Here´s a topic about games that have some sort of dark-sci-fi style that every Nihei fan would love.
All games are default for PC and if not, I wrote it in the header.




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Condemned: Criminal Origins (2005)





One of the...no THE best horror game I ever played. You are a cop that hunts serial killers and also gets hunted by the cops. The whole city gets suddenly mad and everybody starts killing everybody. Very good story with great light effects. From the makers of F.E.A.R. Never released in europe because of the violence. After that, no game or film shocked me again. Play it in a dark room with headphones!





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Death Space (2008)






Typical Sci-Fi "Aliens"-style game with many ideas from other well known games. Special are some levels without air and gravitation. The mixture is great and the atmosphere is very dark and claustrophobic. The sound effects are excellent. Also best played with headphones.




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Chronicles of Riddick -
Escape from Butchers Bay (2004) / Dark Athena (2009)




You are Richard B. Riddick, some sort of special warrior from the movie "Pitch Black" and "Chronicles of Riddick". This is not some sort of crappy movie-licence game. I think that the games is much better than the movie "Chronicles of Riddick". You are in a high security prison on some outer planet and try to escape. You have the ability to see in the dark. So the games gets really interesting, because you not only kill everbody. There are some stealth passages and in the prison you have to talk with people and get some information. The graphics are not up to date, but the light effects are well made and transport the dark atmosphere really good.
The latest "update" is called "Assault on Dark Athena". It has some new missions with newer graphics. It also contains the old "Escape from Butchers Bay".




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The Darkness (PS3) (2007)





A dark and atmospheric shooter from the comic series. You are Jackie Estacado and have the power of "The Darkness". This are Tentacles around you that can grab a person and other tricks. Your main weapons are two pistols. It plays in New York and in the "Outerworld" (some sort of WW1 hell).
I don´t own a PS3 and played it only by a friends one for an hour.




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Clive Barkers - Jericho (2007)






Very Dark and bloody game. But the game itself is just run and kill. You have nothing to think about. Mostly many enemies attack you and your squad and you have to kill all. Gets boring.




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Gears of War (2006)






In an apocalyptic future the humans fight against an alien race called "Locust" that sleeped thousands of years in the earth. The game is simple fighting with some cool dark levels and many very nice gigantic monsters. The atmosphere is not so intense like the other games, but the world is very detailed and the enemy´s are sometimes challenging.
Gears of War 2 is released 2008, but I didn´t played it.




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Maybe you have more games. I always search for them. But please no fantasy games!

System Shock 1 & 2

Both immensely groundbreaking cyberpunk games of the first-person horror action-RPG genre, for the PC.

If you consider yourself an avid PC gamer and science-fiction fan and you have not played these games, you should feel slightly ashamed. They haven't aged gracefully but SS2 in particular has received a lot of attention from its fans to making it playable in this modern age.




Digital Devil Saga: Avatar Tuner is a two-part RPG for the Playstation 2.

It takes place in a strange future where humans(?) have formed clans and fight each other at the behest of a strange mechanical tower. It has some awesome music and an interesting battle system. Also everyone can turn into demons and eat each other, oh boy!

While System Shock 2 goes without saying as a damned fine game, what really surprised me is the level of refinement in the Chronicles of Riddick games. Especially as a movie franchise tie in the games are remarkably well done. I frequently EFBB as a best practices case study for design philosophy to execution.

A lot of studios TALK about what making good games is but Starbreeze walks the walk.

Quake, ! It's fun shit, you guys should try it.

Killer7 on PS2 & Gamecube is also the best, even though the sci-fi aspect takes a backseat for surreal messages you'd expect to find on an Alejandro Jodorowski film. But still, zombiefied suicide bombers with uncontrollable laughter, killer Power Rangers, and people you've killed coming back from the dead to haunt you and tell you that you suck and hope that you fail make this game the joy.

Then there's Kenji Eno's D2 on Dreamcast. It's a wonderful love letter to Carpenter's The Thing and probably something that's hard to handle on this day and age since the opening of the game is cult members highjacking an airplane. A meteorite strikes and the protagonists finds herself in a Canadian winter wilderness full of disgusting alien mutations running loose all over the place.

Lastly it's not really that dark, but Oddworld: Stranger's Wrath on the original X-Box ( no, I don't own any next-gen consoles! ) is very worth mentioning. It's the wild west in the alien Oddworld as progress and evolution has kicked in and you play as The Stranger trying to survive through bounty hunting some really sick bandits using 'live ammunition'. Very overlooked and very fun game to explore and play.

