9 Video Games With Seriously Morbid Background Lore

As gaming has evolved into a more serious medium, it has welcomed with it more ambitious and expansive uses of world-building and storytelling.

Gone are the days where Mario ran through fiery dungeons, stomped battalions of Goombas and wrestled with colossal dragons for the pure thrill of having an off-screen smooch with a princess, leaving behind some of the best experiences gaming has ever seen.

From Last Of Us and Mass Effect to The Elder Scrolls and God Of War, looking at the narratives of modern video games sees a large shift towards creating deep, investable worlds full of interesting characters and fictional history.

However, this focus on ingrained world-building hasn't always centred around the cute and cuddly.

With developers making lore a bigger part of our collective investment, we've seen more mature and, frankly, horrifying pieces of background history come to the surface.

Whether repulsive experiments inside supposedly safe nuclear warhead shelters or serial killers that stalk children around the halls of pizzerias, there's reams of chilling hidden lore that shines a creepier light on many of your favourite games.

From some titles you'll expect it from to more unassuming ones (Nintendo has one dark sense of humour, let me tell you), here are just a handful of games with seriously morbid background lore.

Although Fallout is known as a franchise with a wry sense of humour (no, I'm not referring to how much of a joke Fallout 76 turned out to be), there's a dark, sinister undercurrent that runs underneath all its entries.

Sure, there are areas out in Fallout's wasteland that hold all manner of terrifying lore tidbits - The Dunwich Borers in Fallout 4, for example, hold all sort of ghostly scares, and The Ultra-Luxe in New Vegas is home to some hauntingly cannibalistic high-society gamblers.

Yet, little of the game's deeper lore can match that of the Vaults, some of which you'll read about in data logs and others you'll have the honour of exploring yourself. These pre-war bomb shelters may have kept thousands alive after the surprise nuclear annihilation of Fallout's America, however, they double up as horrific experiments that test human psychology among other, far more grotesque experiments.

From forcing inhabitants to perform a barbaric, democratically-decided annual sacrifices to creating a mutating chemical agent that transforms people of the wasteland into crazed, lunatic monsters (and even melds one man into a disgusting part-mutant, part-supercomputer monstrosity), these vaults are dark.

While the world of Fallout has always been a dangerous place, its vaults remind you that humanity is crueller than any Deathclaw or Yao Guai.