The end of the world is a popular topic in world culture. Books and films are dedicated to him, legends are made about him, and, of course, games are released in which the apocalypse takes an important place. To distract from the problems of 2023, in which perhaps the end of the world did not happen, Cybersport.ru offers to look at ten games with an unusual apocalypse – no invasions of zombies or deserts burnt out by nuclear flames.
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The local apocalypse is biblical. On Earth, the forces of heaven and hell collided, and in the course of their battle, all of humanity died. In the midst of chaos, one of the horsemen of the Apocalypse, War, appears, but discovers that the call has worked falsely: there are no other horsemen at all, and the seventh seal is not broken. The Charred Council, which keeps order, blames the War as the culprit for what happened, and only a hundred years later the fallen horseman gets the right to return the outraged honor.
In the original Darksiders, most of the time will be spent in a world destroyed by the Apocalypse: people are either dead or turned into mindless zombies, angels are defeated, and demons triumph on a dead planet. In other games in the series, details of the world are revealed more fully (and in the third, you can even see the surviving representatives of humanity).
In the future, humanity continued the war for territory. To make this process more effective, combat robots were created, which got out of control and began to hunt for any organic matter, not just given opponents. In an attempt to save itself, humanity has rolled back to an almost primitive state, preserving scraps of knowledge about the technologies of the past, so it is the norm to meet a tribal shaman in Enslaved. Monkey lives in this world – a lone warrior, by chance, joining forces with Tripitaka, a girl from a distant tribe. Against his will, he must help her get home, for which they have to endure a long journey through ruined America.
The most interesting thing in the local world is not even robots, but the fundamental principle. The plot is based on the legendary Chinese novel of the 16th century “Journey to the West”. Monkey is an analogue of the Monkey King, and Trip is a rethinking of the monk Xuanzang, on whose behalf the story is told in the original. There are a lot of intersections, except that the goals are slightly different – Xuanzang went to India for Buddhist sutras, and Trip leads the desire to get home.
At the end of the 19th century, the temperature on Earth began to decrease. The official version said that the reason for this was the increased amount of volcanic dust in the atmosphere, but a select few knew that the Sun was extinguishing. The British Empire began to prepare for the worst and build a chain of reactors in Antarctica, so that in the event of an excessive decrease in temperature, there was somewhere to hide. However, the end came faster than expected: in a matter of months, the southern states ceased to exist, faced with a previously unknown cold problem, and Britain collapsed under the pressure of panic and financial difficulties. The survivors traveled to Antarctica in hopes of surviving.
The player takes on the role of the mayor of New London, based around one of the few operating reactors. It is not so easy to manage a city in conditions of acute shortage of about everything, and you have to balance between humanity and complete totalitarianism. Cannibalism and child labor cannot be ruled out in the darkest of times, and indulgences can lead to the fact that the newly-minted mayor is literally thrown out into the cold.
This is where you are the apocalypse. The player chooses for himself the reason for the future end of mankind: a bacterium, a virus, a parasite and from a heel of other equally dangerous things, after which he infects the “zero patient” The rest is a matter of practice: the chosen fatal disease will have to develop according to several parameters, increasing its resistance to study, infectiousness, the severity of the carrier’s transfer and mortality, while at the same time trying to hinder the attempts of humanity to create a vaccine.
The developers approached the issue responsibly and tried to reproduce a realistic model of the infection of the world. It got to a scandal: in China, the game was banned in February 2023 due to the similarity of the situation depicted with the COVID-2019 pandemic.
The local end of the world begins in modern-day Tokyo. A group of cultists performs the act of Conception: the familiar world is destroyed, and a new one appears in its place. This is the requirement of the Great Will – the higher power of order that governs existence itself. Tokyo then turns into a dead wasteland inhabited by demons and the souls of people who died during the Conception. Among the survivors are a handful of people with unusual abilities. The new world is plastic, and the forces of Order and Chaos are trying to subdue it to their will. And in the center of all this – the nameless main character, who woke up no longer a man.
The Japanese RPG series has always gravitated towards complex narratives and moral dilemmas, but Nocturne is considered a great starting point for a variety of reasons. Here the controls are familiar to the modern player, the complexity is not lifted to the ceiling (but this does not mean that it will be easy) and an interesting plot with the ability to choose the side of the conflict. The developers tried to reproduce the feeling of descent into hell – and quite successfully.
