Dark Atmosphere in Games
Spoiler Warning: Slight Spoiler Warning for Dead Cells and a major one for Hollow Knight.
There is a certain atmosphere in video games that really wins my appreciation and gets me to fall in love with their worlds—dark atmospheres with harsh, cruel worlds that lie in ruin. Not an apocalyptic event, not one big explosion or event that led to this destruction, more rather a slow decline as the flames of society snuffed out one by one, leaving few to inhabit the broken land. Not stories of Earth, but rather embracing the fantasy elements to give a feeling of unease and sadness to exploring. Claustrophobia and anxiety through each corridor. A few games that do this atmosphere well are Dark Souls, Dead Cells, and Hollow Knight. Each of these games tells the story of a world slowly falling to ruin, and you as the player must seek to end whatever predicament or force that keeps this world in ruin.
A few things each of these games does to make the world as oppressive and foreboding as possible is in the gameplay itself. Dark Souls, especially with enemies and environments that will do anything and everything to kill you. There are no safety railings or invisible walls to prevent you from falling off cliffs. Enemies are relentless, and death will be a constant occurrence until a player learns to dodge and judge attack windup properly. Bosses are even harder, with very large health pools (The amount of damage required to kill them), and dealing enough damage to you to make mistakes is incredibly costly. Hollow Knight is similar to a lesser extent with its enemies, putting most difficulty into fine-tuning bosses to challenging but fair perfection. Dead Cells has somewhat of an opposite approach where bosses are a bit easier, but a common enemy, if given the chance, can kill you in instants. This feeling of death looming around every corner makes them so fun to explore, as you never know when your journey will be cut short.
These games also make the world not only feel unforgiving, but the environments also reflect this, with decrepit castles and villages dominating the land of Lordran in Dark Souls. Hollow Knight uses a variety of ruined structures, with trams and transit stations in ruin, buildings stripped to their foundations, and pathways overgrown by vegetation. Dead Cells has a large variety of prisons. I’d estimate a good third of the game’s levels are prisons, combined with a castle inhabited by undead soldiers still mindlessly following the task of guarding the halls they lived in. And corpses. Corpses are everywhere in these games. Not only the ones you leave behind you, but most loot you find in these games comes from the bodies of the dead that were killed long before you arrived. These foreboding environments filled with death and decay truly add to the feeling of loneliness and ruin these worlds give off.
And finally, the stories. The reason why everything is ruined, dead, and forever miserable. I don’t know how Dark Souls or Dead Cells ends, but I have a rough idea of how it’s going to go. The idea of Dark Souls is to ring the Bells of Awakening and kindle a bonfire somewhere to usher in a new age of fire. That’s all I know, so I’ll have to go off what the game has told me. As for Dead Cells, the idea is to make it to the Throne Room at the end of the castle, defeat the king’s bodyguard, obtain a boss stem cell, and kill the king. The boss stem cell is to make the game harder, allowing you to collect the next one and so on until you unlock a door with five of them. This is incredibly hard. The story is that a disease befell the kingdom, and in desperation to contain it, the king ordered the genocide of his people. The dead rose from the grave, the prisoners rioted, and some wonderful dialogue came from it. “Lucky prisoners got a window in their cell. They then choked on the ashes from the Ossuary” “One poor sod tried to escape the prison over the Ramparts. He died of exhaustion halfway up, and the guards left his body on the wall to send a message.” and one of my favorites “The social hierarchy of the island is as follows. First the dogs, then the rats, and below them, the prisoners” This dialogue and story just hammers in that oppressive, “you are nobody feeling” of Dead Cells. As for Hollow Knight, a game I’ve actually beat. The story is similar in that you play as a nobody, a random bug who has returned to the kingdom of Hallownest to unlock the Vault of The Black Egg by killing the bugs whose lives serve as locks, killing the Hollow Knight, and containing the infection that has plagued Hallownest for eons. The infection ruined Hallownest slowly, decaying it and leaving its inhabitants' mindless husks, shells of their former selves. Each of these games has a depressing story of a random nobody running through a ruined world whose people have lost their minds and wills, cursed by some disease or plague, with the only way to stop it being prolonging the inevitability of death. Through all this difficulty and hardship, victory feels like a true achievement, not something just handed to me to tell me a story, but a real thing that I fought tooth and nail to get to.
