Just wondering what’s the best darkest game with mature themes you guys have played from choice of games or hosted games
Any suggestions?
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This was fun:
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Yeah I play that game a lot,dark ages is my fav
Best dark COG/HG: Choice of the Deathless/The City’s Thirst.
Best dark WIP: Through Broken Lenses.
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The Monsters WiP is pretty dark.
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Fallen Heroes! So dark, so sad… so gooooood.
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Oh - another amazing dark WIP - Blood For Poppies. 
I can’t think of a lot of darker published games… let’s see, looking through the catalogue: Metahuman Inc. might fit your tastes, A Wise Use of Time lets you use time control to be a bastard, Neighborhood Necromancer is a silly comedy about dark magic and murder, and NOLA Is Burning is a pretty fun AU-Mafia sort of crime story.
Depending on your definition, Zombie Exodus may count and is an awesome game (series). Community College Hero and the Heroes Rise trilogy are superhero games with well-written villains and fairly gritty worlds.
I’ve never played some others, like “It’s Killing Time” that seem on the more violent side, so I can’t recommend them one way or the other.
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The only horror published game I know of is the shadow horror, it’s fairly good, worth a play or two. But as for games with dark content I’d say tin star can be quite dark at times. Played killing time and I wouldn’t call it dark particularly, but that’s just me. Depending on your head canon and choices double cross got quite dark, but I think that was just my head canon tbh 
. Divided we fall is I guess? It’s about the Spanish civil war, so hardly jolly .
Alter ego is really dark in all of my playthroughs I usually either play as a psychopath right from the start, end up becoming depressed and then keep going down that path or end up dying alone unsuccessful in poor health. Not sure if that’s just the game though or if it is possible to have a totally “good” playthrough
Also I love the ZE games but I’d say burnt too. It’s quite unique and not as good in many ways, but definatley worth a play, definatley dark.
Meh if we’re including jokey dark games for rent haunted house and diabolical fit the bill.
“It’s Killing Time” just glamorizes the violence and is frankly unrealistic into the extreme. If a game lets me get away with murder, then it should at the very least
have realistic consequences…
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Might I suggest Highlands, Deep Waters , by me and Nerull? It is quite dark, perhaps even too much at times. We handle a wide range of dark and mature themes, from paranoia, horror, anxiety, fear, violence, sinister rituals, murder, prejudice, sexual and psychologic abuse, all put together in a series of mysterious events that span across ten years in a small town in Scotland.
Although I’m yet to play Through Broken Lenses, I quite liked the concept when I read about it.
As a player, I really enjoy games with grimdark themes and realistic settings. The less fantasy in it the better, for my tastes. I know it’s not quite what you asked, but I would suggest, outside of text games, the following two:
Age of Decandence: A masterpiece a decade in the making, it’s a classic rpg that really, really puts value on your choices, and it plays almost as a text game, but with tactical combat. The thing is: You can finish the game without fighting once, if you are smart and compromise. What really appears to me about AoD is the fact that the world is cruel in every sense. Yes, you don’t usually need to fight, but that doesn’t make the game easy. There are people trying to trick or fool you at every corner, trying to use your to fulfill their own personal agendas, and you can’t quite trust anyone.
Battle Brothers: A tactical, open-worlded game where you are the captain of a group of mercenaries. There’s permadeath, there’s realistic combat with a nice injury system and there’s a nice tactical battle system. Much like Age of Decadence, you’ll often find yourself employed by people who don’t give a shit about you.
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@MahatmaDagon Even though the game isn’t CS, I just want to make the comment that the Merchant route on Age of Decadence is mindblowingly devious. Best route, hands down.
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Tin Star has some of the darkest and lightest moments I’ve seen in IF.
The Infinity Series and the ZE series are basically the GoT and TWD of IF, respectively (only better!), Monsters of New Haven High gives me AHS vibes (so a creepy undertone so far, leading up to something, and exploring dark themes, all made creepier by the fact that the protagonist(s) are in high school), Vendetta: Rise of a Gangster is pretty brutal (your sister has been murdered under mysterious circumstances, you’re an ambitious gangster with little to no compunction), and in Dilemma, you can hit and run, leaving a kid to die in the road rather than risk your friend’s drugs being discovered in a subsequent car search.
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I agree about the Monsters WIP. very dark, very intense, very good.
as for other games… come on, really, guys? Dark souls, hands down. this game is so dark and so depressing sometimes (when you kill some god/npc or learn some deep dark truth about the world or… well, the whole damn world is very dark!). you are playing the whole trilogy in the body of the corpse. what can be more dark than that? (but it’s still soo good. everybody should really play it).
Wow have none of you read 7 bullets that’s the darkest choice of game hands down
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Curious but in everyone’s opinion, just how dark is too dark for a choice game? I’m wondering because in lots of games you have people running around killing the “baddies” but they’re not considered dark because they’re a hero, superhero or soldier kind of game and the people who are killed are usually either nameless/anon, accidental, obviously very evil, self defense or the details of it are brushed over. (ie someone kills a guard and then moves along without thinking about it again.) Even traditionally “evil” creatures like Vampires that you could work with as a tormented soul- killing vs survival vs how much they choose to continue to care bout their victims angle seem to be getting a bit of a makeover in a lot of cases (cough twilight cough)
So what if you have a character that’s put into a situation where there are deaths occuring that are not so clear cut, and more personal. (Either by their own hand, or they’re in a position they could try to stop it from happening). The people responsible or MC may feel as if they have a good reason for acting as they do (although it’d be considered twisted and abhorrent by most). Would people want to read something like that? Or would it be too dark and uncomfortable for a choice type game?
These discussions touched on that:
I think it might be worth diving into this more specifically though, if you want to make a new topic.
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Thanks @Sashira 
Lots of good points in those links. I think part of my question is on a slightly different track (which I may not have explained well) I might make a different topic to keep a tangent discussion off this one.
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I’ll reply for now, hope that’s ok? because personally I found the wording of the last part of the question interesting. Because nothing is too dark for me but unless the killings are written in an over the top comical way or something similar(thinking of tinstar here) I don’t se how you could relate to the mc, and therefore don’t see how it’d be that enjoyable. I mean I don’t always have to relate 100% to the mc, but if he just kills people because reasons, and we feel no sympathy for the mc what so ever, I personally wouldn’t enjoy playing a game like that.