Afterfall: InSanity has some awesome scenery gorn, particularly in the City of Light.
American McGee's Alice has this in spades. It's hard to single out just one screenshot for comparison, but this◊ pretty much sums up the mood of the new "Wonderland" created by Alice's unbalanced mind.
Its sequel, Alice: Madness Returns wavers between gorgeous scenery porn (Oriental area) and horrific scenery gorn (the Hatter's Domain) until Queensland. Then gorn rules the day.
At the beginning of Batman: Arkham City, The Penguin greets Bruce by welcoming him to Hell. Suffice it to say he's not being hyperbolic, and the burning, dilapidated environmental detail immediately lets you know it.
Hunt: Showdown takes place in the abandoned bayous of Louisiana filled with abandoned buildings, walking corpses, and dark shady trees.
In Battlefield: Bad Company and its sequel feature a highly destructible environment, the creators knowing full well how fun it is to destroy maps with C4, grenade launchers, rockets, tanks... In BC2 you can bring down whole buildings on the enemies fighting from them and dig craters in the ground!
Bioshock has your character arrive on the scene in Rapture after a lot of crap has gone down. Evidence of firefights, messages written in blood on the walls, damaged electronics and wires, corpses, and whole areas frozen off by sub-zero seawater leaks are visible at every third step. Ghostly hallucinations and audiotapes give you an idea of what the slum used to be like.
During the first underwater section of the sequel, Subject Delta can see the Rapture skyline, complete with decaying, flooded buildings, made all the worse by the natural beauty of the seafloor.
BioShock Infinite does a great example of this, on the first half of the game you enjoy a scenic tour on the beauty of Columbia. Later on when the Vox Populi's uprising, the city has become a wartorn ghost town. You and Elizabeth visit the same island when you first came to Columbia, and it is now totally wrecked with parts of it having fallen off from the rest or some of it floating about.
Earned in Blood has St. Sauveur, a city located on a hill, with a large portion of it destroyed by Allied bombing.
Hell's Highway takes this up to eleven with Eindhoven, which is destroyed by German bombers and buildings are shown bombed out and burning in the process. And then there's "Hell's Highway", which goes even further, with burning vehicles and buildings at literally every other meter one looks.
Some games in Castlevania series feature this as backgrounds, which include destroyed buildings, flame, and hanged/impaled corpses.
One particularly notable instance is the first Stage of Rondo Of Blood, which is the town of Jova from Simon's Quest, set on fire and invaded by the undead.
In Cave Story, the Egg Corridor starts off nice and operational. When you visit it again later in the game, it's badly damaged as a result of the giant dragon egg hatching.
Chrono Cross gives us the Dead Sea, a city from 1999 AD frozen in the act of being destroyed by Lavos.
Command & Conquer, boy howdy! By Tiberian Sun, Earth is pretty much a ravaged, drought-ridden wasteland dotted with lovely things like Tiberian Weeds and raging ion storms. Only a scant few pockets of civilization remain on the blighted landscape, and even they are torn with the ongoing no-holds-barred beatdown between NOD and GDI. And then it goes From Bad to Worse in Tiberium Wars when we see just how xenoformed the Red Zones have become, with Tiberium "glaciers."
Company of Heroes featured this, but in a twist, instead of immediately starting off this, you are the one doing the destruction. It's a sight when you first start off, some french villas, beautiful market squares, and walls. But once the battle actually starts, artillery starts falling, blowing up houses, grenades and mortars start scarring the landscape, and tanks break apart the walls. By the end a battle, the landscape is completely changed, with only an inkling of the past beauty.
Many "City" stages in Contra series are this, usually since you're required to jump from a destroyed building to another while dodging alien rushes and bullets.
Dowerton Station, unpleasant enough in Dark Fall: The Journal, has graduated to full-on Scenery Gorn in Dark Fall: Lost Souls.
Dark Souls, a Dark Fantasy taking place in the ruined land of Lordran, naturally has plenty of this, from the decrepit Undead Burg to the vile shantytown pit of decay that is Blighttown to the water-logged ruins of New Londo. In fact, according to Director Miyazaki, this sort of beauty is a Central Theme of the game.
The Dark Tales series has a fair bit of Victorian Scenery Porn, but it also has a lot of this in the form of run-down buildings and devastated scenes.
Most places in Destiny are this, although the ones that aren't definitely qualify for the opposite. From what remains of Golden Age Earth to deep inside a nasty Hive lair, you'll see plenty which adds to the feeling of darkness that consumes you throughout.
In the bonus chapter of the second Detectives United game, James and Agent Brown visit an Alternate Dimension which is basically days away from an environmental apocalypse. The Alien Sky with its Red Filter of Doom just makes the destroyed appearance of the place that much more foreboding.
