by mento
With many video games, where the stakes rarely dip below "apocalyptic", you're often either trying to prevent a world-ending event or trying to survive in whatever climate remains after the fact. It's rare when you're there to witness it happen, or at least its early stages. Often, however, the threat of annihilation alone isn't enough player motivation to prevent it: we've all heard the villain's speech about releasing the evil god, or had the scene with the scientists discussing the impact of the meteor, or saw a vision of the future that chilled the heroes to the bone. Games sometimes like to really turn the screws, making their last (or in some cases, their first or middle) acts really heavy on the melancholic and ominous atmosphere. Some really real shit's about to go down, unless you do something about it.
The following are a list of games that use various visual and audial techniques to emphasize the hopelessness that their respective worlds face without the player's intervention, or sometimes even in spite of it. These games put truth to the idea that while a Earth-shattering kaboom is bad enough, the trepidation before it happens can be practically suffocating.
I've mentioned a few music tracks and there's no way to input them into lists, so I've put them here:
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Chrono Trigger actually does this twice, because that's how Squaresoft's time-travelling RPG rolls. The first comes when the party finds themselves in the dismal ashen future of 2300AD and are introduced - via video footage - to the entity known as Lavos. Lavos, the meanest pinecone on the block, is fated to awaken 999 years into Crono's future and spell doom for every living thing on the planet with its violent awakening. Walking around in its aftermath is a powerful means, unique to the game's non-linear relationship with time, of giving the player a window into what will happen if they're not able to bring Lavos down before he parties like it's 1999.
The second concerns the Black Omen: an enormous flying warship created by Queen Zeal to wait out the emergence of Lavos. Presumably, she intends to sit on the ship's deck on a lawnchair with a cocktail and watch the world burn. It sits in the skies for millennia after the heroes accidentally allow it to be activated in 12,000 BC, existing in all time eras thereafter. It's made especially unnerving by how used to the sight everyone is, as it has technically been there since time immemorial; Crono's Mom casually remarks in passing how beautiful the Black Omen looks today with the sunlight glittering off it. No-one save the player and Crono's party are aware of its grim significance, but it still serves to make the world just that little bit more foreboding.
Even before the player arrives in Yharnam, it's not exactly in a position to be welcoming holiday makers. Madmen suffering various levels of homicidal lycanthropy prowl the streets, the few sane citizens have boarded up their homes and are resorting to quivering under the sheets, and there's at least one really misguided plan to contact a race of otherworldly deities that has been put into motion. Yet even as the player's hunter goes around systematically putting down the rabid hounds of the Healing Church, they're powerless to stop the machinations of forces they cannot yet comprehend. When the hunter drops through a barrier between dimensions to take down a hideous failed attempt to evolve a human into a celestial being, a veil is lifted from the world and it's only then when the reality of just how much of a pickles on parade Yharnam is in becomes clear. Yharnam isn't just (literally) going to the dogs, but is poised on the precipice between our world and a terrifying universe beyond our ken.
Technically, no-one but the party knows for sure about the coming of Nyx, after her herald and manifestation of the Death Arcana - Ryogi Mochizuki - drops some harsh truth bombs come Christmas time. Strega's been busy spreading the gospel, however, because the last few months of the game's calendar sees the rise of an apocalyptic cult that continues to spread despite the efforts of SEES. The Shin Megami Tensei series has always done apocalypses well, usually as part of the opening act, so they've had a lot of practice orchestrating end of the world parties. Even so, there's a certain sadness whenever you walk around the once bustling metropolis of Iwatodai and find most of the streets abandoned but for hundreds of flyers and graffiti for the cult in question, and that's reflected in the quiet, melancholy remixes of the city's and school's themes. Whether everyone's quietly praying for salvation at home or taking part in enormous "who cares, we're all dying anyway" hedonistic bacchanals, the player (sadly) does not get to find out.
Talking of deadly moons, though, we should visit Termina to talk about Majora's Mask's final few hours. Majora's Mask has been derided for numerous reasons by various persons, some of whom work for this very website, but it's hard to fault its sense of atmosphere. Termina's central hub of civilization Clock Town has a jaunty tune throughout the three days of the game's setting, though each day brings with it a new ominous bass edge to its folksy reverie. When it reaches the last few hours of the final day, there's no longer any pretense that something will come along and save the town: the music becomes fully hopeless as the final bells chime to welcome Mr. Grimace to his new Earthly digs. The player still has time to intervene but every fiber of their being is telling them to get the heck out of there and start over, the ambience being as crushing as the moon itself.
