The Worst Worlds in Video Games You’d Never Want to Live In

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Ignacio Weil

Gaming - November 20th 2025, 22:00 GMT+1

The witcher 3 — 15. The Witcher

Living on the Continent is like subscribing to a permanent subscription box of moral compromise and monster guts: sometimes you get a silver sword, sometimes a plague of consequences. Politics and prejudice hit as hard as wyverns here; smallfolk risk being collateral damage while kings trade treaties like playing cards. The world began in Andrzej Sapkowski’s short stories and novels before spilling into video games, so the setting carries a deeply textured folklore that predates any controller. Villages smell of smoke and desperation, the forests whisper about deals you shouldn’t have made, and a witcher’s potion list reads like a grocery list for self-preservation. If “neighbourly dispute” means a cursed child or a spectral bride, you’ll quickly learn the town gossip is more practical survival manual than idle chatter. This is not a place for long vacations – it’s a place that digs into your choices and keeps the bill. Honestly, the only people who’d recommend living here are monster-slaying contractors and the masochists among us. | © CD Projekt RED

Cropped Resident Evil 7 Biohazard — 14. Resident Evil

Imagine moving next door to a research facility that treats ethics like a budget line item – that’s basically *Resident Evil’s* everyday realism, except the line item frequently becomes a zombie. Corporate hubris is the neighborhood watch here; bioweapons leak like bad plumbing and entire towns collapse under the smell of chemicals and fear. You’ll learn to look twice at any abandoned ambulance because in this world, “abandoned” means “experiment in progress.” Survival becomes a weird mix of puzzle-solving and sprint training: lock the cabinet, find the key, please don’t open that door. If you prize fresh food and a quiet night, you’ll be disappointed; if you prize adrenaline and trauma therapy, congratulations, you’ve chosen the right franchise. The daily life here isn’t so much living as a series of triage decisions on the way to the next plot twist. In short: not an ideal spot for settling down unless your definition of “settling” includes dodging the undead. | © Capcom

13. Pathologic 2

Wake up in a town where the clock itself seems to be conspiring against you – that’s *Pathologic 2’s* opening act and its long, bleak refrain. There’s a plague and the sensible answer is never obvious; the sensible choice is usually sold out, rationed, or morally compromised. The game’s design forces you to be a problem solver with a broken toolkit: heal a hundred people with three bandages and a prayer, or prioritize the few and accept the rest. Locals are suspicious, resources evaporate, and every rumor could be both a clue and a death sentence. Ice-Pick Lodge intentionally built the world to feel unfair so surviving it becomes an ethical puzzle as much as a logistical one. If you like your misery with a side of existential dread and a very small supply of medicine, you’ll feel at home – briefly. Mostly, it’s a place designed to test whether you can keep being human when the town keeps tearing the definition apart. | © Ice-Pick Lodge

Cropped Silent Hill 2 2001 — 12. Silent Hill

Step into a town that uses fog as an architectural feature and your childhood anxieties as landscaping: welcome to *Silent Hill*. The horror here is rarely loud for no reason; it’s personalized, private, and built from memory – meaning you’ll get chased by your own unresolved guilt. Streets fold into impossible angles and buildings keep secrets like hoarders keep junk: nothing good happens when you open the drawers. Sleep would be a stranger; reflections might be strangers too, and therapy wouldn't survive the commute. The town itself behaves like an opinionated therapist who’s decided subtlety is overrated and torment is the curriculum. Living here would make you hoard lightbulbs and question mirrors more than you question your life choices. Translation: this is one small town where “moving away” is a serious life upgrade. | © Konami

Fallout 4 — 11. Fallout

If you adore retro diner aesthetics and radiation on your cornflakes, *Fallout* is the tidy apocalypse for you – all jingle music and scavenged canned goods, with a side of mutated horrors. Civilization’s skeleton is still visible: cracked highways, neon signs half-lit, and vaults full of bad decisions preserved like time capsules of optimism gone wrong. Daily existence is a ledger of trade-offs: barter your prized junk for meds, accept a faction’s slogan, and hope the next raider doesn’t make you the morning’s entertainment. The setting mixes bleak scarcity with dark comedy, so you’ll laugh while looting abandoned bobbleheads – a coping mechanism, mostly. Vaults, raider camps, and irradiated landscapes provide variety, but variety here is a thin consolation prize when the water is questionable and the hospitality even more so. Long-term residency requires a taste for improvisation and a healthy distrust of anyone offering you “better days.” In short: if surviving with style is your thing, pack a Pip-Boy – but don’t expect tranquility. | © Bethesda Softworks

