10 Deceptively Innocent Games With Incredibly Dark Lore

The setting of Pikmin might look bright and colorful, but in reality, it's all just a clever front concealing a very dark concept of humanity's future. More specifically, that humanity has been completely wiped out in a nuclear disaster.

Though it's never been outright confirmed, the games leave a lot of hints, which have caused much debate amongst the fans of the franchise. The first and most obvious hint regarding humanity's existence are the small objects like soda cans, bottle caps, and batteries the player can find throughout the levels. The planet that Pikmin takes place on also resembles Earth, or rather a hypothetical version of it from 250 million years in the future, called "Pangea Proxima."

But what about the nuclear stuff?

Well, in the original Pikmin game, one of the very first objects the player has to find is a Geiger counter, a device used to measure radiation. The counter in the game is constantly clicking, meaning that the entire surface of the planet is highly radioactive.

Of course, a lot of this is speculation, but you can't deny there's something eerily creepy about the empty world of Pikmin once you remove the pretty flowers and aliens.