bastard tricking Dante into breaking the chains holding him in Hell, so that he can Rage Against the Heavens yet again. Which is why Dante and Beatrice finally resealing the Devil and escaping Hell is such a precious case of Earn Your Happy Ending.
• Darius Force has a dark and moody tone in comparison to the other games of the Darius series.
• Dark Souls III, while being mechanically a lot more newbie-friendly than the previous two games, has a much bleaker story: the Age of Fire is basically dead, the Abyss is rising, and the second DLC takes you to the very end of history: an endless expanse of faded ruins and bleak desert, with a tiny fragment of life in it which you end up destroying.
• EA released a game that plays like Diablo in a dark and gritty sci-fi universe. It's called Darkspore. Yes, that Spore, the goofy critter creation game.
• Darwinia, released by Introversion Software, centers around saving a race of small, green machine-intelligence entities known as Darwinians from a virus that has infected their computer system. However, in the process, the player introduces the Darwinians to a previously unknown concept: organized conflict. The result can be best seen in the slogan for the sequel, Multiwinia:
  Multiwinia ~ Darwin is dead. Prepare for war.
• DC Comics agreed to make a crossover game called Mortal Kombat vs. DC Universe, being a lot more violent than other games of the license (but less violent than the Mortal Kombat brand due to Executive Meddling). And if that weren't enough, then came Injustice: Gods Among Us, another DC game by the same studio, which is a sequel to MK vs DC. It doesn't have any Kombat characters or setting (or gore, for that matter), but it does have the darkness — the story, for instance, features half the heroes entering He Who Fights Monsters territory. The premise of the game is "What would happen if The Joker breaks Superman?"
• While the Dead Rising series has always balanced out its dark zombie stories by setting them inside bright and colorful locales like shopping malls or casinos, Dead Rising 3 leans towards the darker side by taking place in the near-colorless, gloomy, torn-up city of Los Perdidos.

• Deltarune:
  • This game is the spin off successor to Undertale, and it is a bit darker than what Undertale was, but downplays it so it's not completely gritty. While Undertale had characters that were mostly misguided and could be befriended with a bit of work, Deltarune puts you with a school bully that thinks violence solves everything and relies on threatening people to get her way while also refusing to listen to you until she goes through some Character Development. Undertale gave you encouragement with how your choices matter and how you can ultimately resolve things peacefully. Deltrune goes for a more "cynical, but grounded" route where you are told many times that your choices do not matter in the slightest and that sometimes violence is the only way to solve a problem if the people causing said problem will not listen to reason. Death is also talked about more frequently and is used as a threat more often in Deltarune while Undertale rarely touched upon it unless you went for the No Mercy route. Also, there is more cursing in it than before. Ironically, however, Deltarune is never as dark as Undertale can be, as you can never actually kill anyone, meaning there's no Genocide route....at least until Chapter 2. Speaking of which...
  • The Weird/SnowGrave route completely plays this straight in comparision to Undertale's already dark Genocide route, due to the context of corrupting the timid sweetheart Noelle into a cold, power-seeking murderer through the use of emotional manipulation and pressure that you, the player, put her and Kris through, which reaches a logical conclusion when she snaps and freezes Berdly in a block of ice with a spell outright labelled as "fatal." When they get back to the light world, Berdly is still unresponsive, and all signs point to him actually being dead. While Undertale's Genocide route involved the player corrupting themselves and terrorizing a society of monsters, Deltarune's involves making the people who have absolute trust in you do it in your stead to the point that even their own friends aren't safe from them. Another notable difference is of the human Player Character; while in Undertale, Frisk is an emotionless blank state who you don't even learn the name of until the Golden Ending, Kris has a clear personality and identity of their own, and on multiple occasions in the darker route, shows extreme discomfort at being forced by the player to manipulate Noelle into killing.
• Densetsu no Stafy 3 is much darker than the rest of the Legendary Starfy series. The environments and enemies are creepier and less upbeat, many of the new character designs lack the cartoony cuteness of the rest of the series, it has a intimidating and very evil new villain, and it has the death of Moe's father and Ogura, as well as confirming the deaths of the Puchi Oguras from the previous game.