Devil May Cry 5: Red Grave City is degrading and the demons are invading. Instead of the pristine Gothic architecture of past Devil May Cry games, battles are fought across burning wreckage of a modern city which is also infested by parts of the giant Qliphoth tree.
The Butcher's room in Diablo, red with blood and full of human bodies mutilated, impaled and/or hung up on hooks.
Diablo III has the Halls of Agony, torture chambers filled gore, baskets of heads, and other horrors. The Desolate Sands are dull and lifeless, littered with bones and tar pits. Mount Arreat is a hellish volcano filled with black architecture and eyeless, tormented giants chained to the walls. The Heavens start largely pristine but become more and more polluted as the act progresses, growing dark and overrun by fleshy growths.
Reaper of Souls has Westmarch, a once-lively city littered with corpses and two courtyards nearly paved with piles of the dead. Pandemonium is a cold wasteland crumbling apart and filled with the ruins of an eons-long war.
Scorch 'n' Torch. You know those grassy plains you've been running through in the past few levels? Picture them, except on fire.
World 6, where you get to see all of the locations from the first game after they got turned into a frozen wasteland.
Dragon Age has more than its fair share of this in certain places.
Dragon Age: Origins has several examples. The Deep Roads, the tunnels connecting the cities and Thaigs of the Ancient Dwarven Empire, are now swarming with darkspawn and corrupted by their taint. The Circle Tower, after being overrun with Abominations and Blood Mages, has most of the upper floors covered in an oozy, fleshy... something, similar to Darkspawn corruption. Ostagar comes across as this in the Return to Ostagar DLC, where the former ruins are littered with the unburied dead from the ill-fated battle, swarming darkspawn, and the crude effigies they've constructed.
In Dragon Age II, the prologue takes place in the Blightlands, the area surrounding Lothering that has become tainted due to being overrun by the darkspawn horde. Most of the driving plot of Act 1 features Hawke preparing to join an expedition to an undiscovered part of the Deep Roads, while the Legacy DLC journeys to another part, which houses an ancient Grey Warden prison. Even much of the city of Kirkwall, where the main game takes place, has some of this going on; the place was built as a hotbed of slave labor a few centuries ago, and the architecture remains foreboding and unfriendly. The ambient music, with its weird chanting, does not help.
The Exalted Plains in Dragon Age: Inquisition is a ruined battlefield in the aftermath of a civil war; the land is scarred by ruined trenches, filled with bodies (both dead and undead), and topped by the banners of the two sides still lazily twisting in the wind, forgotten by the armies as they retreated from the undead attack. To make matters worse, the ambient music (if it can be called that) consists of little more than a combination of a mournful chord and an eerie, low humming sound.
Dragon Quest Builders takes place after the bad ending of Dragon Quest. Civilization in Alefgard has been laid to waste, and what buildings remain standing are dilapidated and in disrepair.
Needless to say, the Emergency! series has lots of this. Peaceful towns will be torn apart by every manner of disaster you can imagine.
Epic Mickey, most places are dark and ruined by default thanks to the Thinner Disaster. Places such as a ruined theme park and a ghost ship are downright nightmarish.
In Fable II the region of Wraithmarsh, complete with Banshees and a plethora of Hollow Men turns out to be the village of Oakvale from the first game which has gone to ruin since a young man later revealed to be Reaver sold it out and it was looted and the inhabitants slain. For a second time.
The introduction to Fallout ends with a slow zoom out to reveal the television we have been watching is sitting unattended in a ruined house in a blasted, ruined cityscape.
Fallout 3 opens with a slow pan back through a rusted, broken-down bus as "I Don't Want to Set the World on Fire" plays... until the camera swings up to reveal the ruins of Washington D.C. The gameplay lives up to this, so that the first thing you see after your eyes adjust from leaving Vault 101 is a scenic overlook of the post-apocalyptic Wasteland, with the half-skeletal Washington Monument far on the horizon.
Some tropers from the D.C. area have commented that the game became less fun when they recognized the blasted ruins of their real-life neighborhoods.
Fallout: New Vegas, while much more civilized than the Capital Wasteland (and for good reason), is a good mix of Scenery Gorn and Porn thanks to the rugged vistas of the Mojave and the ruins of the titular metropolis.
The DLC locations focus more on the Gorn. The Sierra Madre is one big, blasted resort town blanketed in a toxic Cloud. The Big Empty can be described by your character as looking like it was "tag-teamed by a pair of giant fuckbots." And the Divide is just hell, irradiated ruins flayed by a pitiless windstorm, the only significant sign of activity being the slowly flashing red beacon lights that hover over the scene as if warning passerby away.
