Darkest Third-Person Shooters

The third-person shooter genre, similarly to the first-person equivalent, has slowly turned to the darker side over the last two decades. With horror games becoming more popular, in addition to plenty of game narratives becoming more nuanced and psychological in nature, the shift to a darker style is natural.

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This means that, while there are still plenty of light-hearted games in many genres coming out today, the general nature of the third-person shooters being released has changed. Darker stories, fewer white knight protagonists, and more grayness all around are what fill many such games in the genre today.

6 Alan Wake

Any game that was set up to be the video gaming version of a dark, thriller TV series, with an episodic format throughout the game, was likely to contain a lot of darkness. The developers at Remedy Entertainment described Alan Wake as having “the mind of a psychological thriller” but the game skirts the edges of becoming an outright survival horror entry.

Alan Wake follows an author who goes on a vacation to see a famous psychologist, and ends up in an intense series of sequences against nightmarish creatures, never quite sure what is real. Having mostly third-person shooter elements over any more horror-based content, Alan Wake is the perfect game to revisit for lovers of dark shooters, especially with the sequel on its way.

5 Mafia: Definitive Edition

The Mafia series focuses on exactly what the title suggests, as players take control of a taxi driver in the 1930s who becomes a member of the Salieri crime family and rises within the organization by completing a variety of criminal activities, making for a pretty dark and twisted story.

Mafia is a fascinating game that was recently remastered with a definitive edition, prompting a lot of players to rediscover the dark, even at times chilling story within. From the moment when it is discovered that everybody Tommy secretly saved has been murdered, to the depressing ending and what it says about the world, Mafia is a truly dark, though fascinating, game to try out. There are also a whole bunch of great games similar to the Mafia franchise available.

4 Max Payne

Any game that opens with the lead character’s family being brutally murdered by junkies is likely filled with darkness. Max Payne is another game set in a dark world of crime, conspiracies, and intrigue, going as far as using gritty-style graphic novel panels throughout the game, and the nature of the story took a lot of inspiration from hard-boiled detective novels.

Max Payne is a great franchise with a unique style, always including a lot of darkness as Max traverses various secret societies, gets framed multiple times for murder, and kills a lot of people. The game also has drug-induced nightmare sequences, just to make sure the darkness is in the forefront of the player’s mind throughout.

3 Returnal

One of the strangest games released in recent years, Returnal is set on an alien planet where explorer and pilot Selene crashes after trying to investigate a strange signal. She then discovers corpses of herself and realizes that after dying, time loops back to her crashing onto the planet, making for an initially terrifying premise.

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Returnal works in a roguelike fashion, so every time players die they are looped with Selene back to the crash. The game is heart-breaking, at one point Selene even escapes the planet, returns to Earth, lives a life, and dies of old age, only to reawaken on Atropos again during the crash. Returnal is a game filled with darkness and devastating themes that make players question everything.

2 Days Gone

Zombie games are generally sad affairs, after all, there is a lot of darkness and terror in the entire world being devastated by a pandemic that kills almost all of the planet's population. Days Gone is set a couple of years after just such an apocalyptic event and follows Deacon St John in his attempts to find the wife he initially believed to be dead.

The subject material throughout the story of Days Gone is generally quite brutal, with cults and betrayal at every turn. This is all in addition to the overarching story about NERO’s research and their involvement in knowing about mutated freakers. Days Gone has bright spots throughout, but generally, the story and world are some of the darkest in recent gaming history.

1 The Last Of Us Part 2

By far one of the darkest and most controversially tragic games in recent years, The Last Of Us Part 2 decided to take a fascinating approach. While not strictly a shooter, the game incorporates many third-person shooter elements in addition to stealth and survival horror ones. Instead of choosing to just focus back down on the relationship between Joel and Ellie, the main duo from the already dark first game in the series, Part 2 doubled down on the bleakness of the post-apocalyptic world where they had been living by dealing with the consequences of Joel’s former actions.

This led to Abby, a character who was the daughter of someone Joel had killed in the first game, coming back for vengeance. This led to a brutal ensuing conflict where players took control of both Abbie and Ellie at various points as they sought each other out. At different points, both engage in horrors in their search for vengeance, making many players uncomfortable with the level of darkness the game achieves as it continues to challenge their moral compass.

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