• Devil May Cry:
  • Devil May Cry 2 was clearly made under the assumption that the overblown camp of the first game was a bad thing, and decided to play the B-movie setting straight, as evidenced by changing the stylish wise-cracking, cowboy-esque, demon hunter Dante to a generic, stoic badass who barely gets any lines. It might also have to do with the fact it was rushed into production without informing or involving the original creators. To say the least, it didn't turn out well. Capcom made up for it with a return to the appeal of the original with Devil May Cry 3: Dante's Awakening.
  • Dante in Devil May Cry 4 grew up and apart from bishounen self in previous installments, sporting five-o-clock shade and somewhat cynical and wisened behaviour.
  • DmC: Devil May Cry is an Alternate Continuity that takes place in Limbo City, a twisted world caught between reality and the demon world. Conspiracy and propaganda run rampant through the world as Mundus attempts to secretly govern society through unending debt. The people are secretly being drugged and subjugated without even realizing it. Dante is an angry, rebellious man with a mean streak and a meaner mouth and only joins The Order because putting Mundus out of business might help him get some sleep at night instead of constantly being hunted as one of the half-angel, half-demon Nephilim.
• Digimon:
  • Digimon Story: Cyber Sleuth and its midquel Hacker's Memory, marks the beginning of an Audience Shift towards older audiences for the franchise, as they were the first games to receive an ESRB rating of T in the US and a CERO rating of B in Japan. They had a moderate amount of fanservice, but also carried heavy topics like Organ Theft and mass murder with a Gory Discretion Shot that fills the screen with pink blood (though mostly in sidequests instead of the main story). It's a step-up despite the lack of genuinely depraved villains and gory violence common in the franchise throughout.
  • Digimon Survive plays this on a caliber beyond Cyber Sleuth, as the game can have allies outright go insane and die over the course of the narrative depending on the player's choices, On-screen and sometimes gruesomely (within the confines of a T rating). Rather than having a group of Chosen Children exploring the Digital World, you also have a group of random children who were whisked into an ongoing lethal incident pertaining the other world where hostile monsters frequently attempt to hunt down and kill them.
• Compared to its source material, Discovery Freelancer is considerably darker, introducing institutional slavery, organ-harvesting, and the charming act of leaving the pilot of the ship you just shot down to freeze to death or selling them to pirates. Factor in the open wars going on all over Sirius, and it seems almost like a Crapsack World.
• Discworld Noir: The game feels like a dark Watch book, to fit with the Noir theme. It is also quite darker than the two previous Discworld games, both in feel and in colour palette. Actually works.
• Donkey Kong Country 2: Diddy's Kong Quest is dark in comparison to the original Donkey Kong Country. The Kremlings are pirates and are carrying weapons like cannons and cutlasses around, Donkey Kong has been kidnapped, and in comparison to the friendly jungles and temples of the original island, you're fighting on the home turf of the Kremlings this time, an island full of swamps, sunken ships, ghost-infested structures, and a castle. The game in general also has a darker and more foreboding visual and audio aesthetic.
• Each main game in the Doom series tries to one-up the original in different ways:
  • Doom II ups the stakes from the first game, where the demonic invasion was at least limited to a couple remote UAC bases on Phobos and Deimos. By the second game, the demons have finally invaded Earth itself. The PlayStation and Sega Saturn ports (which actually consist of selected levels from the first and second games with a few new levels thrown in) go even further, using haunting dark ambient soundtracks, colorized sectors to give the levels a gloomy feel, and more intimidating sound effects for the monsters.
  • Doom 64 puts more focus on establishing a creepy, unsettling aesthetic than the previous two games, with the soundtrack (from Aubrey Hodges, who also made the music for the PlayStation port) being more droning and atmospheric and the levels more moody and darkly lit. The monsters are also redesigned to look more menacing and they have their PlayStation screams.
  • Doom³ is definitely darker in the literal sense, but it also includes a storyline and several PDAs one can find to expand on how Hellish things got for the UAC. It also introduces a lot more Survival Horror elements and contains jump scares, and makes combat a bit slower.