There's no prolonged period of apocalyptic fervor before Kefka decides to enact his last-second plan to doom the planet to a series of natural and unnatural disasters by disrupting the flow of the world's magical energies to make himself all-powerful, becoming the sort of demonic clown deity that Shaggy 2 Dope and Violent J can only wish they were. The World of Ruin isn't quite beyond the point of recovery; it's more that any semblance of sanity and order is hanging on for dear life. There's a few moments of optimism that hints at a comeback, but not while terrors haunt the skies, dinosaurs walk the Earth, octopuses run colloseums and Pennywise's meaner older brother sits atop a spire of broken dreams ready to snuff out all existence on a whim whenever he deems the comedic timing to be perfect.
There's a landmark moment in Persona 4 when Teddie emerges from the "television world" - which, alongside everyone's favorite rotund mascot, harbors vicious manifestations of peoples's psychological flaws known as Shadows and a permeating fog which seems to produce them. It doesn't occur to the party that if Teddie can find his way through to our world, so too can that fog. While most of the citizens of Inaba see the mists (or barely see them, as the case may be) as an irritating and unusual weather phenomenon, others are able to perceive to some extent just how deadly it may prove to be and react with predictable panic. The Investigation Team still has enough time to find the source of the truth-obfuscating fog and take it out of commission before anything worse comes to pass, but walking through an opaque Inaba is still ominous as heck and the music reflects that.
It's a bit of a cheat to invoke Forbidden Siren, since the event that causes the calamity occurs minutes after the game starts. However, it's easy to get a sense of what the idyllic Hanuda was like shortly before the entire rural village was whisked off to a pocket dimension governed by a disgruntled interdimensional insectoid god and its legion of zombified cultists that were once the villagers. Being a scenario-based game with many different characters, almost all of whom have their own reasons for being in Hanuda when a ritual goes horribly awry, there's many interpretations of the game's story and setting and what's happening to them personally. For many, they are not privy to the town's well-hidden dark past and secretive rituals and thus have no way of understanding what is occurring, often being killed or driven insane in the process. It's a really neat way to get in the heads of the hapless bystanders who tend to die horribly in horror fiction such is this, tasking the player to make some progress saving the day with the game's ostensible hero Kyoya Suda one moment and then putting them in the terrified, doomed shoes of random school teacher Reiko Tatako or trashy TV reporter Naoko Mihama the next.
Secret of Mana was the first SNES game I'd ever played to make me feel a sense of wonder from its Mode 7 enhancements. I hadn't yet played earlier examples of the technology, such as the spinning rooms of Super Castlevania IV, the vertiginous skydiving of Pilotwings or the rotating courses of F-Zero and Super Mario Kart, so I was always deeply impressed by how momentous each trek across Secret of Mana's world map was, whether you were being fired out of a cannon or flying across continents on your dragon companion Flammie. Not enough can be said about the game's excellent music either, especially on that world map where the music would eventually switch from the innocent sense of adventure that Flight Into the Unknown evoked to the more determined Prophesy, which becomes the standard world map music for the end game after the sinister Mana Fortress rises into the skies. What struck the hardest chord with me though, was during a brief moment in the story between when the bad guys managed to raise a sunken continent and then freed the Mana Fortress from beneath that same continent, where the portentous Star of Darkness is played on the world map instead: this indicated that the game's relatively carefree earlier chapters had ended and the world had been changed irrevocably.
Star Control 2 is a near perfect space exploration game. Its one downside, and this is largely a subjective quality, is that it has an invisible time limit that begins as soon as you start the game. Given that it takes a little time to get anywhere in the immense portion of the galaxy that the player can traverse, and that completing missions for the various sentient alien civilizations you're hoping to ally with can also take anywhere between a few days and a few weeks of in-game time depending on how quickly you're able to find their planets and resolve their issues, it's fair to say that it's entirely possible to hit the terminus of this time limit without realizing it. What happens next is that the heretical Kohr-Ar branch of the Ur-Quan - an ancient race of insectoids that got burned once by being too accepting of other species, and has thus either enslaved or imprisoned every other sentient spacefaring race for their own protection - manages to win their little civil war and enacts their own variation of the Ur-Quan doctrine: which is to say that it would be far safer in the long run to simply exterminate all other forms of life instead. Planet by planet, the Kohr-Ar will march across the known galaxy genociding every alien species you may or may not have befriended. If the Kohr-Ar are not stopped in time, they eventually reach Earth and the game ends on something of a dour note. If you're in the unfortunate position to have dithered too long and are able to witness these cullings as they happen, the game's cheeky sense of B-movie fun really turns on a dime.
