Simulator games are incredibly popular and addictive. Although you can live the life of your dreams, there is also the chance that things can go terribly wrong. As developers try to emulate the nuances of complex events and processes, players can make choices that break the reality of the game. One minute you're trying to understand jet propulsion, the next you're tossing little dedicated scientists into the ether to die in the vacuum of space.
Did the developers intend for these games to make the player question their own moral integrity and importance in the vastness of the universe? Probably not, but that doesn't make the existential dread they evoke any less terrifying.
BeamNG.drive
Liminal spaces and unforgiving physics
The physics-defying polygon-distorting, soft body-crushing chaos that is BeamNG.Drive is a lovely physics sandbox. Players have a tremendous amount of freedom to create intricate races and innovative accessories. Alternatively, they may create a liminal hellscape from which there is no escape. Add user generated BeamNG.drive mods to the mix and you have a recipe for disaster.
The vanilla game is largely uninhabited, and there is an eerie silence in the environments. Some that have been painstakingly created, others are eerily empty with blank squares stretching as far as the eye can see. If empty liminal spaces don't creep you out, maybe the lifeless stares of the crash test dummies and their violent deaths at the hands of the players will.
Completely accurate combat simulator
The Terrible March of Existential Horror
Where else can you send a lone bard into battle against an army of snake throwers, and he'll blindly walk towards certain doom with a blank look on his face? Completely accurate combat simulator is a charmingly silly game that simulates unlikely battles in the most hilariously reductive way possible.
Players pit armies against each other, and these troops then slowly march towards each other, attacking according to their type. Archers shoot bows (or snakes), hobbits ineffectively swarm enemy units, and Zeus units literally throw lightning bolts. Obviously, some units are better equipped for combat than others, and LOSS has no problem letting you send a harmless lute-playing idiot to his death at the hands of the Thunder God.
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Cities: Skylines
Are the citizens there just to suffer?
Cities: Skylines is a nuanced and detailed city building and management simulator that allows players to establish a thriving community. Some people strive to create profitable megacities, others strive for a utopian city, and a select few creators enjoy making terrifying purgatory for their citizens bombarded by endless natural disasters (with the “Natural Disasters” DLC).
Aside from deliberate sabotage and despotic rule, it is very easy to accidentally turn a city into a miserable hell for its inhabitants. Players can accidentally find themselves battling disease of pandemic proportions, catastrophically high crime rates, or a city on fire. It's all part of Cities: Skylines experience.
Two point hospital
How much is a human life worth?
is Two point hospital a sweet medical admin simulator, or a grim, scathing indictment of the for-profit medical industry? It really depends on who is playing it. There are many ways to cause existential dread accidentally or on purpose, from the grim mistreatment of employees to silly illnesses with terrifying consequences. Will you cure their bizarre ailments or let patients suffer in the halls of your hospital?
When a patient dies on the ward, they calmly get out of bed, go to the changing room, get dressed and then collapse on the floor. If this death ritual wasn't grim enough, patients who have died linger on the premises as ghosts and haunt the corridors, leaving ectoplasm everywhere.
Planet Zoo
Maybe the player should be at the zoo
If any type of simulator game is going to make someone question their own morality and what it means to be human or humane, it's a zoo simulator. Planet Zoo really makes the player question who should be responsible for this situation, along with wondering if humans should be in the zoo. It's so easy to inadvertently make life a living nightmare for endangered species.
Planet Zoo: Achievement/Trophy Guide
Planet Zoo is a great simulator with a decent number of trophies/achievements to chase, with some taking longer than others.
Animal rights are not the only problem in Planet Zoo. Employees are often treated badly and guests can be caught in a literal tourist trap. Even the most well-intentioned player can end up in an absolute disaster that violates multiple human and animal rights agreements.
The long car ride
Drive the player to madness on the road
Aside from the obvious horror elements of The long car ridecan the stark loneliness and isolation cling to the player. The player embarks on a seemingly pointless one-way journey with only the monsters and a blow-up doll for company. Many start The long car ride expecting a strange and unsettling survival simulator experience, only to find yourself in a full-blown existential nightmare.
The procedurally generated environments can be extremely cruel, with some players ending up on a relatively scary but uneventful journey and others ending up in an unsettling dystopian wasteland. It's the luck of the draw, which can be said for life in general.
Gas station simulator
Nothing creates existential terror like isolation.
When you're on an endless road trip through a procedurally generated purgatory, why not stop at the most cursed gas station since Kentucky Route Zero? While there are certainly elements of this offbeat simulation that are intentionally unsettling, the silent look and quick, physics-defying exit of the NPCs will likely be enough to put most players on edge.
Customers make strange remarks, and there are bizarre environmental stories scattered across the landscape. It's one of those games where it's hard to tell where the intentional eerie design ends and the unintentional horror begins.
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Cooking simulator
The solitude of a purgatory for hospitality.
One person, locked in a kitchen, is forced to serve food to an increasingly demanding faceless customer base. Is there even anyone out there? It is a terrible capitalist nightmare of an inescapable kitchen without human contact. It is no wonder that many enslaved cooks Cooking simulator chooses to end his time in the kitchen with the help of flammable gas containers and oven.
Subsequent installments and DLC have fleshed out the universe a bit more, but even then troubling details remain. For example, why is Cooking Network the show's audience made of cardboard? And why can you go into Super Hot Mode? It's all very worrying.
Kerbal Space Program
Sacrifice them for science!
Kerbal Space Program asks players to advance scientific endeavors and seek to refine space travel at all costs. For some reason, the best way to achieve this is to have an untrained person take care of countless Kerbal lives. In a similar way to the blindly loyal units Completely accurate combat simulatorthe player repeatedly sends adorably smiling astronauts to their near-certain doom.
These little guys are ready to die for your scientific ambitions. Like many sims, power dynamics are in Kerbal Space Program is incredibly unsettling and can fill the player with deep moral conflict and existential dread if they think about it a little too hard.
The Sims 2
Hell is other people.
Not many games give the player a physical incarnation of death to negotiate with or dramatize the process of a family falling apart. Any of the entries in The Sims comics can be existentially terrifying in the right hands, though The Sims 2 has some of the weirdest semi-random events in video game history.
From the bizarre and self-destructive loops Sims get themselves into, to the appearance of the Cursed Social Bunny, which appears when certain Sims' Socials get too low, The Sims 2 often seems like a terrible fever dream. This tradition of surreal, existential horror would continue in subsequent episodes and has become something of a beloved eccentricity of the series.
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