  • Doom (2016) is straight up Bloodier and Gorier, and introduces shades of Graying Morality with Argent Energy, which is harvested from Hell itself and obviously inviting disaster, but one character insists it's the only way to sustain an Earth that's exhausted every other possible energy resource. The soundtrack is also a hard barrage of metal mixed with industrial and dark synth.
  • Doom Eternal, while mostly Denser and Wackier, is considerably darker compared to 2016. It is revealed that the stand-in for angels, the Maykrs, are just as evil as the demons and that they were responsible for Argent Energy; which is essentially powered by tortured human souls. The Final Boss is an universe ending threat that Was Once a Man, and the Doom Slayer turns out to be the classic Doomguy, having left Hell as a traumatized wreck who had lost his pet rabbit - and as an Easter Egg shows, his family - to the demons.
• Massive, massive change in mood between R:1 and R:2 in .hack. The good AI are dead or apathetic, and players have gone from dealing well with depression to psychosis. It's possible that the third "season" R:X is trying to regain the innocence.
• The original Double Dragon was already a gritty game to begin with, but the arcade version of Double Dragon II: The Revenge attempted to up the ante by killing off the girl from the first game, changing the objective from rescuing her to avenging her death. All the returning enemy characters were redesigned to look more punkish (Linda the female mook for example, was given a mohawk and a chain whip) and the new bosses includes a masked wrestler who leaves behind his mask when he dies and an André the Giant-lookalike with Terminator-esque sunglasses whose stature dwarfs Abobo from the original game.
• Dragon Quest games are often pretty idealistic, but as shown by Dragon Quest V they aren't afraid to make the heroes work hard for their happy endings. However, Dragon Quest VII is easily the darkest Dragon Quest game yet, with the heroes almost always finding a part of the world that suffered (or is about to suffer) some kind of unspeakable tragedy that would wipe out everything. Normally they put a stop to this and manage to save the town (and that part of the world) but there have been instances where they were too late or there wasn't anything they could do.
  • Dragon Quest Builders is also quite dark for a spinoff, taking place in a Bad Future where the hero of the original game decided to side with the Dragonlord, thus kickstarting a (still bright and colorful) apocalypse.
  • Dragon Quest Builders 2 is even darker than its predecessor. Most of the darkness in the first game was merely implied and happened in the backstory. Here on the other hand it's front and center, with the entire world being run by a Religion of Evil, and there's a lot more death (including a sequence where the player has to personally bury a trio of fallen soldiers).
• Dreamfall has a definitely darker and more depressing tone than The Longest Journey. Both worlds have suffered following the end of the first game. Stark, the world of technology, has experienced the Collapse, throwing the technology levels back about a century and enforcing Big Brother Is Watching-type policies. Arcadia, the magical world, has much of the known world under the boot of the anti-magical Azadi Empire, which has taken over during the power vacuum created by The Horde's invasion. Only one Draic Kin remains (and she is supposedly killed later in the game). April Ryan, the protagonist of the first game, has gone from a wide-eyed art student to a cynical, battle-hardened rebel leader (and is apparently killed at the end of the game).
• The general direction of Dwarf Fortress updates is that each is darker and edgier than the last, if it's more than bug fixes, to bring more Fun. Highlights include:
  • DF2010 gave made the Hidden Fun Stuff go from a handful of demons to hell itself, spewing legions of demons, the randomly generated Titans and Forgotten Beasts, and the strange, bizarre underworld.
  • The .17 version of DF2010 came with the introduction of bogeymen that kill anyone who wanders alone at night, the Night Creatures who abduct innocent people to transform and breed with, and the spirits of improperly memorialized dwarves haunting, and sometimes murdering, the living.

E

• The Earth Defense Force series has always reveled in B-movie cheesy charm, but Earth Defense Force 5 mixes this narm with an overall darker narrative which shows humanity nigh-hopelessly outmatched by the aliens, with their invasion hitting so suddenly that much of their technology had to be repurposed from conventional warfare or civilian applications (such as the resident Humongous Mecha being a mothballed prototype construction vehicle). By the end of the game, Earth's population has been reduced by 90%, and civilization has been destroyed and begun regressing.