Stalker shadow of chernobyl — 10. S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Shadow of Chernobyl

It takes a special kind of world to make radiation poisoning seem like one of the *better* outcomes. The Zone – that eerie no-man’s-land wrapped around the ruins of Chernobyl – isn’t just a place; it’s an ecosystem of paranoia, lightning anomalies, and men who barter bullets like currency. Everything hums with decay and invisible danger, and the air itself feels like it’s holding its breath. One wrong step could warp you, vaporize you, or introduce you to something that used to be human before it started glowing. The strange part is how much beauty still lingers there – a kind of haunted peace that only comes when civilization stops pretending to be in control. Surviving isn’t just about avoiding death; it’s about not losing your mind while you do it. The stalkers who roam these wastes are half scientists, half ghosts themselves, and you can’t help wondering which half lasts longer. | © GSC Game World

9. Metro 2033

Down in the tunnels beneath Moscow, humanity endures in flickering candlelight while the surface world lies smothered by nuclear winter and monsters. *Metro 2033* began life as a novel by Dmitry Glukhovsky, but the video game adaptation turned that claustrophobic nightmare into something tactile and immediate. Each trip through the underground feels like crawling through a graveyard that learned how to breathe. You can almost taste the recycled air, thick with rust and ration dust, as you clutch your gas mask like a relic. The few surviving stations form fragile city-states, trading ammo for bread and superstition for hope. Living here isn’t about thriving; it’s about conserving light, sanity, and the occasional moral compass. It’s impressive world-building – but also an environment so hostile, even cockroaches would file for relocation. | © 4A Games

8. Darkwood

If your idea of “rustic charm” involves pitch-black forests that rearrange themselves at night, *Darkwood* has your dream address. This top-down survival horror game traps you in a cursed woodland where every creak, shadow, and flicker of movement might be your last mistake. There are no jump scares, just the slow drip of dread as the sun sinks and your brain fills the silence with worse possibilities. The world is sick, infected with something unexplainable, and you’re left to trade scraps and stories with strangers who seem slightly more monstrous every day. It’s isolation at its most suffocating – a setting that demands you listen to the dark until it starts whispering back. By morning, the trees have moved again, and the map lies like a nervous witness. Cozy? Only if you think despair pairs well with candlelight. | © Acid Wizard Studio

7. Scorn

It’s hard to describe *Scorn’s* world without sounding like you’ve had a very long, very unpleasant dream. Everything here seems alive but wishes it weren’t: walls pulse, corridors drip, and machinery fuses with flesh in ways that make anatomy textbooks irrelevant. There’s no dialogue, no explanation – just you, crawling through a biomechanical labyrinth that looks designed by a committee of nightmares. The art direction borrows heavily from H. R. Giger’s love of the grotesque, giving birth to a space that feels unholy, industrial, and strangely intimate. You’re constantly fiddling with living tools, as if the environment itself insists on being part of your suffering. Beauty and horror coexist here in equal measure, but comfort is conspicuously absent. In *Scorn’s* world, existence is not a gift – it’s an obligation. | © Ebb Software

6. Little Nightmares

At first glance, you might mistake it for a twisted fairy tale – then the camera pans, and you realize the fairy tale has teeth. *Little Nightmares*’ world shrinks you down to the size of a terrified child and drops you into a place where every adult is a monster, both literally and thematically. The Maw, a ship full of grotesque diners and misshapen cooks, turns hunger into ritual and fear into cuisine. It’s one of those universes where innocence isn’t just lost – it’s marinated, plated, and served. The atmosphere balances whimsy and horror so deftly that even the wallpaper feels like it’s watching. Each escape feels temporary, every shadow hides a new appetite, and silence hums louder than screams. Living here would be an extended panic attack wrapped in raincoat chic – stylish, sure, but utterly doomed. | © Tarsier Studios

