The aftermath of the apocalypse is a familiar playground to anyone who plays games nowadays. Over the course of the last decade and a half, it’s become the de facto setting of many prestige AAA titles, such as PlayStation’s esteemed The Last of Us series, as well as indie games like Stray. I’m not entirely sure what it is about the setting that makes it such a hot commodity, but maybe it’s that so many genres fit neatly within its parameters. A city-builder and management sim might task you with rebuilding society, while an RPG might ask that you navigate the factions that have formed to chart a peaceful (or violent) way forward for everyone. Scrounging around the refuse of society to craft tools in survival games make them a perfect fit, and imagine the tear jerking moments that could be rendered by an intimate narrative between the last two people on Earth.
GOG, a popular PC storefront, is currently hosting a sale on many such games. If you’re looking for a huge range of experiences in the post-apocalypse, you’ve come to the right place. Here’s just a few of GOG’s best games about the end days.
Unsighted
Unsighted still lives in the back of my mind. A top-down Metroidvania that leans more stylistically towards The Legend of Zelda, it is an exhilarating, sometimes cruel, but always novel take on the post-apocalypse in games. The twist of the game is that in its post-apocalypse, your cast of supporting characters are living on borrowed time, which is always counting down. If you’re not brutally efficient about where your time and effort are going, characters start dropping like flies, impacting the narrative and the ending that you’ll receive.
At the time of its release, I found the system wildly oppressive. On one hand, I really enjoyed the game’s movement and stylish combat, with my robotic hero hack-and-slashing their way through the apocalypse like a stylized anime protagonist. On the other hand, I felt like every time I struggled with a puzzle or encounter or went on an exploratory detour, the game penalized me. I eventually turned the system off, thanks to Unsighted’s exceptionally handy accessibility options, but I do feel like I missed something by removing it from the equation. The despair and urgency is most definitely the point, and I often think about going back and experiencing the game as it was meant to be played. You can experience love and trauma, as well as countless robot deaths, at the end of the world by snagging Unsighted on sale for $US8.
Fallout
It’s been a big year for the Fallout series. It was adapted into a now Emmy-winning television series, was featured in a popular Magic: The Gathering crossover, and could even be spotted in one of the most recent seasons of Fortnite. At the same time, the good will that the great show mustered lifted most of the existing games, which climbed to the top of the charts and stood there for a long while. Fallout 4 and the survival MMO Fallout 76 especially enjoyed the limelight, but even older titles got their fair share of love. It’s been a great time for arguably the most recognized post-apocalypse in games.
Which is all to say, you can’t really have a sale on games in that setting without the inclusion of a Fallout title or two. This sale features six of ‘em. You can crawl out through the fallout with versions of Fallout 4, New Vegas, and 3 with all of their accompanying DLC and expansions, which are going for $US16, $US8, and $US6.59, respectively. Three of the classic installments, Fallout, Fallout 2, and Tactics are on sale for $US2.49 apiece.
Mutant Year Zero: Road To Eden
Wasteland and Fallout aren’t the only isometric tactics RPGs to ever take place in the weird post-apocalypse. A few years ago, we got Mutant Year Zero: Road To Eden, a game that features an oddly satisfying mixture of stealth and strategy gameplay as well as a mutated cast of characters, like an anthropomorphic crossbow-wielding duck. Adapted from a pen-and-paper tabletop RPG, Road To Eden places much more emphasis on exploration than other strategy games, which tend to focus on the intricacies of combat. You maneuver your party around environments, scrounge for supplies, and engage in stealth to either surprise roving bands of enemies or completely avoid them. In action, it’s a lot like the acclaimed XCOM series, and the whole thing plays like a refreshingly fucked-up road trip. You can grab Mutant Year Zero: Road To Eden for $US14, or pick up the deluxe edition with its Seed of Evil expansion for $US18.