• The Elder Scrolls:
  • The series in general has been all over the place in terms of this trope, often zig-zagging it between installments. To note some specific examples:
    • Arena starts off the series fairly soft. Aside from the cover art, it's a fairly light fantasy style adventure without much edginess.
    • Daggerfall, coming at a time when PC games faced very little in the way of censorship, flies down a darker and edgier path. It features nudity, gruesome texts in books, insane dungeons, disease is instant death if not cured in time, etc... It's also possible to outright miss the main quest by not reporting to the initial quest giver in the given time frame.
    • Morrowind loses some of Daggerfall's edginess simply due to censorship, but the atmosphere is still quite dark. The setting is a Crapsack World backwater island district of the Empire, currently under the threat of the Blight and the Corprus Disease, creations of a deranged Physical God channeling power from the heart of a "dead" god. While not quite as edgy, the game has a very Eldritch atmosphere giving it plenty of darkness. Additionally, in terms of gameplay, Anyone Can Die, because you can kill them if you wish. It's possible to kill quest essential characters which can break the game in number of ways.
    • Oblivion zig-zags once again, with a much lighter atmosphere in terms of the game's brightness and wider color palette. However, it's largely a Crapsaccharine World that is quickly involved with an invasion by The Legions of Hell led by a Destroyer Deity. Oblivion also has the Dark Brotherhood faction questline wherein the player character can actually become an assassin who follows a Religion of Evil, with all that that entails. In terms of gameplay, Oblivion takes a step toward the softer side from Morrowind, making quest essential characters unkillable and quest related items undroppable.
    • Skyrim zig-zags back to the "Crapsack" feeling of Morrowind. You're the last hope of the mortal world facing down the Beast of the Apocalypse, all set during the Grey and Gray Skyrim Civil War, with the Aldmeri Dominion (led by the fascistic Thalmor looming in the background) In terms of gameplay, it is also zig-zagged. The quest essential characters and items from Oblivion remain, and the only ways to truly fail a major quest are to die or encounter a bug. However, the combat is quite a few shades darker, with Skyrim introducing "kill cam" style finishing moves including beheadings and neck-snappings.
  • Outside of the main series, the Battlespire spin-off is probably the darkest ES game. Unlike virtually every other game, you're utterly alone, trapped in a horrific Oblivion Realm filled with equally horrific monsters just waiting to tear you to pieces. Throughout the game, you are subjected to various nightmarish imagery, forced to fight against seemingly impossible odds as the Big Bad viciously taunts you the entire time.
• Elemental Gearbolt is not only this to Project: Horned Owl, but it's also this compared to most light gun games. The protagonists are recent victims of violent death, brought temporarily back to life to destroy the kingdom which had been their home.

• Emerald City Confidential is a noir retelling of sorts of the Land of Oz series of books. The main character is a cynical private detective who lives in a Crapsack World filled with crime and corruption.
• The Endless Nightmare series have it's fourth installment, Prison, being much darker than it's three predecessors (especially compared to Shrine, the Lighter and Softer third episode). The game is set in a dark, gloomy prison in the aftermath of the Covid-19 outbreak that claims your wife and son, you spend most of the game mourning while trying to stay alive, and there is far greater emphasis on the psychological horror elements than the previous entries.
• Epic Mickey for the Wii had concept art of creepy steampunk cyborg versions of both Mickey Mouse◊ and Goofy◊. The artwork really speaks for itself◊. For a Disney game, that is pretty damn dark. But in the final product, it had a different kind of dark to it. Rather than dealing with Body Horror robotic chimeras of our favorite Disney characters like first expected, it's about the consequences of Mickey's irrationality and how he must make up for it.

F

• Although the Fallout series isn't exactly cheery to begin with (what with being set in a post apocalyptic wasteland and all), it still manages to play with this trope a lot.
  • The first game mainly focuses on various towns and communities rising from the ashes, trying to rebuild civilization within a harsh wasteland, with bouts of Black Comedy and pop cultures references sprinkled in for levity.