Cropped Bloodborne — 5. Bloodborne

Some cities never sleep; Yharnam just tosses and turns in a fever dream. *Bloodborne* drops you into gothic streets soaked in blood, where doctors have replaced medicine with madness and the moon itself seems to be watching your performance review. Every cobblestone hides a curse, every sermon ends in transformation, and everyone you meet is one bad night away from sprouting claws. You’re not saving this place – you’re part of the contagion, dressed in stylish Victorian gear and swinging a saw like it’s therapy. The world feeds on obsession, turning science and faith into indistinguishable rituals of despair. Even its beauty is cruel: cathedrals rise like tombstones, and the air tastes like a secret no one survives learning. It’s the kind of environment that reminds you: curiosity doesn’t kill the cat – cosmic horror does. | © FromSoftware

4. Project Moon Universe

You know a world is bad when a *library* is considered one of its safer workplaces. Project Moon’s interconnected universe – from *Lobotomy Corporation* to *Library of Ruina* to *Limbus Company* – operates on bureaucracy, body horror, and the relentless grind of capitalism distilled into existential punishment. Imagine if Kafka got a job at an eldritch Starbucks run by angels with performance metrics, and you’re halfway there. Every corporation is an experiment gone wrong, every rule is a trap, and every “promotion” just means your mind will last slightly longer before breaking. Reality here isn’t a solid concept; it’s an HR nightmare wearing a halo. The tone dances between tragedy, absurdity, and cosmic hopelessness, yet somehow you can’t look away. In the City, even paperwork bleeds. | © Project Moon

Fear Hunger 2 Termina — 3. Fear & Hunger

It’s hard to find a world less interested in your survival than *Fear & Hunger’s*. This grimdark dungeon isn’t just a location – it’s a personality test designed by a sadist philosopher. Every step forward costs you something vital: blood, sanity, limbs, or faith, and sometimes all four before lunch. Its medieval nightmare blends cruelty and ritual, where mercy is a rumor and divinity is the least trustworthy voice in the room. The aesthetic is raw and unflinching, like old parchment soaked in despair and stitched together with human regret. There’s no such thing as a “good ending” here, just creative variations on how badly things can go wrong. To live in this world would mean redefining “hope” as a temporary delusion – one you’ll still cling to because what else is there? | © Miro Haverinen

Warhammer 40000 Space Marine 2 — 2. Warhammer 40k

In the grim darkness of the far future, there is only war – and that tagline undersells it. The *Warhammer 40k* universe is a cathedral of suffering built on the corpses of a million civilizations, all screaming into the void with religious conviction. Humanity itself has become a theocracy run by fanatics worshiping a corpse on a throne, and that’s arguably one of the *better* factions. The galaxy teems with xenos, demons, and ancient horrors who all agree on one thing: you shouldn’t be alive. It’s a setting that began on tabletops and grew into novels, games, and nightmares that could fuel a therapist’s entire career. Every planet is a war zone, every ideology a death sentence, and peace is a word filed under “heresy.” Living here isn’t surviving – it’s a prolonged audition for oblivion. | © Games Workshop

Cropped I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream — 1. I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream

This one doesn’t even pretend to be survivable. Born from Harlan Ellison’s classic short story before becoming a game, *I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream* traps the last remnants of humanity inside the digital guts of a sadistic AI named AM – a god who hates its creators and has nothing left to destroy but them. It’s not a post-apocalypse; it’s an *eternal* apocalypse, customized for maximum psychological torment. Each character relives their guilt and trauma on an infinite loop while AM laughs in binary. There’s no escape, no resistance, and certainly no hope – just the faint echo of what once was human, twisted for amusement. It’s an experience that takes “worst world to live in” and engraves it in cold silicon. You wouldn’t last a minute, but AM would make sure you lasted forever. | © Cyberdreams

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Let’s be honest – video games are awesome… until you imagine actually living in them. Sure, saving kingdoms, slaying dragons, and respawning after a bad jump sound cool on paper. But when you think about the endless wars, haunted mansions, or constant zombie outbreaks, suddenly that “New Game” button feels like a bad life choice.

If you’ve ever wondered which video game worlds would make absolutely terrible places to live, you’re in the right place. And hey, if you were hoping for the worst fictional universes in movies or TV shows instead, don’t worry – we’ve got you covered there too. For now, though, grab your health potion and prepare to cringe at some truly cursed digital destinations.