The Seven Most Metal Video Games Ever Made

Video games can be metal. I’m not talking put-on-big-hair-and-fight-demons-while-the-guitarist-shreds metal, but dark, creepy, rich, brutal, wading-through-blood-while-trying-to-hold-onto-your-soul metal. The sort of experience that’s intense and horrifying and makes you see, hear, and feel the world as a dangerous, wicked thing that wants nothing more than to consume your being. Sure, there’s plenty of demon fighting too, but I’m talking more about the general theme of the hardcore metal genres. Here are the seven most harsh, most dark, and in many cases most insanely awesome metal video games ever made.

And if you’re interested in big-hair-and-fight-demons metal, check out this older list. It has two titles that overlap, and then stays away from the creepy, crushing darkness of “truly” metal games in favor of huge swords and guitar solos. Because there’s nothing wrong with that if you like keeping your soul un-crushed.

Dante’s Inferno (2010)

Dante’s Inferno was an epic 14th century poem, or a third of a poem, by really-old Italian dude Dante Alighieri. In it, he tours Hell, led by the Roman poet Virgil, writer of the Aenid, and- oh, fuck it… the game is based on the poem like Powerglove is based on Warhammer Online. In the game, Dante’s a crusader who sees his girlfriend banged by the devil and dives into Hell to save her before she realizes evil has a bigger dick, even if it is vague and looks like a black cloud.

All you need to know about the metalness of Dante’s Inferno is this: you use a crucifix and Death’s scythe to kill gangs of unbaptised babies with hook arms. You also kill Death, stitch a red cross onto your chest, and fights a giant Cleopatra with man-sized maggots jumping out of her nipples. Poetry and art it isn’t, but between the futility of fighting through hell and the sheer amount of bizarre and Biblical imagery in the game, it definitely counts.

Most like: Behemoth

The Binding of Isaac (2011)

Aw, look at the cute little cartoon baby. Even if it’s a gory shooter, there’s no way this could be brutal, could it? Fuck yes, it can be.

The Binding of Isaac is about  a baby raised by a religion-obsessed mother who hears voices she thinks are God telling her to kill her son. So she tries. Instead of a recreation of one of the first deus ex machina in a story, she nearly does kill him before he jumps into the basement. Which is a dark, evil place full of demons who might be his brothers and sisters, born and otherwise. It gets so much worse from there.

Oh, and it’s brutal by NES standards, too. If you die, you don’t start the level over, you start the game over. Also, everything in the dungeons is randomized. Including your items. One of which is a coat hanger you wear through your head. I mentioned you play a crying, naked baby, right?

Most like: Deafheaven

I Have No Mouth And I Must Scream (1997)

There are plenty of bleak, depressing, post-apocalyptic games out there, but I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream is the bleakest, most depressing, and most apocalyptic. It starts with a supercomputer that killed all of humanity telling the player how much it hates him. This isn’t some Skynet where a computer just decides humans are a bad idea; this is a supercomputer powered by hate (and voiced by Harlan Ellison, who is powered by a combination of hate and scotch) that killed everyone on earth because of that hate, and only kept a handful of humans alive to torture them. Oh, and you play those humans.

But hey, you play some nice humans who fight an evil supercomputer, right? Nope, that isn’t the case. There’s a suicidal nihilist, a psychotic military officer, a woman with a Green Lantern type of phobia, a delusional paranoid, and a Nazi scientist. Of all of these “heroes,” only one can survive at best, and they all go through some spectacular psychological torment thanks to the Ellison 10,000.

Most like: Fear Factory

Shadows of the Damned (2011)

If Dante’s Inferno is the Behemoth of brutal hell-exploring video games, Shadows of the Damned is the GWAR. Take the same premise of a man going into hell to find his love, then add a ton of dick jokes, poop jokes, and utter fucking surreality and you’ve got Shadows of the Damned. In other words, it’s a Suda 51 game, and while Suda 51 and his company Grasshopper Manufacture is generally more punk than metal you still can’t deny that whipping out a skull that turns into a gun to shoot demons while running through a hell that looks like a cross between Victorian England and a grindhouse movie screams stupidly awesome foam rubber armor heavy metal. Also, the checkpoints are floating dickheads that crap gold, and main character Garcia Fucking Hotspur (his full name) is voiced by Steve Blum delivering his worst possible Mexican accent.

Most like: GWAR

Harvester (1996)

This is another point-and-click adventure like I Have No Mouth And I Must Scream, and like the previous game, this one is incredibly fucked up. It’s basically like Twin Peaks if Twin Peaks was a virtual reality world for serial killers populated by a death cult. There’s cannibalism, there’s rape, there’s schoolchildren getting beaten to death with baseball bats with cartoon sound effects, there’s a little bit of everything in this messed up game. With such an emphasis on serial killers and overall violence towards everyone, Acid Bath is the best band to describe this forgotten classic of adventure violence.

Most like: Acid Bath

Portal 2 (2011)

Underneath the cute robots and turrets, the snarky jokes, and the puzzle gameplay, Portal 2 is one of the bleakest games ever made. The humor’s pitch black, but the story itself manages to be even darker. You wake up 300 years after you thought you escaped from a scientific hell, only to find you’re back in the same research facility, where tens of thousands of other test subjects are already dead and your only friends are AIs that want to kill you. Oh, and the research facility you’re trapped in was created by an obsessive madman who killed countless people over decades in the misguided pursuit of science, including implications of daughters of scientists being captured and tortured and test subjects being encased in glass. The soundtrack might be overly electronic, but for the spirit of the game, the frantic near-phone-signal sound of Periphery fits.

Most like: Periphery

Brutal Legend (2009)

This is a game about a roadie who finds out he’s a demon’s son and is warped to another universe where everything translates into metal concerts. It’s a superficial kind but it’s still pretty ridiculously metal, with demons, demon nuns, dwarves, and murder cars. That’s the game’s strength, but it’s also its problem: it’s too self-aware. It paints everything with such a broad brush of cliches and stereotypes there isn’t much there for fans of the genre itself to embrace outside of enjoying the joke.

Ozzy, Rob Halford, and Lemmy all voice characters in the game, but as parodies or opposites of themselves. There’s plenty of violence, but little gore or emotion. Also, Jack Black is the roadie half-demon you play through the game. I like Jack Black, but him playing himself in a metal game is… well, I don’t have a better analogy than “like Jack Black playing himself in a metal game.” For a game with Brutal in the title, it just isn’t very brutal. Fun, visually impressive, full of action, and packed with some great lines, but not very brutal.

That said, Brutal Legend has one of the best metal medley soundtracks you’ll ever hear. There’s everything from Dragonforce to Children of Bodom in the game, and customizable soundtracks let you cut out the Def Leppard and Motley Crue and let you play the game raging on the hard stuff. It’s like a primer to all metal genres, with plenty of death and black metal joining the classics.

Most like: Dragonforce

-HR

When Hank Rasputin isn’t parked in front of his video game console or writing for MetalSucks, he’s writing about video games, TV, the Internet and all things nerdy at www.aggrogate.com.