  • Fallout 2 zig-zags the trope. It is considered the silliest game in the series and has a much larger emphasis of making jokes, but is also not shy about showing aspects like slavery, rape, prostitution, child-killing, drug addiction and cannibalism, in greater detail than in the first game. Also, the villains in Fallout 2 are far more sinister and powerful than the Anti-Villain that was the main antagonist in the first game. And the game involves genocide via an airborne virus that's played straight.
  • Fallout 3 somewhat subverts this by having its sparsely-populated and desolate Washington D.C. have quirky characters and an eccentric retro-fitted 1950s aesthetic which undermines the grim tone it's going for. It's still at least constantly cited as being the best game in terms of having a post-apocalyptic atmosphere, regardless.
  • Is yet again zig-zagged in Fallout: New Vegas, by having a more populated, civilised area with a clear blue sky and various vegetation, full of different factions vying for control of the titular area, which was barely hit by the bombs at all. Because of this, it has more of A World Half Full feel to it instead of the pure grimness of 3. It's definitely not the lightest game in the series though, due to a large dose of Grey-and-Gray Morality in its main story, as well as bring back the darkness in Fallout's comedy (both of which were largely absent in 3), and some of the terror-filled DLCs released with it, especially Lonesome Road and Dead Money.
  • In a wider sense, the canon itself is supposed to be Darker and Edgier. However, since the comedic moments do draw a portion of their fanbase and the game is, in part, a dark satire of the 1950s, they have relegated some of the zanier comedy to noncanon status, never mentioning it in future games, glossed over it Broad Strokes style, or, in the rare case it is plot relevant, downplayed as much as possible
  • Despite the Commonwealth merely getting grazed in comparison to the Capital Wasteland, Fallout 4 manages to be even darker. Everything Played For Cynical Laughs in previous games is suddenly Played for Drama — with a healthy dose of natural fears and conspiracies beyond the main character's control or comprehension at work as their life quickly changes forever, their spouse murdered and their child snatched in front of them while they can only watch helplessly from a cryonic suspension pod.
  • Fallout 76 zig-zags this. On the one hand, Appalachia is practically untouched by the Great War, so the region is flush with forests and greenery. On the other hand, however, there is a virulent plague that nearly wiped out all of humanity in the region, transformed the survivors into semi-feral madmen, could possibly drive humanity to extinction, and can only be stopped with nukes (which West Virginia is actually replete with). All this on top of being stuffed to the gills with mutated beasts from brahmin and molerats to cryptids like the Beast of Grafton and even the Mothman!
• Far Cry 2 and its sequel were considerably darker. Tackling the futility of war and how it dehumanises everyone, the player included.
• The boxing game Fight Night Champion is this, not just to the Fight Night series, but to the whole EA Sports catalog. From the more muted and realistic color palette, to the more brutal and bloody nature of the fights once a fighter gets cut, to the Trainers being a lot more open with stronger cursing. Not to mention the dark storyline of Champion Mode. To this day, Fight Night Champion is the only game in the EA Sports catalog to be rated Mature by the ESRB.
• Final Fight: Streetwise is a good example why you don't make it so damn Grim Dark. And they forgot our favorite trans woman Poison? For shame, for shame. Guy, the series Knight Errant, becomes a mob boss. Cody? He does drugs. And they heal his permanent injuries.
• Fire Emblem installments can zig-zag when it comes to being darker and edgier, but these games notably stand out:
  • Compared to any other game in the series, Fire Emblem: Genealogy of the Holy War is notoriously considered by many to be by far the darkest. To wit, the plot as a whole is far more complex compared to its predecessors, Fire Emblem: Shadow Dragon & the Blade of Light and Fire Emblem: Mystery of the Emblem, the actions and personality of the main Lord, Sigurd, are steadily deconstructed as time passes (for one, he is unaware that his home kingdom is seeking to conquer the continent, and they play him like a fiddle the entire time), and there's also the fact that he and the rest of the cast from the first half of the game die at the game's halfway point. And most infamously, tying with the loads of Rape, Pillage, and Burn and child sacrifices that we don't see as much of in later games, there's lots of incestuous references, both in the story and in gameplay. Many games in the series after Genealogy would never reach the level of darkness it did until...
