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Curated playlist

Dystopian video games

  • Final Fantasy XIIIFinal Fantasy XIII's heroes learn their mission is to destroy their own world.
  • Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 sold 6.5 million copies in the United States and United Kingdom within its first 24 hours. Those sales brought in $400 million. At the time, that made it the largest entertainment launch ever recorded. The…
  • Horizon (video game series)Horizon is a science fiction game series from the Amsterdam studio Guerrilla Games, and by November 2025 it had sold over 40 million units worldwide. That figure places it among Sony's best-selling first-party properties. Its setting is…
  • Half-Life 2Half-Life 2 is a 2004 first-person shooter from Valve Corporation, and it cost 40 million US dollars to make. Development lasted five years. By 2011 it had sold 12 million copies worldwide. In November 2024, twenty years after its release,…
  • Gears of WarGears of War begins its fiction with a death toll. The event is called Emergence Day. In only 26 hours, the Locust Horde, a race of subterranean creatures, kills 25% of the population of the planet Sera. From that catastrophe grows a…
  • Death StrandingDeath Stranding is a 2019 video game in which a courier named Sam Porter Bridges crosses a wrecked United States on foot, carrying a premature baby in a pod. The baby is not cargo. It is a tool, a companion and, as the story unfolds,…
  • Horizon Zero DawnIn Horizon Zero Dawn, a 2017 game from Guerrilla Games and Sony, an infant is found before a sealed door inside a sacred mountain. She grows up as Aloy, an outcast of the Nora tribe, raised by a fellow outcast named Rost. Her world is a…
  • Death Stranding 2: On the BeachHideo Kojima, the director of Death Stranding 2: On the Beach, responded to glowing playtest results by tearing up part of his own script. Roughly halfway through development, audiences testing the game liked it a great deal. Kojima told…
  • Wolfenstein: The New OrderWolfenstein: The New Order is a 2014 first-person shooter made by the studio MachineGames, and it first reached the public as three still images with one caption: 1960. Nothing else was explained. The number gave no hint of the story,…
  • Final Fantasy VIFinal Fantasy VI lets its hero fail to save the world. The story's second half is called the World of Ruin.
  • Horizon Forbidden WestHorizon Forbidden West cost around 212 million US dollars to make, which places it among the most expensive video games ever developed. At the peak of production, more than 300 full-time employees at Guerrilla Games were working on it.…

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