Fallout 4 brings the series to the ruins of Boston, and while the area itself wasn't nuked directly, the city is in ruins, a sprawling, multi-level nightmare of urban combat between bands of raiders, mercenaries, and Super Mutants. Then there's the Glowing Sea, where the nuke did fall, an irradiated wasteland that will kill an unprotected explorer in a manner of minutes, assuming the local wildlife doesn't find them first. Worse, the danger of the Glowing Sea doesn't stay confined to it, and occasional Radiation Storms sweep through the Commonwealth and force the wise indoors.
Far Cry 5: In the Resist ending, Hope County, Montana is hit by a series of nuclear attacks as the Deputy and their companions race for the safety of Dutch's bunker. The drive there provides a first-hand view as the mushrooms clouds rise, cars crash, birds fall from the sky, animals run in terror, and everything is engulfed in flames as the sky turns into a hellish orange glow. All sent to a rock version of "The World's Gonna End Tonight"
In Final Fantasy V there's a place called Gorn Town that is essentially the abandoned ruin of an ancient town, complete with broken pillars, ruined buildings, and plants that have overgrown everything. It was renamed to Gohn in the GBA release, which somewhat ruins the joke.
The Ship Graveyard much earlier in the game also qualifies — an entire dungeon made up of nothing but wrecked and ruined ships, many of which are submerged.
In Final Fantasy VI, After the Endof the World of Balance occurs, and right before Celes' awakening, there's a silent camera pan across the new, twilit face of the World of Ruin, driving home the point that nothing will ever be the same anymore.
And then the ending cinematic indulges in Scenery Porn to show how despite all of the devastation, life (and hope) goes on.
Final Fantasy VII begins with this trope: a wretched cyberpunk metropolis of Midgar in birds-eye view... and then you fall into the shoes of terrorists blowing up a scary mad science installation.
Later, you have to climb a long rope to get up onto the top of the city to raid the Shinra Headquarters. On the way up you're treated to a view of the recently destroyed Sector 7, which really shows you the scale of how big of bastards Shinra are.
Another scene not that long afterwards (well, relatively; this is an RPG we're talking about) involves literal gore as well. Your party must outrun the Midgar Zolom to proceed, which, at this point in the game, is very strong. Upon escaping it, they prepare to enter the Mythril Mine... and see the corpse of another Midgar Zolom impaled on a tree, courtesy of Sephiroth.
Trabia Garden in Final Fantasy VIII. The garden Selphie was transferred from at the beginning of the game, it was only recently hit by missile strike. The devastation including bombed sportsground or makeshift graveyard among others really helps to convey a massive Tear Jerker to a player.
The Necrohol of Nabudis and surrounding Nabreus Deadlands from Final Fantasy XII. The city was destroyed offscreen during the intro by Reddas using Nethicite there, an event comparable to using a nuke that is repeatedly acknowledged during the game. The necrohol itself is a half-decaying, dimly lit, partly submerged ruin full of mist, while surrounding lands are foggy marshes infested with undead. The ruins are also quite similar to Nalbina fortress - the place where you control Reks - by its layout, so you have an approximate reference to how the untouched place supposedly looked like.
In Chapter 11 of Final Fantasy XIII, you visit Oerba Village, the hometown of Vanille and Fang, and find it a decaying, Cie'th-infested ruin, partially covered in crystal sand. It's one of the most powerful scenes in the game.
Lightning Returns: Final Fantasy XIII . Near the end of the game, you can see What amounts to a world-spanning tornado ravaging familiar locales from the previous games, including the above-mentioned Oerba. Justified considering the very nature of the game.
Final Fantasy XV gives us Insomnia in the World of Ruin. While it's implied that the rest of the world is the same, Insomnia is the only place you get to explore. The once-bustling city is shrouded in eternal night, its streets littered with debris and crawling with daemons. One particularly breathtaking moment has you standing atop the tallest building looking down at the city, which is completely dead and silent.
F.E.A.R. 2: Project Origin goes out of its way to show you just how horribly devastated post-explosion Fairport is. One of the most powerful moments is when you reach the epicenter of the explosion... or rather, the edge of the epicenter. Throughout the game, you've been seeing this titanic rising dust cloud spreading over the sky in the distance, but it isn't until the last hour or so of the game that you actually reach the crater itself, which is so vastly immense that standing at the edge simply boggles the mind.
Ghouls n' Ghosts's second stage is a derelict village of windmills (Pictured Above). In the Game Boy Advance port of Super Ghouls and Ghosts, a modified version of the stage appears in the new Arrange Mode as an alternative to that game's own original Gorn stage of a rotting shipyard.