Quake 4 (2005) / Doom 3 (2004)






Typical 3D shooter classics with a solid atmosphere at the time of release. I played them, but I did not really liked them. The level design and the scripted events are awful. Its the "collect the medikit and monsters will appear"-system all the time. The atmosphere of Doom3 was really shocking at the time and nice to see.
Doom 3 was more about shocking and Quake 4 more with action. But the engine is the same and I think some textures also. So worth mentioned here.




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Alien vs Predator (1999) / Alien vs Predator 2 (2001)





There are many AvP games, but mostly crap. This goes about the 3D shooter for PC. In this game you can do that, what we all wanted to do since we saw the movie "Predator". To be a predator!
But not only that, you can also be an alien and crawl very fast at the ceiling to jump down on the enemies. The third playable race is the human soldier. With this you are more vulnerable than all other races, but thats why it is so exciting to run through the dark base on planetoiden LV-426. The first game is graphically veeery out of date. The second part also, but after that years fun to play. The third will released 2010.

I played System Shock 1 these days on an old P166 (for old dos games! ) and it got me again!
This game is very fascinating.
I did not liked the second part, but it was also nice to play.




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Abuse (1996)




I know this fit not 100%, but I always liked the dark style of this simple run´n´shoot game. The speciality was that you control with keyboard and mouse. The game was nice, but the enemy´s very dull. Because of the masses of aliens was the game sometimes very hard.
There is a port for the iPhone. Lucky who can afford one!

I most assuredly would mention Halo tangentially, but I think I've done enough of that already.

I think we're all aware of the similarities between Blame! and Halo at this point

Chromax! How could you not like SS2
Well I guess the original System Shock is a tough act to follow. That game is brilliant.

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Recently I've been fascinated with a game called Baroque which is probably the most Blame!-esque video game I've ever played. It's originally a game that was released in the 90s for Sega Saturn and again for the Playstation, but not so long ago it got remade for the PS2 and Wii. Mind you the remake is NOT decisively superior to the original but it is easier (not necessarily a bad thing), more playable and most importantly localized to the English language.

It's extremely dark, twisted and surreal (which makes the Teen ESRB rating a bit amusing) and I'd be lying if I said the gameplay and mechanics were anything close to resembling intuitive and forgiving.

While at first glance it might look like a fantasy game, it's actually quite sci-fi...with highly ritualized technology and a mysterious sinister religious order prevalent throughout. The protagonist is an undying amnesiac given a poweful gun and a mission (sound familiar?) to descend to the bottom of the enigmatic 'Neuro Tower' which is packed to the brim with very weird, twisted beings.



Along the way you'll encounter a lot of strange victims of a calamity that has seemingly destroyed the world, and uncover the mystery behind your own identity and your place in this hellish world.



Nothing will be handed to you though, not the plot nor the gameplay. It's up to you to figure things out (the game steadfastly refuses to hold your hand) and not only is the tower full of horrible traps and its inhabitants both numerous and deadly, but when you die (and you will die, a lot) you will wake up outside the tower with no items and no levels. In fact, this happens each time you reach the bottom of the tower.

This is a dealbreaker to most but not without a silver lining. Dying unlocks parts of the story and opens up new items or interactions. And with foresight, you can deliver items found inside the tower to the outside where you can recover them and use them on later forays. Additionally there is a rather forgiving save system for each floor of the tower that lets you reload at will (this was added for the western release).



If you're a bad enough dude to rescue the mad god from false angels, you can read a bit more here: http://hardcoregaming101.net/sting/sting2.htm

Mind you this game is NOT for everyone. You have to be a real masochist or have the patience of Buddha for this game in addition to enjoying vague, disjointed plots that get slowly leaked to you. But for those it appeals to, it's one of a kind and unforgettable. And I'd recommend tracking down the soundtrack to anyone who enjoys Vangelis and/or industrial techno, as both games have superb soundtracks.

System Shock 2 really does come off as pretty dull with its 2fix the elevator" nonsense after the constant escalations of the first game. I mean, it's essentially not unlike a Die Hard IN SPACE! done right.

Well, maybe in everything except for the overly complicated controls.

And yeah, Baroque is quite a number! Maybe Japan's own Half-Life, , is worth a mention too?

Oh man, I love Breakdown. I was surprised that a beat-em-up had such a substantial plotline.

But I'm not seeing the parallels between Baroque and Half-Life...they're about as different as any two games can get from each other.

I meant comparing Breakdown and Half-Life, not Baroque.

Ahaha, my bad :)

Yeah, that makes a bit more sense
Too bad Namco is infatuated with making 3D fighting games and lightgun games these days.