  • Taking pages from Genealogy, Fire Emblem: Three Houses heavily deconstructs many of the series' staple character archetypes and story settings. Unlike Marth, none of the house leaders are completely good people and basically every faction falls into Grey-and-Gray Morality. The traumas that many of the cast experience, thanks in part to the game eschewing the series' traditional gratuity of High Fantasy in favor of a disturbingly, grounded approach rooted by its focus on blurring the lines between factions, are frighteningly realistic for a fantasy series, and unlike Fire Emblem Fates, there is no Golden Ending. At least one of the main house leaders will die, if not more. And of those students you don't recruit, you'll likely be forced to fight and kill them despite being decent people. The game is considered by many to be the darkest game in the series since Genealogy and the darkest modern Fire Emblem game.
• Five Nights at Freddy's 3 is when the series became Darker and Edgier as a whole. Not only does Springtrap look far worse than any of the previous animatronics (that's not even getting into the fact that Springtrap has a rotting human corpse inside the suit), but Fazbear's Fright in general appears abandoned and bleak. Justified — somewhat — in the sense that the new owners of the place are turning it into a horror attraction.
  • Five Nights at Freddy's 4 is even darker, as the animatronics are the scariest yet, and you're a little kid instead of a grown man. There are also no cameras.
  • Five Nights at Freddy's: Sister Location is the darkest FNAF game. Two nameless technicians are killed and hung in plain sight on rafters, a child is murdered by Baby on-screen, and in the (canon) Bad Ending, the main character gets 'scooped' (i.e., disemboweled) and Ennard, a Body of Bodies made up of the rest of the animatronics, wears his skin as a disguise to get out of the building. Oh, and Ennard doesn't leave the skin suit until it's rotted purple, and you get to watch it slowly decay in 8-bit 'glory'. If you have read The Silver Eyes, you already know from the start that things are going to be bad when it is spelled out to you within the first minute that these things were designed by Mr. Afton. He is Purple Guy.
• Fuga: Melodies of Steel is a far darker entry of the Little Tail Bronx entry than Tail Concerto and Solatorobo: Red the Hunter due to involving War Is Hell and Character Death. Oh, and did we mention the main protagonists are kids no older than twelve who have to be put through the ringer by piloting a massive ancient tank, which also happens to possess a highly lethal weapon that can only be used by sacrificing one of their lives to it?

G

• Ghost Recon and Rainbow Six shifted to a darker direction as the newer soldiers are more like Military Mavericks than by the orders soldiers and Spec Ops, Rainbow Six Vegas exemplified the notable shift.
• Gleaner Heights is a gothic game inspired by Harvest Moon. It's meant to be a darker twist on the series and its other Spiritual Successors. It features suicide, infidelity, abuse, and other mature themes.
• Golden Sun: Dark Dawn is darker and edgier than its predecessors. Weyard in the two previous games was largely at peace, and the only characters who tended to kick the bucket were the villains. Now Angara, and very likely the other continents of Weyard, is full of budding countries who frequently war with each other, and once the the Grave Eclipse is activated, townspeople start dropping like flies in the face of an overwhelming monster horde, with even a few named characters both good and bad getting Killed Off for Real.
• Grand Theft Auto:
  • Grand Theft Auto 2, compared to the first game, started exploring many of the darker themes around. In the Cyberpunk-like Anywhere City, the multiple gangs are hostile to each other, with a MegaCorp pulling everyone in for profits and influential controls. There were also a few missions that explicitly explored the horrendous themes, like The Mafiya turning innocent pedestrians into hot dog meat.
  • Grand Theft Auto III ramps up the grittiness even further. New generations of gamers who come to this game after playing the next games might be surprised by how this game is less sentimental. As for the storyline, the entire plot is about a remorseless, callous killer looking for the psychotic woman who betrayed him. Furthermore, there's a gritty atmosphere, dirty streets, rains and cloudy time.