Ghost of Tsushima: No thanks to the Mongol invaders, much of the beautiful island's scenery has been mutilated into a nightmare. The forest of Kamiagata region was burned down by the Mongols in an attempt to clear out bandits, leaving the area a charred wasteland. Komodo's beach is still littered with the bodies of slain samurai, the sand is stained red from the blood, and even Lady Masako's sons are strung up on a nearby tree. You also come across villages where the Mongols opted for destruction rather than subjugation, and the houses are hollowed out with bodies and severed heads skewered on pikes and trees with hanging corpses.
No matter how you choose to execute the FIB heist in Grand Theft Auto V, it ends up with the building being blown to hell and back. Most of the latter half of the heist involves escaping the blasted upper floors of the building as it burns and falls apart around you, and it's even possible for one of your crew members to be killed by falling rubble.
The tutorial of Guild Wars Prophecies ends with the Searing, magical fire raining down on your Doomed Hometown. The next few missions take place in the ruins, which are now a burned-out wasteland; this is particularly effective if you remember how beautiful it was during the tutorial. Other uses of Scenery Gorn include Nightfall's Desolation, a sulfurous desert inhabitable only by the undead and the demonic, and Realm of Torment, the hellish prison of a banished god.
Guild Wars 2 has Orr, a former human kingdom that sank beneath the waves for centuries only to rise after being corrupted by a dragon, all the while being infested with the undead. It's littered with the remains of what were beautiful cathedrals and palaces, most of which are encrusted with dead sea life and enormous filmy eyes.
Lion's Arch became this after the Living Story ended. Originally the main city for players and filled with NPCs, it's been reduced to a rubble-filled, scarred wreck with only a scattering of guards to keep out the looters and workers. And that doesn't count the month where it was overrun with enemies, polluted with poison, and on fire.
Halo 3: ODST plays this especially strongly during the nighttime segments of prowling the Covenant-occupied New Mombasa. Abandoned cars, destroyed vehicles, and burning buildings are common.
Halo: Reach takes this up to eleven, particularly in the level "New Alexandria". Made harsher by Scenery Porn in the first chapters.
The end section of the third level of Halo 4 lets you experience Scenery Gorn that's in the process of being made, as you ride a permanently-boosting Ghost through the canyons of Requiem's core level while the landscape all around you is being violently torn apart by a slipspace anomaly overhead, accompanied by Grunts running for their lives, the ground itself seizing and fragmenting beneath you, and "Escape".
When playing Hotline Miami 2: Wrong Number on hard mode, the background of the level selection screen shows ruins of Miami drawn in a rather sombre palette. In order to unlock the hard mode, the player has to finish the game on normal difficulty first, and the ending reveals that most of the world was destroyed in a nuclear conflict between the USA and Soviet Russia.
Take a look and compare the differences between the maps of Hyrule Field◊ and Ganon's Tower in Hyrule Warriors. No wonder the narrator said that every time the Triforce fell into the hands of evil, the land fell into misery.
In inFAMOUS, a good portion of Empire City is in ruins, which makes for a more visually interesting setting than the generic cityscape Empire looked like before the RaySphere went off. True, it's mostly a boring gray, but even that serves a purpose as it contrasts nicely with Cole's colorful electricity-based powers.
The city of New Marais from inFAMOUS 2 has its own example in Flood Town — a ruined parish, still flooded and in ruin, with scrawled messages all over the buildings as the people who live there try to hold on.
One of the first few things to realize in Inazuma Eleven 2 is that the whole Raimon academy is totally destroyed by aliens. The scene specially pans on the soccer club, which is the heroes' important stronghold in the first game. The school gets better and more fabulous than ever.
The ruined areas of Haven City in Jak 3: Wastelander. It's unnerving when you can make out areas you've visited in the previous game now in a state of severe ruin.
Chapter 12 of Kid Icarus: Uprising takes place on a massive, already war-torn battlefield that becomes even more derelict when the Goddess of Nature, Viridi, makes her grand entrance by dropping a massive plant-bomb and converting the whole area into a tangled mess of trees, vines, and the occasional piece of building.
The Last of Us features some impressive shots of ruined cities. Boston in particular is a harsh reminder that the world as you knew it is gone.
In Legend of Legaia, this is Conkram in its current state. It's one of the few video game architectures that sends Legaia's level design right into Silent Hill Territory. Between people trapped in walls, guards that open the pathway by splitting up the flesh that joins them together, helpless citizens screaming incoherently from the unbearable pain they've been experiencing non-stop for over ten years, and overall oppressive atmosphere, it's a complete nightmare and Hell on Earth. It's one of the most poignant examples of the horrors of the Mist, and a level that can be repulsive to many gamers playing through it.
When Link emerges from the Temple of Time for the first time as an adult, he sees the devastation that Ganondorf's seven-year reign has wrought. The bright, colorful Market with its happy music has been turned to ruins, the carefree villagers replaced by Redead zombies. Likewise, beautiful and majestic Hyrule Castle has been replaced by the onyx coloured Ganon's Castle — hovering over a lake of molten lava, to boot.
