Plenty of games are set in fantasy worlds completely divorced from the real world, with magic powers and distant lands of myths and legends. Other games prefer to stay grounded, set in a version of reality, whether that’s covering seedy crime-fueled underworlds, the tragedies of war, or the dark dealings behind political assassinations.
Then there are those games that sit between these two. Games that are set in the real world, with some elements changed drastically from what’s expected. From alternate histories to dimensional rifts, these worlds take the reality everyone is familiar with and twist it into something new and fantastical.
8 Control
Control is set in a world that looks the same as the real one at first glance. Much of the game is set in an office building in New York, with all concrete walls and drab office decor. When the walls start shifting, and supernatural horrors start showing up, however, that’s when it becomes obvious that something else is going on.
Control’s universe is one constantly under threat from altered world events, where supernatural forces bleed in through dimensional rifts or through the collective unconsciousness - the game’s central organization, the Federal Bureau of Control, exists to tackle these forces. It’s also not the only game in this version of the world, as Alan Wake showed what happens at the center of an altered world event, even if it wasn’t known as an AWE until Control was released.
7 The Longest Journey
The Longest Journey is a critically acclaimed point-and-click adventure that was released on PC in the early 2000s and managed to show an alternate Earth in two separate ways. The protagonist, April Ryan, lives in a futuristic version of the current world, studying art in a city called Newport in 2209.
However, she learns that her world of science, known as Stark, has a twin known as Arcadia, which is the world of magic. April is one of few people capable of shifting between the two worlds, and she finds that she must use this power to prevent a great calamity that’ll affect both worlds. These two worlds combined offer a unique and in-depth take on two alternate Earths sitting side-by-side.
6 Horizon Zero Dawn
The world of Horizon Zero Dawn and its sequel, Forbidden West, is visibly Earth as it’s currently known, but something has happened to revert humanity back to tribal ways, while robots roam the land and notable contemporary landmarks lie in ruin.
Much of Horizon’s story involves discovering what happened to Earth to cause all this to happen and the slow reveal of everything that happened to create this version of the world, combined with the sight of crumbling buildings left in ruin for an unfathomable length of time, produces a chilling cautionary tale on the use of tech.
5 Splatoon
A more light-hearted take on a post-human world can bizarrely be found inside a colorful Nintendo game. Splatoon, a multiplayer game about part-squid creatures firing colorful ink at each other, is secretly a post-apocalyptic world where marine life has become the dominant species.
While this isn’t obvious to new players, there is lore revealed in Sunken Scrolls and other documents in the single-player campaign. Even a quick glance at this lore reveals that the goofy squid kids aren’t just alternate fantasy humans; they replaced humans entirely, acting mostly like fashion-obsessed teens from the hip districts of Tokyo. Not the most expected depiction of a post-apocalyptic world, but Nintendo do like to surprise their audience.
4 Resistance Series
The Resistance series on PS3 presented a world where Earth’s history went in a drastically different direction. World War II never happened, and Russia fell into silence in the 1920s after the Tunguska Event of 1908 brought an alien menace to the world. By the 1940s, the invasion had reached the UK, and in the early 50s, American troops were sent to assist in fighting back, kicking off the events of the games.
The three main games follow these troops as they fight off aliens with highly advanced technology and early 20th-century weaponry, with the first game in the UK and the sequels taking place across America. Combining military shooters with survival horror, the series sadly ended in 2012 following the release of Resistance 3 and the Vita spinoff Burning Skies, but fans hope to see more of the world in future games someday.
3 Fallout Series
The Fallout games combine alternate history with a post-apocalyptic future, one where a war over resources between China and the US results in total nuclear annihilation, with most of the survivors holed up in secure bunkers to avoid the worst of it.
However, the other significant difference between Fallout’s world and the real one is the fact that society in the US barely passed the 1950s and 60s, with most of the aesthetic drawing from the atomic age styles of that time, right down to a soundtrack of period-appropriate hit songs. This combination of nuclear wastelands full of horrors with a retro aesthetic has given Fallout a distinct identity.
2 Bioshock Series
Set in an alternate history, the Bioshock games are set in a world where the villains are larger-than-life characters capable of creating impossible cities. The first two games are set in Rapture, an art deco-styled undersea city founded in the 50s by extreme objectivist Andrew Ryan, while Bioshock: Infinite takes place in Columbia, a sky city founded on an extremist version of American exceptionalism drawn from the ravings of a man named Zachary Comstock.
This would be enough to make Bioshock’s world an exciting alternate Earth, but Infinite went one step further by stating that these cities exist as part of an expansive multiverse, one that the real Earth may be part of, illustrated by a cosmic sea of identical lighthouses. The idea that Rapture and Columbia could exist in some parallel universe makes Bioshock’s world even more exciting.
1 Assassin’s Creed
Much of Assassin’s Creed takes place in a world like the real one, set in familiar cities in familiar historical settings. However, it also features a modern-day storyline tying it all together that suggests that its world has some significant differences. The first of these is advanced tech that makes trips through history possible, but it goes beyond that.
This world is also caught in a perpetual war between the Assassin and Templar orders, both of which exist in secret and have grand designs for humanity. Behind this is a hyper-intelligent race of proto-humans who’ve attempted to use humans as their playthings for centuries, adding sci-fi and magical elements to what first seems like a purely historical series. Despite the mixed reactions to Assassin’s Creed’s modern storyline over the years, it’s hard to deny that the conspiracies that the player engages with make it an exciting place to explore.