10 Devastating Video Game Openings That Totally Broke You

6. Soma

Before SOMA jumps into pure, unadulterated sci-fi terror underneath the oceans of a destroyed Earth, it ushers you through a present-day prologue where everything is surprisingly mundane. You pick up as Simon, the survivor of a car crash which killed his friend and gave him severe brain damage, which will eventually kill him too.

As you walk around his flat and read his texts and e-mails, the story progresses, and it's eventually revealed that the doctors can do nothing to help his condition. His fate seems all but secured, at least until an experimental brain scan that's yet to be tested comes along as his last hope of survival. The idea is to upload his brain and digitally simulate a way to cure him of his ailments.

It's already a bleak opening, with Simon's condition treated very matter of factly, but once he sits down and the experiment begins, things get even more terrifying. The experiment goes wrong and Simon blacks out, waking up hundreds of years in the future after an apocalyptic event has destroyed the world.

With no understanding of how you got there or why, you're dropped into a dystopian facility and forced to fend for yourself. Simon survived, but he probably wishes he hadn't.