While all the temples Link explores have an eerie atmosphere, the Bottom of the Well and the Shadow Temple put the others back to shame. Both places are extremely dark, have torture instruments with blood painted on the floor, some rooms have creepy facial motifs that tell you stories about "Hyrule's blood-stained history of greed and hatred" or others filled with skulls and bones. And we're not talking about the mini-bosses...
As well, The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker has Greatfish Isle, which has been ripped to shreds by Ganondorf's forces, forcing Jabun to flee and hide out on Outset Island. Considering the rest of the game is mostly Scenery Porn, the sight of what has befallen Greatfish Isle is extremely jarring, likely intentionally so.
The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild is a good example of this. Most of Hyrule has been destroyed, the once lively towns turned into ruins and Hyrule Castle surrounded by malice and corrupted Guardians.
Manhunt is made of this trope, as the story takes place in a crappy, run-down stand-in for New York City. From the abandoned projects to the empty mall, it's everywhere.
Mass Effect 3: pick a world attacked by Reapers, any world. There's Earth, where you're gunning down Husks not a hundred feet from Reaper Destroyers and their foghorns from hell; Palaven, where you watch from orbit as cities are consumed by enormous firestorms; Tuchanka, which is still a desolate planet full of crumbling ruins and baked dirt although there is still greenery there, and you can do a lot to help; Rannoch, which might or might not feature the remnants of the entire quarian Migrant Fleet falling from orbit; Thessia, which is in the process of being crushed by the Reapers; and the Citadel itself, which is torn up by a Cerberus assault and sports scarred decks, charred walls, and splattered blood for the rest of the game. Suffice to say, the galaxy looks like Hell — and it kind of is.
Mass Effect: Andromeda: Former planet H-047C, which was blown to pieces by a Negative Space Wedgie. The only view consists of mile after mile of completely dead planet, and chunks of dead planet floating around. All lovingly rendered with the game's high-definition graphics. Ryder will even comment that, terrifying though it is to be there, the views are pretty spectacular.
MechWarrior really got into the proper scenery gorn around the era of Mechwarrior 3, wherein you could see the ruined towns of the small planet of Tranquil, destroyed in the fighting with Clan Smoke Jaguar. More impressive ruined cityscapes were availble in the Mechwarrior 4 setting, amid the combat of the Fed-Com civil war, particularly on the Steiner capital of Tharkad during Operation Checkmate. The destroyed scenery has truly come to a head in Mechwarrior Online and Mechwarrior 5, due to the inclusion of dedicated city combat maps and the option for your own 'Mechs to level entire buildings by virtue of weapons fire, melee attacks, or just wading through them.
Metro 2033 has this when you get out onto the surface, coupled with snow, howling wind, and ruined buildings.
In Modern Warfare 2, the beginning of "Of Their Own Accord". You come out of the bunker and the trenches, to be presented with the ruins of the Washington Monument filling your screen, and the National Mall churned up by shellfire and more trenches. Just to ram the point home, the level up to that point has no music, only radio chatter and distant shell-fire. As you come out of the trench, the music starts, and it's a heartbreaking orchestral piece, perfect to set the tone.
In Mortal Kombat 9, the stages set in Earthrealm during the events of Mortal Kombat 3 feature cityscapes being ravaged by the invading forces of Outworld. Debris, smoke, fire, and the occasional giant monster abound.
Elephant Games are known for these in their Mystery Trackers game series as much of the locations that the player visits are abandoned towns and buildings due to either supernatural disasters or man-made disrepair. And in their joint production of Fate's Carnival for the Mystery Case Files series, their highly detailed rendition of Madame Fate's carnival is scarier than its original design.
Every game in Mystery Case Files's Ravenhearst arc get progressively scarier and scarier, to the point where Escape From Ravenhearst and Ravenhearst Unlocked needed Content Warnings for not only the horrifyingly scary plots but also for the nightmare-inducing Bedlam House settings.
The Nancy Drew games will occasionally dabble in this, with many stories taking place in antique buildings in various stages of disrepair. The shining example is The Ghost of Thornton Hall. The titular hall is an old Southern Gothic mansion that's crumbling down, overrun with ivy, and still amazingly beautiful.◊
The main areas of NieR: Automata are full of gorgeous looking ruined, post-apocalyptic cityscapes.
The Nightmare Ned video game features some really scary scenes, as per the name.
Most areas of Odium, especially the docks in the beginning.
A Plague Tale: Innocence has gorgeous landscapes in some scenes. More often the characters are making their way through rather less nice places. A farm heaped with dead pigs, a battlefield layered with corpses, a plague-ridden town, and most of these have the bonus of swarms of hostile plague rats. The blackened skeleton-studded Meat Moss on all surfaces where the rats have had free reign takes pride of place and combines with some imposting architecture towards the end.