  • Grand Theft Auto IV replaces the crime dramas with an immigrant story wrapped in a crime drama, while retaining the humor. Niko's backstory is the darkest backstory ever in the series. Every GTA game before this lets you get away with anything and people will rarely question your actions. In GTA IV, Niko's actions and decisions during certain missions will alter who you see later on and you may even get reminded about what you done, especially if it was a bad choice. The final missions also change based on what choice you make, and the outcome affects Niko greatly. Decided to take Dimitri's deal? Your girlfriend dumps you because you're greedy for money and Dimitri kills your cousin at his wedding. Did you decide to kill Dimitri instead of taking the money? The mafia gets their own revenge by killing your girlfriend.
    • The The Lost and Damned DLC turns the Grim Dark up to eleven, with the protagonist Johnny partaking in a series of events which leads to the death of his best friend Jim at the hands of Niko, being betrayed by childhood friend turned Big Bad Billy Grey who tries to have Johnny and Jim killed during a drug deal and later attempts to sellout everyone to save his own ass after said drug deal gets him arrested, and said arrest leading to a civil war that wipes out more than half of the Lost. Once everything is over with Billy dead, Johnny and the survivors of the whole ordeal (One of whom happens to be a paraplegic crippled in an accident caused by Billy's carelessness) decide to just burn down the clubhouse to put it out of its misery after it and the club have been ruined over the course of the game. This leaves the player with a single, run down safehouse that is in one of the most run down areas of the city and used to belong to one of the Lost members Johnny had to kill in the civil war.
  • Grand Theft Auto: Chinatown Wars also shifted back to the general tone of IV, after the lighthearted The Ballad of Gay Tony, but throws in some even more controversial elements. The infighting between The Triads and the Tongs are a bigger focus, with many of the characters, friend or foe, becoming Tragic Villains that ended up dead. The protagonist Huang Lee is a dysfunctional Triad protagonist who averts Damn, It Feels Good to Be a Gangster! trope, and only to find out his Evil Uncle is the true mastermind behind the tragic events. Plus, a drug-trading minigame is also present, ratcheting up the edge quite a bit.
• Guilty Gear:
  • The Korean OST is entirely different in tone from the original Japanese soundtrack. It's not bad at all (in fact some of the theme are completely awesome), but it's much less energetic and resembles post-apocalyptic heavy metal rather than rock. Just one example for wacky comic relief character Chipp Zanuff, his Japanese theme "Suck a Sage" vs. his Korean theme "Child of the Wind". For the record, you can still switch back to the original Japanese soundtrack in the Korean version of the game in the options menu.
  • Guilty Gear -STRIVE- is aesthetically and tonally the darkest entry in the series. The vivid colours the series is known for are muted, and characters don't do many of the silly facial expressions from before. Characters have taken a turn for the darker, too: Faust has cast aside his jovial Fighting Clown persona and may have lapsed back into his Dr. Baldhead insanity, becoming a really creepy Humanoid Abomination in the process; the impending death of Sol Badguy is alluded to several times; and the villain's "destroy the world" scheme has metaphysically apocalyptic consequences like something out of End of Evangelion. Ironically though, the actual story gives many characters a Surprisingly Happy Ending: the Sol Badguy persona dies and Frederick gets to live in retirement working in a little machine shop with Jack'O after the government help him fake his death; Axl finally gets reunited with Megumi after years of being lost in time; even Asuka/That Man gets a happy ending, as he succeeds in bringing about global peace between Gears and humans and makes amends for all his past mistakes, and he spends the rest of his days running a radio show.

H

• Though Halo started off fairly grim in the first place, as the series progressed it went ever deeper down the tunnel. By Halo 3 there's some serious nastiness going on, especially regarding the Flood and the terror inherent to some of Cortana's messages.
  • The story goes that the original script for the original trilogy's ending had a much lighter tone, with all the main characters returning to Earth to a hero's welcome. Marty O'Donnel, Bungie's musical director, thought that this ending was too light and soft and didn't portray the grim consequences of being a "hero" in a 30-year war. Subsequently the script was re-written to have a much Darker And Edgier ending in which several main characters die and Master Chief is stranded in deep space with Cortana, presumed dead by the rest of humanity.