Frostpunk
The end of the world is going to be brutal no matter how you slice it. Frostpunk is a city builder that’s well aware of that fact. In it, you manage a society trying to weather a harsh volcanic winter. In order to make it, you have to be capable of making tough calls that bring your own moral positions and ethics into question. Food may be limited, and you are the deciding factor in who gets fed. Children can be put to work at the risk of morale, and poor working conditions can lead to frostbite and death. You can be a benevolent organizer or a tyrant, and the post-apocalypse is a perfect environment to explore those notions. Frostpunk is brutal in a way that most games about the end of the world actually avoid because really engaging with the issues the concept raises can be off-putting and uncomfortable, and it’s why I appreciate it in the first place. Find out what kind of leader you might be in the apocalyptic winters to come by picking up Frostpunk for $US6, or you can pick up the game of the year edition with all its DLC for $US12.73. That or, y’know, pick up the sequel that’s being released in about a week.
Dying Light
Zombie apocalypses have been particularly attractive playgrounds for video games throughout the 2010s, and few series have grown as instantly popular off of the concept as Dying Light. Techland built off of the foundation it laid out with Dead Island to make a parkour-centric romp in which you and three friends can bounce and wall-run all over the place while decapitating and drop-kicking zombies, and it appropriately did gangbusters. It was so fun and so well received, not to mention so widely purchased, that the studio supported the original game for much longer than it probably initially intended, produced a humongous sequel to it just a few years ago, and is now revisiting the first game’s protagonist in a standalone adventure in the near future. You should probably dropkick the checkout button on the definitive edition of Dying Light, which comes with all the cosmetic and content-packed DLC, as well as the game’s lone expansion, for just $US10.
Rain World
Rain World is utterly confusing. It’s a gorgeous 2D platformer in which you play as something called a slugcat who has to survive as the prey of a simulated ecosystem. Between rooms, you’ll have to fend off and escape predators you can’t really hope to defeat in outright combat. Along your journey though, Rain World tells you essentially nothing. There is little in the way of a UI interface or tips that will guide you to survival. Rain World is the video game equivalent of being thrown to the wolves. It will begin as a miserable time, but if you’re patient with Rain World, you’ll find a lot to love about its hands-off approach. Eventually, it instills in you a confidence: it doesn’t communicate mechanics or direction to you because it trusts you to experiment, divine what it is you need out of the experience, and chart your own path to safety. You can try to survive Rain World’s beautiful and harsh apocalypse for $US12.49, and you can pick up its lone expansion, Downpour, for another $US10.49.
Cloud Gardens
Cloud Gardens has the rare distinction of being the coziest post-apocalypse game here. In it, you are quite literally nature itself as it reclaims the abandoned landscape of the apocalypse. Drop props like train cars and bottles into dioramas of the end days and then cover it all in vegetation. Cloud Gardens boasts a lofi score and PS1-style graphics that lend nature’s reclamation of our world a serene and dreamlike quality. If the rest of the games on this list are too intense or even nasty for your sensibilities, I think Cloud Gardens is maybe the reprieve you’re looking for. And after all, who doesn’t want to get away from all the noise of our own lives for just a bit? Why can’t the isolation of the apocalypse be a refuge just this once? Cloud Gardens can be yours for the very chill asking price of just $US10.79.
The Walking Dead
Telltale’s The Walking Dead has never really been topped. The studio itself went on to make some great adventure games, like Tales from the Borderlands, but very little ever reached the highs of Lee and Clementine’s budding father-daughter relationship as the rest of the world fell into ruin. At the time, The Walking Dead was a reinvention of the adventure game, focusing on characters and dialogue choices as opposed to puzzle-solving, and it was met with acclaim. The first season of The Walking Dead, which released episodically throughout 2012, was considered by many the game of the year, and became the foundation for Telltale’s future, as well as a reference point for many, many narratives in games after it for good reason.
The Walking Dead has some of the most precise and incisive character dialogue of the time. Rarely has a game gotten away with as many quiet and effective gut punches as The Walking Dead. It never tries too hard to paw at depth, nor does it ever treat its audience like children. Its characters are all rough around the edges, as is beautifully conveyed by both the writing and the game’s graphics, which heavily crib from the style of the comic books rather than the realism of the live-action show that put the series on the map. It really feels quite singular.
If you’re at all interested in the history of adventure games, The Walking Dead franchise, or the flashpoint for some of the most widely heralded stories of the 2010s, this game is a must have. You, too, can have the entirety of the series, spanning four “seasons” of episodic chunks, a subseries focusing on the beloved character Michonne, and the interstitial 400 Days chapter for just 10 bucks.
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