Gates To Infinity has this when you're going through the Glacier Palace and fighting the Bittercold. The Palace is beautiful and elaborate, but once you know it's the fortress of the enemy, it's suddenly the symbol of an ensuing chaos that will consume all.
The Enrichment Center in the beginning areas of Portal 2 definitely fits. It's even eerier when you can easily recognize places from the first Portal now crumbling and decaying.
[PROTOTYPE] starts you off in a decent-looking version of Manhattan. As The Virus spreads, the infected areas increase in size — and these are nasty, with blood-red skies, fleshy tendrils crawling across the architecture, crows circling overhead, and, at the center of each one, a building covered in giant, throbbing, suppurating zits. Ew.
The infamous final level of Psychonauts shows us what happens when two mental planes collide with one another. In this case, its the mind of the protagonist, who grew up in a circus, and the antagonist, who grew up in a butcher shop. Neither of their childhoods were exactly happy, and what we get is a truly nauseating landscape known only as the "MeatCircus". Despite the notorious difficulty of the place, it needs to be seen to believe.
Raid on Taihoku takes place in the titular city, after a massive air raid. Right in the first cutscene you see most of the buildings reduced to ruins and the stench of death everywhere, as the opening FMV where the camera sweeps across a body-strewn street. Later during gameplay a few stages sees you running across Taihoku's ruins in the middle of a follow-up bombing to seek shelter.
Radiation Island: The wrecked buildings and military hardware you discover all over the island. There's an Oh, Crap! moment or two when you find a pile of battleships dumped on the beach like broken toys. Or the wrecked hospital with all the patient beds stacked into massive pyramids. Or the extended radiation area enclosing a massive cemetery. Explore at your own risk.
A standout examples from Ratchet & Clank would be whole Blizar Prime and Cordelion research facility from Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart. The former is essentially shaterred planet the remains of which you visit, the latter is an abandoned and visibly decaying research facility on platform in the ocean frozen solid by ongoing snowstorm. What sells it besides truly impressive artistic and graphic representation is that during the gamplay you switch between Gorn dimensions and the ones where everything was still intact, allowing you to directly compare how they looked like before everything went to hell.
Red Dead Redemption uses a downplayed version of this for powerful impact partway through the game. When you first enter Mexico, there's beautifully-rendered scenic landscape for miles in every direction... and absolutely no sign of human habitation. It takes a full in-game day's ride before you finally find the nearest town. Paired with the song "Far Away", it emphasizes just how hopeless John's mission feels at that point.
Resident Evil. The old school Playstation series resorted to using static images for scenarios due to their much higher detail, which happened to be good enough to stick for the Gamecube releases.
Resident Evil 3: Nemesis deserves special mention for its many cutscenes depicting Raccoon City's descent into chaos, culminating in a nuclear strike that obliterates the entire town. It was very impressive CGI at the time, and even today the destruction is glorious to behold.
Resistance 2 shows a shot of San Francisco in flames, being destroyed by Chimera ships, a destroyed Chicago, flooded and filled with corpses as the Chimeran Citadel looms over the city and the abandoned suburban towns of Orick and Twin Falls, made worse by the fact that each town is filled with cocoons, especially the child-sized ones that fill the playgrounds and backyards.
Rising Storm features beautiful jungle environments and Pacific islands interspersed with traps, machine-gun nests, trenches, flaming huts, and knocked out or abandoned vehicles. On maps such as Peleliu and Iwo Jima, vegetation has been burned altogether thanks to constant shelling, leaving a lifeless husk of an island to fight on.
Rising Storm 2: Vietnam continues the trend of showing beautiful jungles interspersed with the above, only now this includes wrecked South Vietnamese cities, with Hue and Saigon in particular shown to be full of destroyed tanks, burnt-out buildings, and dozens of shell craters.
Blasted Tokyo, a version of Tokyo that's been leveled by the angels so badly that the entire place is nothing but desert, massive craters, a Rainbow Bridge just intact enough to let you cross to a plot-important area, and underground shelters. It's so ruined beyond recognition that the game doesn't bother labeling the various districts as you travel through them on the map.
Infernal Tokyo, a version of Tokyo that's bruised up, on fire in many areas, and full of smoke and rubble, thanks to the constant turf wars by the various Demonoid factions. Unlike the above entry, at least the region is still quite recognizable, but even the Chaos-leaning Walter was initially shocked upon seeing how unstable the place looks.
Emblematic of the Silent Hill series, which at best features abandoned, fog-shrouded streets and buildings in varying states of disuse and decay, and often switches to a twisted mirror characterised by blood, metal gratings, rust, blood, and more blood. Oh, and monsters. Lots of monsters.