  • Halo: Reach, Bungie's farewell to the series, was intended to be the darkest and most depressing entry yet, since you already know everything that will happen to you, your comrades and the planet itself . It's about the heroism and sacrifice of those people on a doomed planet watching their friends and everything they love fall. Even look at the medals when you perform a feat (Double Kill/Triple Kill; in Halo 3 they were bright and brightly colored, while in Reach they are darker and look metallic. Yes, even these meta-game symbols are darker AND edgier.
  • Despite giving humanity a shinier and more high-tech aesthetic in the post-3 games, 343 Industries has gone even further than their predecessors did into exploring the shady and amoral side of Halo's humans.
• Hard Truck series started out as a trucking simulation game. Then Hard Truck Apocalypse spinoff was released where events take place in post-apocalyptic Europe.
• Harvest Moon:
  • The "Wonderful Life" subseries of Harvest Moon are extremely dark compared to the other games. For one, unlike the other HM games, once you've chosen who to marry, the game clearly spells out to you that the lives of the other potential brides are now completely, irrevocably ruined. For another, characters age in real time, which means the end of A Wonderful Life is a wonderful death. The game features a darker colour palette and more realistic animals as well. The game pushed its E rating with its themes of infidelity, character death, alcohol, and some sexuality.
  • There's also Harvest Moon: Animal Parade, which states very early on that things suck for everyone in the town because of the Harvest King not being around. Soil has begun to grow barren and fish are not as numerous in the water as they should be, which leaves fishermen to worry about their livelihood, meaning that if the bells aren't found and rung soon, the town may very well become abandoned because of nothing being able to grow anymore. And the circus' animals have run away, too. The game also features some darker character backstories than other games, such as Jin being a widow.
  • Harvest Moon 64 is one of the darkest titles in the game and is a definite step up from the original game. The game starts with your grandfather — the original protagonist — dying and you inheriting his farm. Behind the cutesy Super-Deformed visuals is a surprisingly somber game. For example, the local vineyard is just about to close, its owners have a broken family, and Karen is one step away from leaving town (and will if you don't befriend her).
• Highway Blossoms is a relatively lighthearted Road Trip Plot about a young woman named Amber meeting a fellow traveler named Marina on a trip to a music festival, their going on a treasure hunt and falling in love. There's some angst and drama near the climax, as Amber's insecurities and grief over her grandfather's recent death come to the fore, but it doesn't stay dark for too long. Next Exit is darker, and shows that Amber and Marina's relationship has become troubled due to the former treating the latter like a child, and Marina's POV segments show that beneath her bubbly facade, she resents Amber for treating her this way. The Trio, a group of supporting characters, have their Dark and Troubled Past explored, particularly Tess's unease about being unable to feel strong emotions.
• Compared to the rest of the series, Hitman: Contracts is the darkest. All of the missions take place at night and it's usually raining. The game also has really haunting background music, and at least 4 of the missions have already dead bodies, one who was horribly butchered.
• Homeworld Cataclysm. Although we don't witness it directly, the Beast easily trumps the Taiidan in terms of brutality; at least the Taiidan stopped at annihilating a planet, the Beast only cares about making more of itself in a gruesome and, by the sound of it, REALLY PAINFUL way.
• Hotline Miami was already utterly bleak and ultraviolent, but Hotline Miami 2: Wrong Number manages to dig further, not just by being Bloodier and Gorier, but also acting as the Mind Screwdriver to the previous game and going deeper into just how horrible and depressing the series' setting is, to the point that the game ends in a nuclear apocalypse.
• Hyrule: Total War. It's the colourful and cheerful world of The Legend of Zelda but not as you know it. A Medieval II: Total War mod, H:TW features mass warfare, actual blood, Fantastic Racism, and the possible slaughter of characters from the official games. Word of God says a darker Zelda game that he could actually take seriously again was one of his motivations for making the mod.

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