Revolutionary Road: The Game - ARGUE with your spouse! FIGHT OFF suburban depression! MANAGE to stay alive despite a looming calendar full of inane dates and a pointless existence!

The holidays are all about sales at the mall, what the ratio of whiskey to nog is in your egg nog, and how depressing everything is. Luckily, Hollywood is well aware of this and provides cinematic accompaniment to go along with the holiday blues. Kate and Leo’s reunion movie Revolutionary Road is a perfect example; critics are hailing it as one of the most depressing way to spend a few hours since all of your old high school nemeses appeared on Facebook.

Since most people don’t consider playing a depressing game to be fun, it’s no wonder that the video game industry hasn’t churned out a lot of melancholy games. There’s no Schindler’s List: The Game, or The English Patient: Nintendo Wii Version. Sure, there have been plenty of games that were depressing because they were bad, but not many in the “depressing on purpose” category. However, a few have squeaked by that would make extremely depressing movies. Here’s a list for your enjoyment.

Fallout 3

Nuclear apocalypse is never really cheerful, and it’s made even less so when you have to leave the comfort of your warm, climate-protected Vault and head out in search of your father. He’s apparently decided to abandon his special child in search of something amidst the roaming bands of mutants and radiation-ridden ghouls. You have to abandon the only place you’ve ever lived in, and all the people you’ve ever known. Your mother died in childbirth, you only have one real friend, and now you’re deposited into the barren Wastelands. Along the way you’ll have to kill people, animals, robots and more. Cheerful, right? It’s definitely the most depressing entry in the entire Fallout series, but there is some really beautiful desolation along the way.

Shadow of the Colossus

A lot of fantasy stories involve a prince of some sort rescuing a damsel in distress, and in some cases those damsels might be magically enchanted. However, in Shadow of the Colossus, it’s not just the damsel who is enchanted, but the entire world. In order to restore her to health, you have to fight a series of Colossal foes, each one different from the next. And when I say Colossal, I mean massively ginormously big. Of course, when you start getting possessed by the very darkness you’re fighting, and your horse sacrifices himself to save you, that’s when it all starts getting a bit depressing. By the end of the game, you’ll be fighting back tears and cursing the developers for making a game so good and so depressing that you now want to go live a solitary existence on a remote mountaintop somewhere.

Metal Gear Solid 4

What’s the best way to close out a series that’s spanned 10 years and three different consoles? Apparently it’s by giving your main character a debilitating genetic problem that makes him age much faster than everyone else. Toss that in with a cigarette addiction and the fact the he gets betrayed by just about everyone he ever knew, and you’ve got the base storyline for the last Metal Gear Solid game. At the end of this epic game (complete with over 90 minutes of cutscenes, many of them featuring Snake’s wrinkled face and people reacting in shock at his appearance), Snake announces he’s giving up smoking and is going to attempt to live a normal life during his last remaining years. This all takes place in a graveyard as well, underscoring that fact that Snake isn’t long for this world.

Braid

Jonathan Blow’s amazing game Braid isn’t just a fun to play because of the ability to turn back time, it’s fun because it’s based on such a depressing story. You play a main character who had an argument with a princess that was so bad, the two of them have split up and aren’t speaking. Your character decides that he wants to fix things so much that he develops the power to turn the flow of time backwards. He’s basically realized that he’s screwed his own life up beyond repair, and luckily he can magically try to fix it. But if you have your own problems of the same magnitude, the game just reminds you that you can’t turn the clock back on yourself. Couple that with the extremely melancholy soundtrack, and Braid will have you seeking out therapy when you realize that you can’t reverse the flow of time and keep yourself from dying a horrible death. On the upside, you won’t be chased by rabid, killer bunnies anymore either.

A Mind Forever Voyaging

There’s nothing like waking up one day and finding out that you’re actually just a computer programmed A.I., running inside of a massive programmed simulation is there? This game came out long before The Matrix was even conceived, and it’s one of the most hauntingly depressive games out there. Infocom gave us folly like Planetfall and high adventure like Zork, but A Mind Forever Voyaging was an immersive text adventure full of depressing imagery. Not only do you find out you’re not even real, but you get inserted into a simulated future where your wife and child are taken from you, violent crimes are common, and the church and state turn into fascist regimes. You’re just there as an observer, but each time you go back it’s 10 years later and it gets more and more depressing. ®

Max Payne

What happens when your entire family, including your newborn infant, is slaughtered by thugs and drug addicts? Well, if you’re a comic book character or living in a video game you do the same thing: devote your life to ridding the world of such scum. That’s what happened to Max Payne, and it’s also why he’s such a hardass. But just drive the point home even harder, the developers decided to give you a few levels that take place inside Max’s head, inside his old house. There’s even a crying baby level, where you have to follow a blood trail maze on the ground inside a pitch black room. Take the wrong step, and Max dies. Take the right step, and you continue to hear the sounds of a wailing baby. If you manage to make it through these mental levels, Max still has a ton of death and destruction to deal out. If only Hollywood would seize on this game to give us a big screen version, full of death and destruction. Oh, wait. Crap. Now if only we could get the good version.