The bad futures in Sonic CD are dystopian worlds corrupted by Dr. Eggman. Sonic can make these futures better if he fixes what Eggman has done wrong in the past.
The 2006 game features Crisis City, a desolate, ruined city of the future full of flames and wreckage.
The final battle of Sonic Adventure takes place in a flooded Station Square filled with broken buildings and highways.
Halfway through the first act of Angel Island Zone in Sonic 3 & Knuckles, the jungle the stage takes place in is set on fire. It continues to burn throughout the rest of the stage.
Shadow the Hedgehog takes place in the midst of an Alien Invasion, with the very first stage depicting a city being torn asunder. There are quite a few other stages depicting such carnage, as well. Following certain paths in the game also treats the player to a cutscene of the Eclipse Cannon wiping a city off the face of the earth.
Sonic Forces takes place in a dystopian world taken over by Eggman. Some levels aren't changed that dramatically (Green Hill has seen its water changed to sand), but Park Avenue is a stage in the process of being ripped up by Death Egg Robots, with Sonic blazing through to find Shadow while Knuckles, the Chaotix and Silver keep them at bay, and the entire stage looks awesome.
In The Silent Age the scenery 40 years into the future is designed to depict all sorts of decay and absolute abandonment by any living being, save for the flora. Buildings crumbling, windows broken, skeletons everywhere, rust, dust, dirt, and electricity out. The final future destination over hundreds of years into the future exhibits all the same signs of decline, only partly turning into an eerie jungle.
Sonic and All-Stars Racing Transformed: In a span of a three-lap race, the game loves to invoke literal destruction of a stage's landmarks in order to change the track's layout and force racers into different vehicle modes. For example, Rogues Landing and Sanctuary Falls start off rather peaceful, but by the third lap, the respective series' Big Bads blow half of the areas off.
This trope is almost the entire point of Space Funeral.
Want to see what a post-apocalyptic, post-sandstorm Dubai looks like? Play Spec Ops: The Line and feast your eyes!
In Splinter Cell: Conviction, Downtown Washington, D.C. after the EMP bombs go off with wrecked buildings or vehicles, fires in the streets and various casualties (you even get to see someone succumb to his wounds before your eyes, with his companion weeping over his body) does more to drive in the evil of Tom Reed's plan than any amount of ranting could. Similarly, the inside of the White House is also disturbing.
S.T.A.L.K.E.R. actually manages to do a good job of this. You don't expect to see abject ruination on the scale of an all-out nuclear post-apocalypse, but the empty, decaying land and the ugly concrete convey the idea of an eerily unlivable zone picked over by the desperate. Of course, then you find the mutants, zombies, and deadly anomalies — but aside from all that, just the patina of rust and decrepitude over everything is haunting.
In the early betas, STALKER featured even more desolation and destruction; eg. the Dead City with collapsed Soviet-era flats, an old research center in the Dark Valley, and more.
Most of the scenery is directly based on the photos taken by the game designers in the real area surrounding the infamous Chernobyl nuclear plant. Which, in turn, may not be Scenery Gorn to some but a fascinating and perhaps beautiful outlook into the future after humanity.◊ There have been a few references on the History Channel taking a look at this in their Life After Humans series.
The ghillie sniper missions from Call of Duty 4 evoke a similar atmosphere, albeit without anything more fantastic than arms-trading terrorists and wild hounds.
Certain areas of Starcraft II, particularly when the Zerg come calling. Tarsonis, Tyrador, and Aiur are big on crumbling buildings, corpses, infestation, and creep, but none of them to the gleeful extent of Mordor Char, especially in "The Gates Of Hell".
Sunless Skies: Some of the Spectacles qualify. Only one among the Wonder sort (the still-chiming remains of the Big Ben), but several of the Horror sort qualify, such as ancient ruins crawling with Correspondence and the remains of a mine where the workers disturbed an entire nest of Space Whales.
Super Metroid has Old Tourian, the wreckage of the first game's Tourian, as well as the wrecked ship.
Metroid Fusion: After you destroy Nettori, Nightmare lays waste to Sector 5, flooding most of the area.
Metroid Prime 3: Corruption: The desolate and ruined environments on Bryyo manage to be quite spectacular and awesome. It's taken even further with the decrepit GFS Valhalla, which was violently ravaged by the Space Pirates and all that remains is corpses, stray creatures, ruined machinery, and a desolate atmosphere.
Because of the post-apocalyptic setting for Fragile Dreams: Farewell Ruins of the Moon, expect areas like a deserted amusement park and subway station to be full of this trope.
The Ruined Zoo in Super Smash Bros. Brawl: The opening cut scenes depict a run-down, abandoned zoo against a dark murky sky and a lone animal howling in the distance. Once the actual stage begins, however, it's Mood Dissonance to the extreme, featuring music such as this.
