While most titles give you a big old “GAME OVER” when your character shuffles off their mortal coil, these video games make mortality part of the plot. In the digital worlds beyond our own, the afterlife possibilities are endless. Hellscapes lousy with literal demons. Heavens with everything you could dream of except a stable internet connection. Purgatories where death and rebirth are part of a never-ending cycle – it’s all fair existential game. If you’re looking for answers about what happens when we die, let these titles be your spiritual teachers. These are the 10 best video games about death and the afterlife – an afterlife full of monster slaying sounds way more fun than sitting around on a cloud playing the harp for all eternity, after all.
Dark Souls
In Dark Souls, death is the point. The game takes place in the kingdom of Lordran, a decaying land whose best days are far behind it. Humankind has been cursed to inherit the Darksign, a spiritual brand that marks a person for unlife – they can’t die, but their minds are bodies are destined to decay for eternity. You play as one of these unlucky souls, doomed to slay your way through a morbid world after escaping from an asylum where the undead are housed. Famous for its brutal difficulty, Dark Souls expects you to die often – it’s a plot device, after all. As you hurl yourself into the gears of this meat grinder world ad nauseam, you begin to realize that your personal experience of unlife mirrors the cycle of the greater world. Everything is doomed to rot, and you weren’t put here to save this world, but keep it on life support for just a little while longer.
Death Stranding
Of all the spiritual interpretations of the afterlife that our world has to offer, Death Stranding features easily the strangest: it’s a beach. But not a fun in the sun, Fire Island kind of beach, no, it’s a desolate shoreline that feels as liminal as a late night parking lot. Worst of all, this beach is haunted by invisible entities called “Beached Things,” and their bleeding into our world caused the near total collapse of the United States. Your character is tasked with running supplies across this death drenched world, making you a sort of post apocalyptic Amazon delivery worker. Surreal, strange, and stagnant, the world of the living feels like an eternal purgatory – with actual purgatory dripping in between the cracks in reality.
Hades
Like in Dark Souls, Hades players are certain to become highly acquainted with death as they slog through this hellish dungeon crawler. The dungeon, in this case, is literally Hell – at least as the Ancient Greeks interpreted it. You take control of Zagreus, the son of Hades, who decides to ditch his deadbeat dad in the hopes of joining his mother Persephone in the mortal world – easier said than done. Hades has a reputation to protect, and claims his dominion is inescapable – sending hordes of horrid monsters after his son in order to prove this point. Every time Zagreus dies (which is often) he’s revived at the House of Hades, discovering to his chagrin that the landscape of this roguelike Inferno has reset itself – forcing him to chart his escape route anew every time. Einstein defines insanity as trying the same thing and expecting different results. You’d have to be crazy to think you can escape Hell, but damned if Zagreus isn’t gonna try.
Hellblade: Senua’s Sacrifice
A dark dive into spiritual and psychological landscapes alike, Hellblade: Senua’s Sacrifice follows an ancient Pict warrior’s journey into Hell in order to save the soul of her dead lover. As Senua stalks her way through the shadowy Nordic afterlife, she slowly begins to lose her grip on sanity. The game’s developers worked closely with neuroscientists in order to accurately represent psychosis, which Senua began experiencing as a child. As Senua is plagued by visual and auditory hallucinations, the player can’t help but wonder if she’s actually journeying into Hell, or simply a hellscape created by her own mind. A terrifying exploration of grief, Hellblade is one of the finest psychological horror titles of the modern era.
Spiritfarer
A far kinder interpretation of the afterlife than many titles on this list, Spiritfarer is the story of Stella, a young woman tasked with ferrying souls into the afterlife with the help of her pet cat Daffodil. Stella sails across the world, befriending wandering spirits and leading them back to the Everdoor – the portal to the next world. The game is a soft hearted sandbox adventure/management sim, where you must tend to the needs of your ghostly passengers on their voyage into the great beyond. As the game goes on, you discover the details of Stella’s past, and how a seemingly ordinary woman like her was able to snag a supernatural job like this in the first place. Fair warning, the more you discover about Stella’s story, the more your ship will be in danger of sinking – drowned by the tears sure to be streaming down your cheeks by game’s end.
Limbo
While Limbo never officially tells you that it’s set in the afterlife, the game makes it clear from title alone. The spookiest of side scrollers, you play as a young boy making his way through an eerie black and white world in order to save his lost sister. Part platformer andpart horror, the obstacles that this poor kid is forced to overcome aren’t puffy clouds and cartoon critters, but bear traps and giant killer spiders. An unexpectedly gruesome affair, Limbo will have you white knuckling the controller as you attempt to save this middle schooler from decapitation, mutilation, exsanguination, and many other “-ations” that are too numerous to list here. A creepy exploration of compassion, Limbo proves that a brothers’ love is stronger than death itself.
What Remains of Edith Finch
What Remains of Edith Finch is the story of the last surviving member of the Finch family, seventeen year old Edith, who has returned to her ancestral home after seven years. A first person exploration game, you’re tasked with uncovering the secrets of the Finch family’s past and the causes of its demise. While Edith believes her family to be cursed, the game isn’t a gruesome story about skeletons in the closet, but an elegy for a family that couldn’t quite hold on to their brief lives. Somber and sentimental, What Remains of Edith Finch hits like a cup of coffee and creamer: bittersweet.
Pom Gets Wi-Fi
Plenty of games take place in Hell, rarer are those set in Purgatory, and rarer still are games set in Heaven – Pom Gets Wi-Fi is one of these unusual few. Granted, the game doesn’t take place in human Heaven, but rather dog Heaven, and Pom the Pomeranian is this canine afterlife’s newest inhabitant. While plenty of pooches are content with what Doggy Heaven has to offer, the internet-crazed Pom is nonplussed to learn that this paradise lacks the only thing that can make her truly happy: Wi-Fi. As Pom and her Shiba Inu bestie Shibe search for a signal in Heaven, they may run afoul of its other denizens depending on the player’s choices. Combat in this RPG is simple, revolving around Pom’s penchant for telling “yo momma” jokes, which deal 10 damage every time. Doesn’t sound like much, but Pom might end up becoming powerful enough to kill God in pursuit of her meme-freaky internet quest.
DOOM Eternal
A fresh take on a first person shooter classic, DOOM Eternal is a bloodstained dive into the Inferno soundtracked by heavy metal. In a distant future besotted with demons, the player takes control of the Doom Slayer – a taciturn killer with a weapon for every occasion. Tasked with liberating the Solar System from evil, The Slayer takes the fight from the surface of Mars to the gates of Hell itself. This game is fast paced, brutal, gory, gratuitous fun – everything you want in a video game. Who doesn’t want to blow demons away with a double barreled super shotgun? It’s what games are all about.
Nier: Automata
Philosophical, existential, fashionable, ferocious, Nier: Automata is one of a kind. The game takes place 10,000 years in the future, and follows a proxy war fought between alien machines and androids loyal to humanity. You take control of 2B, an impeccably dressed combat android who can swing katana while balancing on high heels – an icon to the say the least. As 2B slays her way through a seemingly meaningless world, her combat successes bring her cause no closer to victory. As the bodies of her robot foes pile up, she begins to wonder if these synthetic life forms are more capable of intelligent thought than she gives them credit for. Perhaps they’re seeking answers to the same big philosophical questions she is? After all, when your consciousness is uploaded to a digital cloud every time you die, it really gives you an eternity to think about your moral choices – complicated as they are.
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