The Mushroomy Kingdom stage is almost this. It is a decayed, abandoned, desolate version of the classic World 1-1 from Super Mario Bros.. What it lacks in actual ruins (aside from the blocks and pipes), it makes up for with wasteland and tragic remixes.
Definitely System Shock 2. Seeing what happened to the Von Braun...
The Talos Principle: The "Free Will" ending features the destruction of the entire simulation before you are uploaded to the SOMA/TALOS unit.
Teslagrad is set in an abandoned mage's tower, which continues to look gorgeous even as it slowly crumbles and decays.
Being set in Warhammer 40,000, Dawn of War, its expansions and sequel, has this trope out the wazoo. Levels of devastation range from "simple" craters and structural damage to piles of bodies and ruined vehicles to the very ground and sky itself mutilated and warped by the influence of the Immaterium.
Dawn of War II: Retribution may take the cake. One mission has you deploy to a world only for an Imperial fleet to warp in moments later and prepare the world for Exterminatus. Your objective changes from "Get the Big Bad" to "Run like hell to the teleporter beacon." The world has been transformed from a verdant jungle to a burning hellscape, and you race your heroes along the molten rims of craters extending miles into the planet's crust as the ground heaves and screams beneath you. Meanwhile Chaos forces, Tyranids, and Orks are in a frenzy, alternating between running madly and attacking each other in a blind panic. It's both spectacular and screamingly difficult.
In World in Conflict, most of the campaign and multiplayer battles tend to end with the map you've been fighting over reduced to nothing more than blackened ground, craters, and ruins - artillery is cheap, napalm is fair game, and more than one tactical nuke can be dropped per game. The sky even darkens a little from all the smoke if a battle drags out.
Many of the maps in World of Tanks are the bombed-out remains of cities and towns, all rendered in intricate detail; this is especially true of the HD update, where you can now visit the lonely wastes of Ghost Town and Sand River, the industrial husks of Widepark and Ensk, or the solemn ruins of Kharkov and Stalingrad.
The Plaguelands in World of Warcraft, as well as most of the other undead areas. The Eastern Plaguelands are particularly decrepit; the sky is a sickly rusty orange, the trees have tumorous growths sticking out of them, there are mutant creatures everywhere, and that's all before you reach the Plaguewood. It all gives a definite impression that the land itself is poisoned and rotting.
Large parts of Outlands in the Burning Crusade qualify for this, seeing as the entire continent is what was left after the world Draenor was destroyed.
After the Cataclysm expansion, a good percentage of Azeroth's geography now counts as this. Ironically, even as the Barrens have been split in two by a molten fissure and the Badlands scarred by dragonfire, the Western Plaguelands have made a nearly full recovery from the plague of undeath.
The Dread Wastes in Mists of Pandaria are hauntingly beautiful in spots, but much of them has been ruined by Sha corruption.
The Vale of Eternal Blossoms became this after Garrosh stole the Heart of Y'shaarj. Once the most beautiful zone on the continent, the waters are now dry and a giant scar of Sha corruption runs down the middle, even shattering its iconic sentinel statues.
The Broken Shore in Legion is a mass of shattered rock and fel lava, peppered with demonic structures leading to the Tomb of Sargeras.
Argus is even worse, consisting of three continental masses torn free from the ravaged planet itself, with Krokuun and the Antoran Wastes being more extreme version of the Broken Shore. Eredath appears beautiful at first glance; but the earth has been shattered since then, and void corruption is spreading to pollute the land.
X Com Enemy Unknown: Some of the new maps in Enemy Within are breathtakingly desolated. "Portent", the first map in the Operation Progeny storyline, stands out in particular.
Much of Cauldros in Xenoblade Chronicles X. Notably The Capital Wreckage, The Ruined City of O'rrh Sim, and The Kw'arah Cloister.
While Xenoblade Chronicles 2 does sport some fantastic picturesque locales, places like Spirit Crucible Elpys and the Land of Morytha are pretty hard on the eyes. It doesn't help that one is the corpse of a Titan that drains the ether of your Blades until they're dead for good and that the other is what's left of our world after Klaus engaged his experiment, creating the world of Alrest we know as of the events of the game. Needless to say, neither result is at all pretty.
The Zombie Army Trilogy has this twice over. It's Germany in the closing months of World War II, so every building is bombed out and ruined and piles of rubble are everywhere, plus the Zombie Apocalypse means liberal amounts of blood, dismembered body parts and bodies, pentagrams, piles of viscera and impaled corpses. If you're squeamish about this sorta thing, you probably should skip this game.
◊ pretty much sums up the mood of the new "Wonderland" created by Alice's unbalanced mind.
